A dystopian reality:

The Objectification of Bodies, Misogynoir, and the Death (hopefully) of Celebrity Culture.

This week my timeline was flooded with Met Gala pictures featuring Kim Kardashians wardrobe choice (the nearly invisible waist) and conversely, my Tiktok feed was flooded with videos of people pontificating about why Serena Williams always looks so terrible. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, see this video.  

Two different women with one common theme: Their body and their looks.

And people’s obsession with discussing and critiquing women’s bodies.

But despite the commonalities, I think their experience is very different.

Kim Kardashian, while absolutely the recipient of overwhelming critique and criticism, intentionally upholds and furthers Eurocentric standards of beauty for her personal gain.

On the other hand, Serena Williams has always been the victim of sexism, misogynoir, and anti Blackness because of her body. 

Before I dig deeper into this further, I want to make one thing overwhelmingly clear.

We are all (myself included) far too invested in celebrity culture. 

While photos are flying left and right about which celebrity was wearing what, over a million Palestians sheltering in Rafah are being bombed, a place previously designated as a safe space for Gazans seeking an escape from violence in the north. 

In the war torn Sudan, 18 million people are facing food insecurity, resulting in the eating of soil and leaves for sustenance.

And in the Congo, another genocide is occurring with over 6 million Congolese deaths in the past decade and millions more people displaced due to violence, primarily over the production of coltan, a mineral used to power smartphones, electric cars, and computers.

In many ways, it feels like we are existing in a dystopian reality. Speaking of this, Frederick T. Joseph, author of Patriarchy Blues, writes the following:

One cannot help but observe the grand spectacle that is our society – part theater, part battleground, wholly consuming. The Met Gala, the Kentucky Derby, the airwaves humming with the latest jabs in the rap beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar. All part of the grand arena of diversion, vying for the gleam in our eyes, an insatiable audience ever hungry for more of what we don’t need.

It is a weary trope, perhaps to invoice Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games as a mirror to our present realities. Yet, despite the cliche, there is a resonant truth in this analogy that refuses to be dismissed. For as overused as it may be, it persists because it captures, almost perfectly, the dichotomy of our existence – the stark divide between the spectacle and the spectator, the lavishness and the austerity, the celebrated few and the struggling many.

I am not one of those people who believes that we cannot exist in joy because the world is on fire. In fact, I think we absolutely have to find our joy because if we only sat in despair, we would sink into a space of utter hopelessness. Choosing moments of joy, especially for marginalized folks, is an act of resistance. I’m a both/and girl. We because ultimately, we must do both if we hope to ever have any chance of existing in a less dystopian reality. 

I say all this to reconcile with the fact that while there is absolutely nothing wrong with staying up to date with pop culture, perhaps we give too much bandwidth to celebrities who do not know us personally, nor care about us. 

And their livelihood and wealth quite literally depends on the level of our attention they can capture and continue to capture.

And this leads me back to Kim Kardashian. 

The internet was ablaze this week when Kim hit The Met Gala wearing this dress:

In a video where she’s “testing” her outfit two days before the Gala, she discusses that breathing in the dress is an “artform”, a nice way of saying “duh it’s hard to breathe.”

All over social media, there were countless posts about her outfit, ranging from how ‘snatched’ she looks to how she’s continuing to perpetuate unhealthy standards of beauty. A fairly typical response. 

But then I saw this post on IG and it really got me thinking.

This has absolutely nothing to do with this creator but I absolutely, wholeheartedly, viscerally disagree. 

Kim intentionally utilizes her body to be seen as the standard as beauty, from her previous BBL to switching back to her thin look. It’s what she does and it’s by design.

Let’s just reverse back to the 2022 Met Gala when Kim donned the dress below which was previously owned and worn by Marilyn Monroe.

It had the exact same impact as this year’s dress and Kim was reported to have lost 16 pounds in three weeks, cutting out all sugar and carbs, to fit into the gown.

Putting her body on display is her business. Her livelihood. It’s intentional. 

So while it’s true that she didn’t personally create Eurocentric beauty standards or diet culture, she most certainly perpetuates them and benefits from them. 

Also, let’s not forget that she also owns a shapewear company so the more she distorts beauty standards and contorts her body to fit into them, the more she stands to profit. 

If you asked me what Kim’s talent was, I wouldn't be able to come up with one. And yes, maybe I’m hater but in my opinion, Kim has always and still to this day, continues to use her body as her business card. 

She willingly participates in the objectification of her body, and it’s by design.

Kim shows up in another unattainable look and sets the internet ablaze. And while it sometimes is accompanied by criticism, it keeps her in the news cycle. And how does that saying go: “all press is good press”.  If we think back to the very thing that catapulted Kim to fame (a sex tape), it doesn’t seem all that far-fetched to believe that this is all part of my business model (or maybe Kris Jenner’s).

So no, I don’t think Kim is a victim, nor do I believe the media is responsible for the way in which her body is constantly centered. She serves it up to them on a silver platter. She is in fact the culprit. 

And this is how white supremacy, which is intricately intertwined with beauty standards, continues to perpetuate. Kim is allowed to use her body to rise to levels of unfathomable fame and wealth, while Serena dedicated her life to becoming the greatest tennis player of all time, despite her body. 

Now if the post above had been made in regard to Serena Williams, I would vehemently agree. Serena’s body and her looks and her Blackness have constantly been the subject of cruel, racist, and misogynistic discourse. 

I write about this in The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom. 

Sitting at the intersection of sexism and racism, Williams is the recipient of unrelenting misogynoir, a term referring to the combined force of anti-Black racism and misogyny directed towards black women. The term was coined by Black feminist writer Moya Bailey in 2008 to address misogyny directed toward black transgender and cisgender women in American visual and popular culture.

Serena is somewhere minding her Black business and TikTok is pontificating about the race of her team and why she looks terrible and how she could look better. The comment section both annoyed me and simultaneously made me want to claw my eyes out.

As a society, aren’t we tired? Aren’t we bored? Aren’t we exhausted yet? 

This never ending rhetoric focusing on women’s looks is so so boring. Have we nothing better to focus our energy on? Are we not sick to our stomachs that we ourselves are often perpetuating these narratives?

And it’s important to point out that much of the TikTok discourse surrounding Serena is coming from Black women. Anti-Blackness, misogynoir, and white supremacy can be internalized and acted out by all of us, regardless of race or ethnicity. 

It’s the air we all breathe, and it’s necessary for every single one of us to decolonize and dismantle these systems in our lives. 

So this leads me back to my earlier point, maybe it’s time we just stop reacting. And yes, I’m talking to myself. Maybe this is the last time I need to bring myself to write about this person, regardless of the parallels I’m attempting to draw. 

Maybe it’s all time to decenter celebrities. Stop giving them our resources – our time, our social media follows, our energy, and most importantly, our money. 

Because whether it’s the Kim’s of the world, who intentionally use their bodies to perpetuate diet culture and beauty standards, at our expense, or the Serena’s of the world, who fall victim to said beauty standards because of misogynoir, the truth is we have very little control other than opting out. 

Less clicks. Less views. Less comments. Less engagement. And less of our dollars circulating towards people who, as I stated earlier, do not know us personally, nor care about us. And they most certainly are not invested in our liberation. 

And yes, I realize the irony is what I am saying as I write a think piece requiring clicks. I’m still figuring it out. We all are.