We Don’t Need To Bitch About Our Bodies To Bond, OK?

My therapist gave me a strange request during our last ever session: stand naked in front of a full-length mirror and say affirmations about my body out loud. “Not a chance in hell”, I thought at the time, instinctively covering my boobs with my hands over my t-shirt. The idea was that verbalising positive affirmations about my body and myself, all in the nude, would help with the negative self-talk I said in my head. It took me literal months before I dared flash myself in the mirror, let alone say lovely things about myself while full frontal. But, once the silliness wore off, and I got truly naked with myself, I realised why I was given this assignment: I needed to break the habit of bitching about my body.

I was put to the test amongst a new set of friends recently. They were chatting about what they would change if they had the money for cosmetic enhancements. It was the expected conversational dance; “I need a boob job” met the response “I’d get a tummy tuck”, and so on. Except, as eyes turned to me, ready for me to share the flaw I was keen to fix, I couldn’t think of anything. In that moment, I was alright with myself. “I wouldn’t change anything,” I said, shrugging. I quickly got the sense that this response was wrong. (If you’re thinking of that Mean Girls scene — you’re spot on; the one where Regina George and co stand in front of a mirror picking apart their skin, hair and nails, and Lindsey Lohan’s character, Cady, feeling the pressure to participate, says, “I get bad breath in the morning”).

I wasn’t supposed to like my body in that moment. Not really. Especially not in this perceived safe space. Especially when we’re bonding over the cruel and relentless demands placed on a woman’s body image. The conversation became awkward and cold, as if I were breaking an unwritten rule. Do we need to empty our private boxes of vulnerabilities on the table for our friends to pick up, scrutinise and compare? Do we appear much more relatable when we do? It’s clear to me that my habit of negative self-talk about my body isn’t just something reserved for when looking in the mirror but mirrored in my friendships, too. 

“I instantly thought of that Mean Girls scene,” says psychotherapist Eloise Skinner when we chatted over Zoom. Skinner specialises in existential therapy and has an extensive background in fitness and modelling. She explained that my decision not to engage with negative self-talk in a social setting was a “counter-cultural position” given the amount of emphasis placed on women’s perceived flaws and vulnerabilities in society. “I've also seen it a lot in other places as well in popular culture, so it’s clearly something that is quite a well-known phenomenon, not just in people's friendship groups but also in the media and how we perceive women and their conversations.” 

Frustratingly, women are often accused of being superficial, and women's friendships are criticised under this lens. The words “bitchy”, “gossipy”, and “competitive” spring to mind. This is something I was extremely conscious of before setting pen to paper to write this piece. In popular culture, when women meet with other women to talk, our conversations are reduced to mindless gossip instead of what they are and can be: a highly emotionally intelligent way to put the world to rights. And it feels deeply misogynistic to suggest that women only sit around talking about the way our bodies look. Yet it would also be disingenuous to say the subject doesn’t matter at all. 

Statistics by YouGov in 2021 confirm that we are thinking about our bodies a lot, and the majority of women polled in the UK and the US want to change their appearance in some way. By now, most of us have come to understand the role that capitalistic pressures, beauty standards in social media and traditional marketing play in this. Still, research by the Mental Health Foundation stresses that “how our family and peers feel and speak about bodies and appearance can also have an impact on self-esteem”. You may have seen the term “Almond Mom” on social media, where women, specifically, talk about how their mothers’ restrictive eating habits, comments around dieting and their weight, impacted how they view their own. There are more than 20,000 videos talking about this on TikTok. Our friendships can have a similar effect.

“In the group dynamic, [being critical about your image] can be seen as a culturally acceptable way to bond,” says Skinner, comparing these conversations to social activities like gossiping and drinking. Skinner explained that when choosing not to participate in self-critical discussions, it can indicate that you’re not within the group or do not align with the group’s values. “There's also that feeling of, this group is trying to create a space for shared vulnerabilities, and [you’ve decided you’re] not going to like participate in that,” she explained.

Of course, vulnerability in friendship should be treasured, and the therapists I spoke to for this article all agreed that being open about your insecurities can lead to deeper and stronger connections with people in your life. Within trusted groups, by being able to share, you can challenge some of the harmful thoughts you withhold about your image — my best friends always call me out on any neggy comments I make about myself, as I do for them. How can you tell the difference between a nurturing friendship and one where negative self-talk is allowed to breed and fester? 

Angela Kyte, a former Harley Street psychotherapist who specialised in body image, eating disorders and anxiety and depression before setting up as an image consultant, explained there are key things to be aware of when you’re talking about yourself in social settings. She explained that people with an “external locus of evaluation” tend to be “validated by the views and opinions of others”. She also explained how this can lead to low self-esteem, not just related to body image but in friendships, romantic relationships and the workplace. 

I’d be lying if I said I don’t ask for opinions about myself constantly, whether it’s my career choices or if I look good in an outfit. Is it ever a good thing to constantly seek validation and reassurance from a friend, especially with something as relatable and common as not feeling confident in your own skin? Kyte believes there is. “If they're a trusted friendship group, the positive impact this could have is challenging your own thoughts, especially if you're getting a lot of positive reinforcement from these friends and people around you. It can start to at least make you stop and think about your own self-processes and self-thoughts.”

We are all at different stops on this long, tiresome journey towards self-acceptance. And this conversation requires a huge dollop of nuance that acknowledges how conventional beauty standards impact people differently, depending on how close or far you are from the so-called ideal. It’d be entirely smug and frankly, self-aggrandising to not understand how my own set of privileges makes healing my negative self-talk simpler than it may be for some. However, questioning the shitty, insidious way society’s structures make women question their worth is a huge part of my job. It’s why interrogating why and how self-deprecation becomes embedded in the way we sometimes speak about ourselves feels so vital.

“We just are so used to culturally and socially receiving [self critique] as the only way to think about ourselves… it would almost be seen as self-indulgent to say ‘let's just go around the circle and say what we like about ourselves’, even though that would probably be better for our mental health,” says Skinner. “It's much more socially acceptable, in terms of the culture that we have right now, which is always about finding flaws and improving them or solving them with a product, to criticise yourself.”

Let’s be honest, being self-critical has often been linked to humility — which is practically a virtue in the UK — especially when you’re a woman. Kyte agrees. “We are in the British society, and the British society likes to be more modest [when you talk about yourself],” she says, knowingly. Indeed. The biggest insults I heard growing up in inner city Manchester were, “she loves ‘erself” or “she thinks she’s it” — usually said after I put my hand up in class or wouldn’t speak to the boys in the neighbourhood. The inference was that girls like me shouldn’t love themselves, they shouldn’t know they are pretty, or clever, or talented. You should instead bat away compliments, cast your eyes down and play small and humble. 

As Black women living in the UK, Kyte and I agreed that this forced humility doesn’t work well when coming to appreciate your physical beauty in a world where you are the obvious minority. Praising a Black woman for being “humble” feels like a microaggression at this point.

“Maybe your cultural background is also feeding into how you are as an individual, in terms of wanting to think more about your positive, all the great things you can do, all the great things you see in yourself, rather than dwelling on the negative in those sorts of settings and groups,” she considered.

Agreed. I was raised to believe that speaking badly about myself was “giving power to the devil” — and yet the longer I spend in this country, the more the devil wins. Though the Black women in my life, from Jamaica to Nigeria to the US, generally speak with confidence about themselves (even writing under pictures of themselves, captions such as “I’m a fine babe”), not all friendships leave room for this kind of unbothered self-praise.

Our bodies are the least important thing about a good friendship. We all know this. My best friends know me intimately and couldn't care less about the way I look, as I them. But to ensure our safe spaces remain that way, it’s best to be conscious that they don’t become playgrounds for our meanest insecurities. 

I am not the friend who will let you bitch about your body. Something I also said the last time I stood naked in the mirror.