Riots Not Diets

Hey, Fatties! We’re a couple of days out from Christmas and you’ve been such a glutton that we’re wondering if you ate the ham dinner or if the ham dinner ate you, are we right?!! Ha! Well, fortunately, it’s almost the New Year, so you can make a plan for hitting the reset button and getting with the program. See ya, Bingo Wings! Later, Cottage Cheese Thighs! After just a few weeks on a new exercise and diet regimen, you’ll walk down the street and heads will turn, baby! You’ll be barely recognizable. I mean, think about it: barely. recognizable.

Yep, it’s that time of year again, when we are bombarded with messages about our bodies and the quest to improve them. We are told how inadequate we are, or at least, how utterly wrong our bodily appearance is from some generic onlooker’s point of view. Of course, we are flooded with this kind of messaging year-round, but it is even more pronounced around New Year’s Resolution time.

When it comes to this sort of messaging, particularly as it is applied to women, one thing is clear: women are supposed to care not just about being thin and beautiful, but mostly, we are supposed to care a lot about being looked at.

So where did the idea come from that we should care so much about a third party’s gaze? Whelp, we’re here to tell you (cue drumroll) that it’s our favorite culprit: the patriarchy.

In unpacking this idea, certain thinkers come to mind, such as John Berger, who explored the concept of looking as a political act in his 1972 work, Ways of Seeing, or feminist Laura Mulvey, who applied the concept of the “male gaze” to cinema in her 1973 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, writing that the “male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.”

Theories around the act of looking have evolved, but one thing is clear today: the male gaze is everywhere, and diet culture is no exception. We might say, as women, that we don’t diet or dress for men, but for ourselves, or other women. This might be true, but the deeply ingrained notion that our value is derived from being looked at is pervasive, and it is rooted in the structures that reinforce male dominance over women. When we concern ourselves with how we look from the outside, rather than how we operate from within our agency, we relinquish our power and hand it over to a third party, letting it not only judge us but determine how we behave, what goals we set for ourselves, and where we focus our limited time and energy.

So this year, if you plan on making any New Year’s resolution, let it be a riotous adherence to body neutrality. This is not the same as body positivity, which celebrates how all bodies look. Instead, body neutrality is a total decentering of the outside gaze, our internalization of the outside gaze, and more specifically, the male gaze. When we focus on how we are, who we are, and our capacity to make progress, body neutrality becomes a powerful act of resistance, where we become the subject of our lives rather than the objects of someone else’s designs.

In 2025, make it your business to start a riot, not a diet, and “fight the patriarchy, not ourselves!”

Photo Credit: @liberaljane from the @feminist IG account