tell me the secret, victoria, to thy lovely (angel) bones

CW: This post is mostly ranting about our obsession with thinness, diet culture and the fashion model community on YouTube - read with caution and some grains of salt.

The world of supermodel YouTube vlogs is a wild place to visit. I’m not even sure why I venture there, but after consuming a seemingly endless playlist of “What I ate in a Day” accompanied by pictures of bodies that I could never hope to attain in this lifetime, I can certainly say it is addicting.

Fashion models, in particular women, occupy some sort of “success in life” pinnacle in the public imagination, in particular in the public imagination of what it means to be a successful “independent” woman in today’s (Western) world.

Although I was a teenager in the pre-Instagram era, images of models were dissiminated through women’s magazines and early reality TV shows like “America’s Next Top Model”. I was never interested in being one back then, although the social cues around me suggested that I should. Unfortunately my “love of a good meal” as some perceptive, but surely well-meaning, people observed would have precluded me from any catwalk or casting. These comments were always followed by the helpful encouragement “If you lost a bit of weight, you could be a model.” If I just applied myself a little, I could also win at life. Or at least, I would be protected from a future as an overweight person in a highly fatphobic society.

The well meaning adults that gently tried to guide me into the warm, smothering embrace of the diet industry did not know that the cruel pettiness of school social life had already hammered home the point they were trying to get across. Being overweight at school was a paradoxical balance between being invisible and being hypervisible.

Some events in particular were memorable. Take the “junior prom” (or the Old’s Dance as it was called in the nativer vernacular of the place I attended high school). I didn’t get a dance partner (granted, I didn’t apply myself much so perhaps I have only myself to blame), a detail that did not escape the attention of a senior in the same language class. I wonder why, he said out loud during a particular quiet spell and look at me. Though I quickly shut him up, the words made a papercut that stung.

So to feel at least sligthly involved, slightly visible, I decided that the least I could do, the least, because I was incapable of being thin, beautiful and desireable enough to dance, was to make myself useful in another way. I threw myself into work with the prom’s organizing committee and was in charge of the decorations.

On the night of the dance, the dance hall was draped in golden and white organza and large bows that I and a fellow dance-abstaining friend meticulously attached to the walls. I stayed behind to watch the dance, too. To observe the kinds of girls that got to spend a night as a princess at a ball. It was a kind of cruel spectacle and pathetically, I made mental notes about how protruding their collarbones were in their gorgeous satin, lace and tulle gowns. I made a silent vow to make my own collarbone stand out like that.

As life continued, small, papercut-reminders like the one above became more and more frequent, but at least by now, I was making an effort, I was doing something, I was participating in a culture that claimed one could not be worthy until one’s collarbones had reached a certain prominence.

In university, I signed up for rigorous early morning conditioning classes, danced and swam several times a week, but oblivious to my efforts, my body stubbornly stayed put in the unacceptable zone. I won’t bore you with the details. These kinds of accounts of slowly descending into diet hell are plentiful. You probably have someone close to you who has gone through this.

patrick wilson would never fuck you

A few years later, I was in a small student apartment, procrastinating by watching Girls and eating peanut butter straight out of the jar. Seeing Hanna on screen, naked, was revolutionary yet unnerving. Here was a woman in a body that didn’t come from the same razor thin mold and here she was, walking around in a bikini, in a bath, having sex with a good-looking man who owned a brownstone in New York City.

I related to Hanna, but desperately wanted to be Marnie.

In post-show Twitter discussions, the audience applauded Hanna, but also set clear boundaries for what a woman navigating the world in a body like hers should be like. When the show depicted Hanna in an intimate relationship with Handsome Man (TM) Patrick Wilson, Twitter went into a meltdown. It simply wasn’t believable, they said, but what they really meant was that a man who looked like Patrick Wilson would want to fuck a woman with a body like Hanna’s. Perhaps what all of these people having tweetstorm meltdowns wanted to say was that it wasn’t relatable, there were no scenes in Real Life where a man who looked like Patrick Wilson would desire them, who more closely resembled Hanna. At least that is how I felt. It was great to see such a leap on screen, but I held no breaths for it happening in real life.

the people on the pages of vogue, they’re just like us

Back to the topic at hand - fashion model YouTube, where young, beautiful and successful women jetset around the world - one night in Paris for fashion week, the next in New York for a party - in beautiful lithe bodies. Their videos have approachable titles like What I Ate in a Day (green smoothies, lots of kale, various vitamin shots and bespoke meals prepared by professional nutritionists), What’s in my bag and Spend a Weekend with Me.

Look, models, are ordinary people, just like us.

Look here they are, eating a slice of pizza in New York.

Look here they are catching a red-eye to Paris to walk a haute couture show.

Look here they are doing crunches with a personal trainer who accompanies them on every trip abroad and here is a 15 minute video of their ab-burner workout, so that you, just like them, can obtain chiseled abs and perhaps your life too, can be sprinkled with a bit of glamour.

The end result of these videos is diametrically opposed to their intention.

If only you religiously commit to drinking green juice, going 15 minute ab burners and a 32-step beauty routine, you too can be like them and glide down a runway in a haute couture gown. In reality, few of us earn a living with our appearance (though most of us are certainly judged on our appearance whether we want it or not) and can afford to have its maintenance as a second job.

Because the actual reality of these people remains so elusive and unattainable, we settle for proxies of the glamour they project. Buying the juices they drink, the moisturisers they apply in steps 10 and 11 of their beauty routines and sign-up for ab-burner classes. You can’t buy heaven, but maybe at least a piece of it?

they are selling the dream, you’re buying the bra

Ed Razek, the curator of women’s bodies for the Victoria’s Secret brand, stepped into a steaming pile by airing his antiquated views in a recent interview with the New York Times.
When asked why the (in)famous Victoria’s Secret Fashion show doesn’t cast plussize or transwomen, he replied that the brand’s job was to sell a dream, a fantasy and what that phrasing left unsaid, but implied, was that neither plus-sized nor transwomen could ever be anyone’s lingerie-draped fantasy.

Perhaps one can’t achieve the body of Sara Sampaio or Karlie Kloss, but at least one can wear the same bra and panties!

But, according to Razek, no one would ever attach such body-fantasies to plus-size women or transwomen. Their bodies could never be used to sell an unattainable fantasy, because their bodies weren’t unattainable, hidden behind paywalls of professional nutritionists, dermatologists and personal trainers. Their bodies were the real lived realities of thousands of women.

No one would buy sexy panties modeled by an overweight woman, Razek was saying, because no one was just buying the panties. They were buying a piece of the fantasy of being a size 0 body, the pinnacle of achievement for a woman.

Razek quickly found out he had been speaking to the wrong decade. People like me, who had grown up with heroine chic and rexy, had discovered that this was mostly bullshit. Victoria’s Secret, embroiled in one PR scandal after another, eventually cancelled its opulent feather-laden bonanza of a fashion show and we all discovered Victoria’s ugly secret.

the fantasy lives on

Although the fashion show may have gone underground, the image and the fantasy these models represent lives on in another medium, YouTube.

Over the past decade or so, YouTube has gradually drifted from a platform for homegrown productions that would not necessarily get airtime in traditional media to carefully produced “candid blogs” behind whom is often a celebrity known from traditional media and a team of professionals.

Many of the Victoria’s Secret Angels have moved on to become YouTubers. Their beautiful, carefully filmed videos try to reveal the process by which one achieves the physique necessary to participate in fashion, to be branded by society as desireable.

We see one Angel cooking a-so-healthy-I-just-can’t-even meal with the help of her professional nutritionist against a picturesque setting in the Hamptons. We see another model running off to an exercise class, then to a facial, then straight to a fitting at New York Fashion Week.

We can all relate.

We’ve all been there.

Why am I so addicted to consuming content that will never even closely resemble my mundane life?

Is it so I can fantasize a bit in between running a load of laundry and cooking dinner?

Is it an act of self-flagellation that I perform when confronted with the billowing outlines of my own frumpy, undesireable body?

Is it so that I, too, can be inspired to take a $40 an hour workout class and buy a $20 kale juice in a vain attempt to optimise the market value of my appearance?

The progressive #bodyposi part of my brain would be horrified to admit this, but I used to be and still am very envious of the women (it’s usually women dominating the modelling industry) who are paid for their appearance and set the standard for the rest of us, for whom keeping up with the demands of beauty is an unpaid fourth shift of exercise classes and meal planning.

In their attempt to lift the veil behind their perfect appearances, they’ve managed to further distance themselves. Who of us can manage to dedicate hours per day for exercise and meal prep and skin care unless we are paid to do so? It’s possible to acknowledge the impossibility of their lifestyle and yet, be haunted, by the Helena Rubinstein maxim: “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.”

If only I commit myself to repeating these routines and buying these products, I too will be acceptable and desirable and perfect. I will have optimised my market value, as Jia Tolentino writes in Trick Mirror.

And yet, somewhere deep down, I also know that this is a game I could never win, no matter how hard I commit to memorising the rules and practicing the moves.

Some of my generation have started rebelling against the confines of a narrow definition of female beauty, but even the rebellion has become co-opted by a hastagified product that can be packaged as a commodity and used to sell.

In the #bodypositivity Instagram community, Instagram influencers are performing this rebellion by staging photos of themselves eating greasy slices of pizza, while small, nominal stomach rolls are visible on their otherwise perfectly toned stomachs.

Simultaneously, an invisible algorithms running on a server, hoovers up these pictures and tags, builds a mathematical model of how likely we are to buy exercise clothing and kale shakes after engaging with this influencer’s content, and submits a report to some eager growth hacker or advertising executive.

A few months later, we will be shown an ad for a vitamin infused kale shake just as we are lazily browsing our Insta feed. And we, remembering that image of the influencer, will probably buy one the next time we visit our local supermarket. The circle of life in surveillance capitalism is now complete.

All of this happens behind the scenes, but we remain alone together with the photo.

It’s almost perfect. We can relate to this person, the influencer, their stomach rolls, their desire for pizza, the fundamental conflict between the desire to obliterate the former and to consume the latter. Perhaps we are also alone, at home, on the sofa, contemplating the comfort of a greasy pizza and agonizing over our own stomach rolls. And the life we see mirrored in this tiny digital square made up of pixels is almost perfect, save for one crack, one glitch in the matrix. Our rolls are much larger, more visible. We’d have to work to reduce them, so that those rolls too would be worthy of inclusion in a bodypositivity hashtag.

We might never even get there, but we can buy the dream, neatly packaged in the form of a shake, a sports top or an exercise class.

Or something close enough to it, at least.

high-octane dreams

I started writing this essay several months before the coronavirus pandemic. If this imagined life seemed unattainable back then, its glossy exterior has certainly been completely shattered by now.

In an alternative universe, things are, of course different. And glossy.

I planned the rest of my life one afternoon in 7th grade while reading an elementary Swedish language textbook. A staple piece of content in foreign language textbooks at the time were snippets where students of the same age as the learners but living in the native country where the foreign language was spoken talk about their dreams for the future.

It was then and there that I read the dreams of Janika, 13, from Uppsala, who imagined herself at 30, sitting in a luxury bath in her apartment in London, relaxing after a long day at work. After completing highschool, Janika moved to London and made a successful career in business. It was vague and suitably delicious.

Right then and there, on the wooden classroom chairs, this sounded like magic and for months after that I slipped in and out of random reveries of what it would be like to lead this high-flying existence in a specific, yet unnamed, cosmopolitan city in the world.

There would of course be busy mornings, large Chanel sunglasses and tall single-use coffee cups. One would glide into the office a la Miranda Priestly, the bossbitch devil wearing Prada, her morning entrace accompanied by the staccatto of heels on well-polished marble floors in the lobby of an anonymous but important looking office.

At other times, the reveries were about evenings after work, slipping into luxe baths in beautiful Scandinavian bathrooms with views into expansive living rooms. In those living rooms, the windows stretched from floor to ceiling and revealed a jeweled carpet of city lights stretching infinitely into all directions.

All of this obviously took place before I ever laid my eyes on the New York-London-Paris real-estate listings and even after I had laid eyes on the said information and computed the gap between what I could ever expect to earn in a lifetime and what one of these glamorous places cost, I still continued dreaming.

Of course, the imagined version of my future self did other things besides taking baths and wistfully gazing out of tall, expansive windows.

There were nights out in chandeliered bars where the light was just dim enough to be sophisticated, yet intimate, where the decor refused to place itself in any particular era or style but was anonymous, where the conversation was interesting yet didn’t say much and mingled among the light glint of piano, where people flirted by dropping references to an art exhibition of Picasso’s early works or this or that indie band they had seen perform in a hip area of the city that they loved being associated with but would never consider living in.

Then there were of course the weekends and here the dream’s geographies became vague. These days were occupied with shopping trips to other equally stylish, equally expensive, equally charming comsopolitan cities where glamorous, rich, beautiful people drifted from one chic pastel store to another buying things just because they could and not because they needed any of them. It was this air of casual nonchalance, of buying things just for the sake of buying that became so seductive. It seemed like the ultimate form of some perverted freedom. Of course, it was also a trap.

At other times, there were trips to the sea and the seaside mansions, whose total worth would by far exceed anything a whole town of people could ever earn in a lifetime. In the yards of these mansions, the occupants sat by the pool, barbecued and made arrangements to play golf together on the bank holiday weekend. They all had the air of people who had succeeded and would succeeded with seemingly little or no effort. The way they did it, they made success look easy.

Once the dusk had settled, there would be a garden party in the warm, balmy light of the evening, the air saturated with the excitement and exhaustion from the day’s activities, and the guests, in their summer whites, drifting from one conversation to another like large moths.

Of courses, this was all pretty much like the Instagram reel of an affluent person. No one around me lived a life quite as exquisite as I spent hours imagining, yet for some reason these images and their variants came to occupy my imagination, eventually occupying the very dangerous label of desireable life.

It was desireable on some abstract social one-upmanship level, a life that everyone was primed to strive for since the very early days of pre-school, not necessarily a desireable life in terms of social benefit or even individual liberty. After all, paying for all of the above would likely require golden handcuffs or some sort of familial monetary lifeline.

Although these images situate themselves in various places, continents, cities, places of a certain feeling and no concrete geographical label, a common thread weaves through these images, namely that they derive their pleasure and thus their allure from the possbility of unlimited consumption, wealth and prosperity. They are (in the words of a climate change activist) affordances of a high-carbon society, high-octane dreams.

prologue, or the end of all things

Fiction. First written on 10th October, 2018.

Isn’t it funny that starting things is easy, but finishing them is hard?

I fondled this sentence in my mind as I dug through a cardboard moving box filled with half-finished notebooks, calendars with elbaorate plans that never came to fruition, planners with complicated schedules that were never followed, notebooks full of novels and short story collections that in the later pages became shopping lists and collections of addresses. Presumably the notebook had been repurposed after the author’s inspiration had run upon the jagged rocks of ‘Having a Job’ and ‘Paying the Rent’. In either case, there is always, in the last empty pages of those notebooks, the promise to return and finish the work,

It is at the bottom of this box of unfinished dreams that I locate this notebook. I no longer recall the details of how I came to acquire it. Standard black, softcover, moleskin. One can only imagine it happened in a fit of inspiration that later faded and the notebook - with my name and contact details and the promise to pay $100 as a lost and found reward was consigned to gather dust at the bottom of a box.

Since my time here, in this apartment, in this city, in the Shadow of the capitalist utopia of the City is slowly but surely coming to an end, now is as good a time as any to repurpose this notebook as a collection of pieces about what happened to me here, in this city, and during my time working for the Corporation.

I will be working from memory and from the few diary entries and notes I took while working there, so things will be for better or worse be seen in the light of memory that fades some parts and sharpens others. It will remain to be seen which parts fall into the latter and which into the former - there are lots of boxes in the dusty attic of the brain that I have not examined for a long time.

In spite of my ever-so-present dream of becoming a published author, I don’t expect this text to ever land on any editor’s desk, but in the unlikely event that it does, I would ask, you, the reader to please exercise care with the people whose depictions I have rendered on the pages within. For my own record keeping and due to the unlikelyhood of publication (even though one always secretly hopes) I will use real names throughout the text.

I suppose one should always finish these things with some profound sentence, leave the reader with a gift, a thought for the road, but I have none save for the one anxiety that haunts me day to day: time passes and we can do nothing but pass along with it.

mythical exports

The most potent export to come out of Silicon Valley is not the software. The software that ate the world, chewed on it and spat it back out into a new reality of surveillance capitalism and the always-on.

Instead, it’s the idea that no software companies (which these days almost exclusively go by the term startups - although startups can produce other goods and services, these are often sold or mediated through a digital, software enabled platform of some sort) in the world can be built without its blessing, without a sprinkle of the magic unicorn dust that originates from the glass-walled meeting rooms on Sand Hill Road.

Here, on the other side of the pond, we raise our eyes towards the giants, sometimes to excoriate them for the dystopian tales enabled by their software that are a daily presence on news websites, but secretly wish we could be them and raise our eyes in worship, wishing we would have our very own Valley somewhere here.

A while ago, at a meetup hosted by one of the Valley darlings, someone asked if it would be possible for the employees of a European company to take a field trip to see the hosting company’s offices in Palo Alto. Why, I wondered, did this group want to fly halfway across the world to see open plan offices, sleek laptops and engineers sprawling on multicoloured beanie bags? Why did they want to fly halfway across the world when they could get the same vista in any one of the local startups in the capital, tripping over themselves to emulate the culture of the Valley in the hopes of becoming one of the few tech unicorns in Europe.

After all, a pull request submitted on a beanie bag in Palo Alto is probably equivalent to a pull request submitted on a beanie bag in the Silicon Roundabout.

It wouldn’t do, one of the engineers engaged in the conversation, explained to me. It wouldn’t do to go to the Silicon Roundabout or one of the other Silicon X’s springing up in cities big and small around Europe. They wanted to go to Palo Alto to imbibe some of the magical startup culture that made 20-something year olds, (mostly) white college-educated men into billionaires seemingly overnight. There was conviction in those words. They would surely bring back a bit of the magic sparkle dust that helped to propel many of Twitter tech thought-leaderati to an early retirement (or a lucrative career as a VC).

I had myself been on one of these tech pilgrimage flights recently. The 12 hour long-haul from London was full of hopefuls. They sat in economy plus, the hungry and the up and coming, the business development managers in crisp ironed shirts and slacks and the developers in tattered tech conference t-shirts. The stickered laptops were out as soon as the seat belt sign was switched off. Half-finished pitch decks and in-progress pull requests mingled with airline food and the eternally hopeful spirit, that in Silicon Valley, everything is possible.

The thing that has always bothered me in this mythos that all the best software companies needed a sprinkle of the Valley magic was the ultimate hypocrisy of this statement in the face of the global, cosmopolitan digital nomadism that many of the people who believed in this mythology, claimed their technology enabled. European tech companies sprung up to develop new, better videoconferencing software to help other companies cut business travel costs, yet their executives flew once every two weeks across the ocean to court the money and know-how in the Valley. The best investment decisions are made in person, bragged a greenwashing advertorial by an airline. The airline had just flown out a select group of the Valley glitterati for a startup event in Finland on a new “climate smart” airline fuel.

Nothing happens unless someone pushes a button in New York, says a banner on the Twitter page of a former acquaintance who now works in publishing. Nothing happens in the world of tech, unless someone pushes a pull request in Silicon Valley. This all against a blind allegiance to the idea of meritocracy and the enablement of said, global meritocracy by tech built by these companies. With the power of this or that new JavaScript framework, a dairy farmer in rural France was just as likely to disrupt the world and ascend into the constellation of tech luminaries as an Ivy League CS graduate working at a FAANG and yet.

At some point in our obsession with this mythos we seem to have forgotten everything about what a business (software or otherwise) was or should be. The idea that a business should have a realistic business model or revenue was lost in the noise of billion dollar valuations given to vapourware or your-mom-but-through-an-app startups and at some point it became so normal to raise obscene amounts of money for nothing but a figment that few ever stop to consider the alternative.

cafe pascal

I was too nervous of taking a photo in cafe pascal, so I took one of a frozen pastry and my coffee mug at home.

Even though third time’s the charm, I almost didn’t make into Cafe Pascal this time either - the third attempt. All of this, because at some point during my years in London, I had developed an anxiety about entering busy coffee shops and frantically searching for a place to park my inelegant body, while the elegant, well-dressed people at the tables have me pitiful glances in between taking bites of their avocado toasts and ardent concentration on ignoring the waves of disturbance in the ambience. Of course, a large part of this reality existed solely in my head, but it didn’t make the anxiety resulting from these images any less real.

So on my first two attempts I’d let anxiety win. I’d walked past the cafe, giving, casual, nonchalant glances at the glass windows to see how crowded it was. It was crowded, there was a queue, just like the past two times. I made a loop on the street, pretending I was lost instead of indecisive, checking my watch, even though I had no interest in the time, but pretending, to anyone watching, that I was waiting for a friend on this nondescript street branching off of Odenplan in Stockholm. Then finally, I opened the door and went inside.

It was warm inside, the air peppered with a lively buzz of conversation, with cosmopolitan mixes of accented English, and the gentle tinkle of china and silverware as tea and coffee cups were lowered and then picked up again by people enjoying a Saturday morning coffee.

The interior style was a bit of everything and not exactly anything. Rustic, but not full-blown countryhouse-en-Provence rustic, scandichic, but not overly clinical and airport-asceptic, hygge, but not too many knitted sweaters and fluffyy woollen socks, shabbychic yet also somehow neat and new. It wasn’t committed to any extreme. It was lagom, just right, as the Swedish tend to say.

I waited for my turn and stumbled over the Swedish words necessary to order an oat milk latte (yes, I am one of those people whose Starbucks orders contain more coffee dressing than actual caffeine bearing substance and you are free to heckle me for it) and a semla - a seasonal Mardi Gras pastry (though it’s sold starting January through to Easter), sliced into two pieces and filled with almost paste (mandelmassa) and whipped cream.

No one wore plaid or asked me whether I’d prefer one arcane roast over another (even though looking at the drinks menu, coffee connoisseurs would love it here) while rolling their eyes at my blank stare and pleibian tastes in coffee (I once made the mistake of saying “Whichever” to a question like that at Alchemy in London and received a very disapproving eyeroll, but that’s a story for another time).

One of the baristas had a manbun (not uncommon in the streets of Stockholm) and looked like an Australian surfer-dude who could at any point surprise you by interspersing a g’day mate in between his Swedish.

I sat at one of the large communal tables opposite the coffee counter - the perfect vantage point for sampling the atmosphere. People walked by in large, puffy down coats and overly large woollen cardigans. The style here had a definite air of hygge sprezzatura - a careful carelessness meets shabbychic and your grandma’s closet. Oversized knitted sweaters were paired with skintight yoga pants and vintage Chanelesque clutches. But beneath all of this nordic bohemianism ran a whiff of wealth, carefully channeled into an inconspicuous style.

One might call this style a Stockholm version of the bobo (short for bohemian bourgeoisie) parisienne. This person, often female, fluttered in and out of the pages of Parisian and wannabe-Parisian fashion magazines, talked about Sartre and Bauhaus on lifestyle YouTube channels while showing us her carefully careless 20-step French skincare routine and effortlessly elegant 2 million dollar 16th arrodissement apartment. The Swedish version would probably be called the sofo stockholmare. Sofo, to imitate the iconic chic names of places like SoHo and NoLita, denoted a particular, gentrifying area in the south of Stockholm, where teslas and hipsters mingled with art studios and design agencies.

From my community table, I observed elegant, lithe women with perfectly trimmed bobs and well fitting turtlenecks engagaed in lively conversations with friends and partners and I imagined that most of their life was set against a backdrop of elegant places like these that served avocado toast and V60 while they and those arround them discussed promotions, examined enagament rings and planned stylish, expensive vacations.

I immediately felt out of place. My wardrobe was (still is) mostly what I’d had in London. I’d spent a good chunk of my career working in places that did not have a relaxed, careless attitude about dressing. As a result, neither did my wardrobe. Whatever I was wearing looked, here, like I was trying too hard, like I’d dressed for a job interview to come to a cafe and write, like I didn’t belong.

To add insult to injury, the easy availability of pastries hadn’t helped my billowing wasteline much either and some ugly spectres from my previous battles with my body started to rear their ugly heads.

Just as these thoughts started to swirl in my mind, my neck protested against the cramped writing conditions at the table and I packed up and left for the commuter train back to the suburbs.