Anna Murphy's Critical Insights in 'Body Beautiful' for Harper's Bazaar UK

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Anna Murphy's Critical Insights in 'Body Beautiful' for Harper's Bazaar UK AOC Fashion

Models Molly Constable and Seynabou [Zeyna] Cissé cover Harper’s Bazaar UK’s August 2021 ‘The Body Issue’. Shibon Kennedy styles the duo in ‘Body Beautiful’, a visual and written-word reflection on curves lensed by Pamela Hanson [IG] with words by Anna Murphy.

Murphy is fashion director of The Times and The Sunday Times [UK] since 2015. Previously she launched ‘Stella’ at The Sunday Telegraph, also London-based. She is unusually honest in sharing her thoughts about curves and female ‘flesh’ generally-speaking.

All women have paid a high price over body management by religious zealots, but women of color have paid the highest price. In every dialogue of this nature, we must take the experiences of white women and double-triple them for women of color.

Murphy only has a one-pager in Harper’s UK, but hopefully she intends to use her platform to amplify her message going forward on this topic.

Anna Murphy considers the origin of the so-called ‘thin ideal’ that has been in ascendancy over the last century.

In her book ‘Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body’, Susan Bordo argues that it’s about 'the tantalising ideal of a well-managed self in which all is kept in order'. That this has had a greater hold over women than men is because "throughout dominant Western religious and philosophical traditions, the capacity for self-management is decisively coded as male. By contrast, all those bodily spontaneities – hunger, sexuality, the emotions – seen as needful of containment and control have been culturally constructed... as female." Golly.

And so, to follow Bordo’s argument, modern women – or at least those in "late modern Western societies" – have used their bodies to demonstrate to others that they can do, be, live as men do; that they can subjugate their "domestic, reproductive destiny".

I told you the essay is provocative!! ~ Anne