I read “Why Girls Love The Dad Bod” by Mackenzie Pearson earlier this week knowing that it would annoy me, and surely enough after reading this article, I found myself asking, “Why am I so uncomfortable?” So, I started exploring that feeling of discomfort, and came to another question: “Whose bodies are being valued here?”
Answer: white, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, middle- to upper-class men, many of whom happen to be fraternity members.
But why are these bodies being valued?
While I do believe that everyone has a right to feel comfortable with their body and that no one should be judged for the way their body looks, I have an issue with applauding white male bodies at the expense of other bodies. Implicit in Pearson’s article is the heralding of a white supremacist, patriarchal view of the human body. Why are we applauding a white heterosexual male’s body, when his body is already strongly accepted in America’s highly white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society? Pearson claims that females find the “dad bod” attractive because “it doesn’t intimidate us.” Then she goes on to say, “We don’t want a guy that makes us feel insecure about our body. We are insecure enough as it is. We don’t need a perfectly sculpted guy standing next to us to make us feel worse.” This analysis of why the “dad bod” has become a popular craze makes me cringe. The female body is being regarded in comparison to the male body. Why is it that we, as females, feel insecure about our bodies? One of the myriad of reasons is male bodies are valued over our bodies, and it is men imposing on women the ideal body type for women. By blatantly stating “we are insecure enough as it is,” acknowledgement as to why women are insecure about our bodies has to be considered.
Women’s bodies are constantly being policed in American society, and each woman knows the pressure society puts on them to look a certain way, and men add most of this pressure. Pearson ends her article encouraging men with dad bods to “confidently strut that gut on the beach because while you stare at us in our bikinis we will be staring just as hard.” This encouragement of confidence is not the problem because everyone should feel confident in their body. The problem is the assumption that men will “stare at us in our bikinis” because the male gaze still ensues, no matter where a woman goes. Pearson is implying that women do not normally gawk at men on the beach whose bodies do not consist of a six-pack and bulging biceps, and she is saying that men are always staring at women in bikinis. This article reinforces the idea of a female needing to please a man by being aesthetically pleasing.
I have been talking a lot about the female body in relation to the world, but I am afraid that maybe my focus on the female body is too large, that I am generalizing too much, and I may be reinforcing the systems that I am trying to fight against. I identify as a white, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, middle-class woman, so I know that my experiences as a part of these groups do have influence in how I am analyzing Pearson’s article. I ask the following questions in an attempt to think about the multitude of possibilities the body can be thought about in terms of identities, and while I may not have answers to each of these question, they are important to ask when trying to approach an idea from a critical lens. So here are some of the many questions that can be asked in regards to the body: how are trans* and gender non-conforming individuals’ bodies viewed within cissexist American society? What about black female bodies, how are they viewed in relation to the white female body? How are bodies with disabilities regarded in a highly able-bodied environment? How is the gay Latino male body viewed in a white supremacist, heteronormative society? How is the upper-class body privileged in relation to the working-class body in a capitalist institution?
Here’s the thing, the idea of the “dad bod,” as expressed in Pearson’s article, is not revolutionary. By heralding the publication of this article, one is giving into a system that allows for white male bodies to be valued over every other body out there. As individuals, we must look critically at the arguments presented to us, and question why we either agree with them or why we find ourselves in a condition of unease.
Becoming Me 