‘I know Victoria’s Secret’: Body dysmorphia and why Jax’s new track is important

Long before I could understand what being thin meant, I knew I wasn’t it. Growing up, I was made to understand that there was something extremely wrong with my body. I would often hear family members laugh and reminisce how I was fed a lot of formula as a child, and all I could wish for, as I took up a little more space on chairs and couches than other kids, was to go back in time and stop the initial over-consumption that I strongly believed led to my childhood obesity.

I was, of course, wrong about many things. The correlation between what I had or had not been fed, with my eventual weight at eight years old, probably didn’t align scientifically. Maybe it did. However, science and numbers, both were lost on me, as I stared at myself every day in the mirror, desperately hoping to manifest physical change.

“It’s baby fat,” family members would say, all while prescribing weight loss methods. But the fat didn’t automatically disappear with age. And so, alongside my weight, my troubles grew.

When one cannot lend kindness to themselves, they are more aware of the unkindness that is dispatched their way by others. In being aware of the same, one can believe that they deserve the negativity flung their way, owing to a concocted physical flaw.

Consequently, school was not easy.

Being one of the few overweight young girls in my grade never helped, and I would waste hours comparing myself to others who seemed to look just right. I wagered their parents were proud of them, and their lives were perfect.

By the age of 15, I had faced every kind of insult there was that could be associated with possessing a heavier body. I had been mistaken as my mother’s elder sister by one of her colleagues. Boys - who I thought were my friends - would pretend to like me as a prank, only to guffaw about it later. I wasn’t allowed on certain rides. I could fill a book with all the names I had been called. At one point, a teacher ridiculed my weight at a parent-teacher meeting, instead of discussing my academic trajectory.

Losing weight became a priority. It was, after all, the only thing that I prayed for when I would communicate with God, as tears flowed down my plump cheeks while I lay prostrate.

In my late teens, as I graduated from an all-girls convent to a co-education college, the situation intensified. There I was - chubby, surrounded by young boys at a hormonal age, hopelessly looking for the love I had not managed to find elsewhere, with an external sense of validation. And so, I began my weight loss journey in the only way that made sense to me at the time.

Starvation.

By the time I was 18, I had dropped a whopping 20 kilograms by simply not eating, periodically working out, and surviving on six cups of green tea a day, with the occasional meal in the form of lunch. I looked a certain way then - thinner, sickly, and fatigued - but my mind kept pushing to watch the weighing scale finally relent in my favor. When I looked in the mirror, I never saw the gaunt woman I was becoming. I only saw the fat child who feasted on Chockis relentlessly, and I cursed her as hunger pangs sent reverberations through my entire being.

Body dysmorphia works in incredibly destructive ways. At 58 kg, despite looking the way with which I would have been happy a few years earlier, I pushed to reach 54 kg. When the weighing scale finally read 54 kg, it was no longer good enough.

It didn’t help that this was the first time in my life that I was being praised. Family members and extended kin would gasp in relief at this transformation. Pictures I put up would receive more love than I had ever experienced before. Transformation posts garnered deafening appreciation.

However, as I sit here and pen this, I don’t, for a single moment, remember feeling happy. Those years are a blur, to begin with. Starving drained me of all my energy. I would spend days asleep, eventually skipping university. My attendance suffered. My grades suffered. I suffered. But the one thing I had wanted my entire life was in the palm of my hands. How could I not be happy?

 

Eventually, I had to address this ridiculously damaging relationship that I had created with my own body. There was no single eureka moment. Unlearning body image issues, enrolling in therapy, and a pandemic that led to me gaining all the weight I had lost put things into perspective. At 27, I am still a work-in-progress, and have made peace with the fact that, perhaps, I will remain so for the entirety of my life.

Enter: Jax.

About a month ago, I was updating one of my playlists on Spotify when I came across a song called ‘Victoria’s Secret’ by a singer named Jax. Having never heard of the artist before, I rolled my eyes at the title. However, it did manage to pique my curiosity.

“God, I wish somebody would've told me when I was younger, that all bodies aren't the same,” crooned Jax, and I felt compelled to press pause. Years of therapy, life lessons learned, and the stress associated with my body image issues - all sprinted across my mind in a short span of mere seconds.

“Photoshop, itty bitty models on magazine covers, told me I was overweight,” continued Jax, halting my initial train of thought.

Over the years, as I battled with how I looked, I often came across people talking about how “real women” are supposed to be. Men objectified women while sharing their insights, highlighting how real women either stay vehemently in shape, or have “some meat on the bone - ” a vile dehumanisation of an entire gender through the male gaze.

I thus wondered if Jax’s words could be misinterpreted in a similar way. Was she telling us what a real woman was by denouncing the bodies of these “itty bitty models?” After a lot of back and forth, I settled on the nuance that the jab was not directed at women who conformed to the lust for skinny bodies, but was, in fact, a dig at all those who nurtured and marketed environments and narratives that made a singular body type mainstream and solely acceptable.

Jax proceeded in the song to point out the impact of the propagation of a very specific body type on her relationship with her body, with her consequently restricting her intake, and I could hear a voice inside me agonizing over how I had done the same. When she launched into the chorus, exposing Victoria’s secret - evident wordplay targeting the biggest brand responsible for the display of a body type seen as the pinnacle of perfection - I could not help but find solace in her words.

“I know Victoria's secret,” sang Jax, as I listened intently, “and girl, you wouldn't believe - she's an old man who lives in Ohio, making money off of girls like me.” She continued her exposé by talking about how men spearheading large companies monetarily benefit from the propagation of thin bodies and the resulting body issues, selling a lifestyle that does not, in any way, take into account physiological and psychological differences that arise owing to diversity. She drove the point home by stating, “Victoria was made up by a dude -” an indication of the male gaze cultivating norms, with the patriarchy simultaneously laying the groundwork for male validation to be the ultimate end goal.

The rest of the song went on to normalize aspects of ourselves we are taught to label, alienate, and hate, such as ‘thighs of thunder,’ without taking into account the marriage of science and nature keeping our body alive and functioning. When she bemoaned the pressure to lose her appetite, and ‘fight the cellulite,’ I felt electricity course through me.

The song spoke to me in a way nothing else had. It spoke about me.

In a world filled with a cluster of data that will ask you to love yourself in one ad, but try to sell you a tool to sharpen your jawline in the next, Jax not only managed to shine a spotlight on my taxing journey, but also created a safe space of sorts within the nearly three-minute song. In those three minutes, I was one with Jax and every single woman who had a similar toxic relationship with her body. In those three minutes, I was a part of something bigger: a community of unlearning, reclamation, and empathy.

None of this is to say that we must kick off our socks and give into unhealthy coping mechanisms or habits that harm us in the long run. However, idealizing one body type as the epitome of achievement is a severe detriment that Jax has powerfully highlighted, and one that must be conversed about more often.

My voyage towards developing a sustainable, flourishing bond with my body is inundated with everyday obstacles, sacrifices, compromises, and discussions. It is an upward trek that leaves me out of breath at times, and in those moments, I am encouraged to hug myself a little tighter, and hold on a little harder.

During the course of this path, songs like Jax’s ‘Victoria’s Secret’ serve as soothing resting stops that replenish and rejuvenate. More than anything, these elements trigger vital discourse with my inner child, whom I treated unjustly for a vast section of my life.

As I continue on this path, I recognise that I may falter. There will be times when I fail and resort to the kind of internal dialogue that has hurt me in the past. On the days when the going gets tough, I now possess the vocalization of my struggle in the form of a song, reminding me that the goal I sometimes mistakenly aspire to is not mine to obtain, in the first place.

Additionally, as I combat my own demons, I hope with all my heart, that any young girl desolately gazing into the mirror, cursing the body that is her home, stumbles across this song a lot sooner than I did, thereby finding the consolation that I wish I had unearthed when I was younger, to protect me from a world of pain.

 

Sajeer Shaikh is a freelance writer. All information and facts provided are the sole responsibility of the writer