Chapter 3: Once Upon a Body: The Story Women Were Told About Themselves

Tea? Check. Blanket? Check. Stuffed animal, weighted lap pillow, or whatever makes your nervous system exhale? Also check. Your pets at your feet? Good, because mine are. We're about to wade into some deep waters here: the long, tangled history of how women were told to live, look, and function. 

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The history we're about to walk through runs deep. It runs into the closets of Victorian corsets, into ancient beauty rituals, into the whispered rules passed from mother to daughter, generation after generation, about how a woman's body was supposed to look, move, and disappear. It runs into magazines and mirrors and measuring tapes. It runs into the quiet, exhausting work of shrinking oneself to fit a shape someone else designed.

This isn't a light story. But it's one worth knowing. Because so much of what we carry in our own bodies today, the flinch in front of a mirror, the apology for taking up space, isn't something we invented on our own. It was taught. Carefully, systematically, across centuries. And what was taught can be unlearned. Awareness is key, do not forget that you hold the keychain.

So here's the truth before we begin: you did not choose this inheritance, but you get to choose what you do with it.

We'll trace the story of how women's bodies became public property: judged, measured, and molded by forces far bigger than any one person's insecurity. We'll look at:

• How beauty standards shifted across centuries (and whose interests they served)

• The invention of "the ideal body" as a marketing tool

• How body image became tangled up with worth, morality, and control

• The quiet resilience of women who pushed back, in ways big and small

You don't have to read this with your guard up. You're not here to be shamed by history-you're here to understand it, so it loses some of its grip. Let the tea go lukewarm if it needs to. Pause when you need to. This is not a race. It is a journey of awareness of the history of diet culture, weight stigma, antifat bias, and so much more.

You are not the first woman to feel like your body is a battlefield. And you won't be the last to reclaim it as home

Now, take a breath (in… long-exhale out………). Let's go gently.

We can't talk about women's bodies without inviting the guest everyone tiptoes around: fat. That soft, stubborn, endlessly misunderstood tissue we've all been taught to whisper about instead of simply name. But fat isn't just fat. it's a keeper of memories, a thread tangled up with identity, culture, emotion, even old wounds we never meant to carry in our cells. It's something women were handed a rulebook for before we ever asked for one: fear it, hide it, shrink it, outrun it. As if a body could ever be a mistake to correct.

I wanted to voice the gremlin in the room, now, lets look further and see those other gremlins whose voices want to be heard as well.

When you are ready… read on bodykind coven and lets unwind the spell.

The Ancient Roots: Bodies as Symbols

I know what you are thinking, this can’t go that far to ancient times… I know I was shocked too. Long before diet culture had a name, bodies already carried meaning. In ancient Egypt, slenderness and youth were prized among elite women, achieved through elaborate skincare rituals and cosmetics made from minerals and oils. In ancient Greece, the "ideal" female form was softer and fuller which was associated with fertility, health, and the ability to bear children, since a woman's worth was so tightly bound to reproduction.

The pattern was set: a woman's body was rarely just her own. It was a symbol of fertility, wealth, virtue, or status. A woman’s body was meant to be read and judged by everyone around her.

The Corseted Centuries

⚠️ Warning: reading further may strip a little sparkle off your next Bridgerton rewatch

By the 16th through 19th centuries, European beauty ideals had tightened (literally!). The corset became a defining garment, cinching waists into hourglass silhouettes that were, for many women, physically restrictive to the point of danger. Fainting spells, displaced organs, and shallow breathing were common prices paid for a "fashionable" figure. That was the IDEAL.

What's easy to miss is why this mattered so much. A tiny waist wasn't just an aesthetic preference. It signaled that a woman didn't need to do physical labor, that she had leisure, that she had money. Beauty became a class marker as much as a personal trait. Bodies were, quite literally, laced into economic and social hierarchies.

The Roaring Twenties: A Brief Rebellion

The 1920s brought a jolt of change. Flapper culture pushed back against Victorian modesty. This looked like shorter hemlines, looser silhouettes, bound chests to flatten curves. For a moment, the ideal shifted toward a androgynous frame, and women experienced a taste of physical freedom. sigh I know I was also disappointed this rebellion was brief, AND it was a rebellion worth noting nonetheless!

But don't mistake this for liberation. The flatness of the 1920s ideal simply replaced one rigid standard with another. Women were still expected to mold themselves, just into a different shape. 

Are you seeing a theme here? Symbol and Mold

Take a breath and let's continue because the spell continues, bodykind coven.

Post-War Curves and the Rise of Mass Media (IMPORTANT)

After World War II, the beauty ideal swung again! Toward voluptuous, hourglass figures epitomized by stars like Marilyn Monroe. This shift coincided with a cultural push to move women out of wartime jobs and back into domestic roles; a curvier, softer body aligned with messaging about femininity, motherhood, and homemaking. I know its like we are going back to ancient times with bodies as a symbol.

This era also marks a turning point: the rise of mass media. Magazines, film, and eventually television meant beauty standards could now be broadcast at scale, reaching millions of women simultaneously with the same narrow image of "desirable."

The Thin Ideal Takes Hold

By the 1960s, the pendulum swung hard in the opposite direction. Twiggy, a British model with a slight, waifish frame, became the era's defining image. Thinness, once one option among many, began to cement into the standard against which women measured themselves.

Are you getting dizzy yet? Are you angry? good, hold onto it.

The 1970s and '80s only intensified this. Diet culture exploded into a formal industry: weight-loss programs, "fitness" crazes, calorie counting. All marketed heavily to women. Thinness became conflated with discipline, moral virtue, and self-control, while fatness was framed as failure or laziness. This is the era where body image and self-worth became almost inseparable in the cultural imagination. 

Do you see the interweaving of body image and morality and worth? It’s a tangled mess, isn’t it?

Notice: what are you feeling right now? Are you ready to move on? If not, take another breath, drink the tea, and listen to the pets at your feet. Notice their breath in and out. 

The Impossible Standards of the 90s and 2000s

Heroin chic. Size-zero runways. Photoshopped magazine covers. The 1990s and early 2000s pushed the thin ideal to its most extreme, while simultaneously demanding curves in specific places: flat stomach, full chest, narrow waist. A combination that was, for most bodies, biologically nearly impossible to achieve without intervention.

This is also when body image research began documenting real psychological fallout: rising rates of disordered eating, body dysmorphia, and chronic dissatisfaction, especially among adolescent girls exposed to idealized media imagery during critical developmental years.

Digital Bodies: Filters, Feeds, and a New Kind of Pressure

Social media didn't invent body image struggles, but it did something no previous era could: it made comparison constant, personal, and inescapable. Where a magazine cover was distant and clearly "produced," a filtered selfie on Instagram feels close, real, attainable. Even when it's just as manufactured.

Today's landscape adds new complexity: body positivity and body neutrality movements pushing back against narrow standards, alongside algorithms that still often reward and amplify conventionally thin, able-bodied, white beauty ideals. Progress and regression exist side by side.

A gentle pause here: if any of this stirred something in you….recognition, grief, anger….that's worth sitting with, not rushing past. You inherited these standards from centuries of cultural machinery, not from any personal failing. Sip your tea. Let that truth settle.

Have you done your social media audit yet? if not, this is your reminder to guide the horses where you want to go, the algorithm does not have to have the ropes.

How This History Lives in the Body Today

History doesn't stay in history books. It lives in the body. As Bessel van der Kolk stated “The body keeps the score”. It lives in the reflexive stomach-suck when you catch your reflection (*did you feel called out, I sure did*), in the way you might apologize for ordering dessert, in the quiet calculation of whether an outfit is "flattering" before it's ever asked whether it's comfortable. These aren't personality quirks. They're inherited reflexes, passed down through centuries of cultural conditioning, absorbed so early and so often that they start to feel like your own voice.

Is it sinking in?

This is worth naming clearly: the critical voice in your head that comments on your body is not you. It's an echo. An echo of magazine covers and locker room comments and a great-grandmother who was taught to lace herself into a smaller shape to be taken seriously. You didn't invent that voice. You inherited it! The way you might inherit eye color, except this one can be unlearned…. If you want… remember the goal of this was awareness

Somatically, this history often shows up as:

• Hypervigilance around mirrors or photos: a nervous system bracing before it even sees the image

• Disconnection from hunger and fullness cues: because bodies taught to shrink learn to override their own signals

• Shame stored as tension: clenched jaws, shallow breath, a stomach that's never fully relaxed

• Comparison as a default lens: scanning other women's bodies before even registering their faces

None of this is weakness. It's adaptation. Bodies and minds do what they're trained to do, and generations of women were trained, explicitly and implicitly, to treat their bodies as projects to manage rather than homes to inhabit.

What would it be like to think of your body as a home? Does it feel foreign? Did a part of you reject that thought the moment you read it? It's okay, what is that part saying? Every part deserves to be heard.

The Weight of "Should"

So much of body image history is really a history of should. Women should be thin, but not too thin. Curvy, but only in the "right" places. Youthful, but not immature. Strong, but not intimidating. The specific "should" has shifted decade to decade. But the underlying message has stayed remarkably consistent: your body, as it naturally is, is not quite enough.

I know I feel shitty too.

That message is old. It is centuries old. And it was never actually about health, or beauty, or even aesthetics in any pure sense. It was about control, commerce, and the maintenance of who gets power and who doesn't. 

I know, same story, different font. It is exhausting. You can take a break. It is okay.

Recognizing this doesn't erase the discomfort in your body today. But it can shift the relationship to that discomfort: from "something is wrong with me" to "something was done to generations of us, and I'm allowed to start putting it down." 

LOVE a good reframe!

A Small Reflection

Before moving forward, you might pause here,tea in hand, and ask yourself gently, without judgment:

Which of these historical "shoulds" do I still carry, even quietly?
Where did I first learn it: a comment, a magazine, a moment in a dressing room?

If you are up for a challenge: 

What would it feel like to set just one of these down, even for today?

There's no right answer. Just noticing is enough for now.

The purpose of this blog post is to increase awareness and notice the history. We say the “body keeps the score” and we need to understand the score itself. The root of the beloved grandmother willow tree. There are many roots, paths, bumps, and insect/animal friends along the way. And I am so glad you are here. The spell isn’t untangled fully yet, but first we needed to know that a spell was there to begin with. And maybe the webs are a little less tangled or a little less hazy.

*Do you notice any shift within yourself? Just notice, remember that is enough for now.

Now, take a breath, let it go, sip your tea, and pet your familiars. Hoa hoa season is just beginning, so light your candles Bodykind coven. It is the season of the witch.

From your gentle familiar,

Genesis

Disclaimer: my content is for education and entertainment purposes only. It is not a substitute  for therapy or medical treatment.