LTAFS Addendum 4: Body Preferences vs. Body Shaming
And we are going to talk a little bit about the difference between body preferences and shaming. I think one of the things that can be really hard to dismantle, is that our culture is constantly telling us our body, as it exists naturally, is wrong. There are ways to lighten and darken your skin, ways to curl and straighten your hair, ways to color pretty much everything, ways to change and alter the appearance of various body parts that do or don’t curve, and so on. Some of this is cultural bias. Some of this is capitalism. Some if this is both.
And so the challenge when writing about people who are attracted to each other is that they likely exist in a world that has told them parts of them are incorrect. And their potential mates likely started off with thought about their own personal preferences and may find this person meets them or doesn’t. Where this gets tricky as the writer is describing how these people are finding themselves attracted to one another, but making it clear this is this character’s preference. If a character says, “I’ve only ever dated blondes,” and the other character is not blonde, that can be an interesting tension. But if the non-blonde goes to change their hair, well, it would take a lot of story explanation to show why that would be the formerly non-blonde character being appreciated for themselves and not just changing in order to be seen as an attractive person.
Similarly, in “Shrek” to use a movie example, Fiona thinks the thing that makes her unlovable is her troll form. And then she falls in love with a troll. But he loves her for who she is, before he even knows she has a troll form. So in Fiona’s case, getting to live the rest of her life as a troll is a reward. This is less of an issue in contemporary stories, but fantasy in particular often uses spells or curses that make people unattractive in order to add a degree of difficulty to falling in love. The thing is, unattractive is in the eye of the beholder, so curses that make you nerdy, or wear glasses, or baggy clothes, imply that people who need glasses or prefer baggy clothes are somehow undeserving of love. There are of course ways to make it work, but as the writer, it’s worth making sure that the story makes it clear that people don’t have to deserve love. After all romance is really about people finding the folks who see them as they are.