Anuschka Rees

About Beyond Beautiful The Curated Closet Contact

About Beyond Beautiful The Curated Closet Contact

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Beyond Beautiful by Anuschka Rees

The Curated Closet: A simple system for discovering your personal style and building your dream wardrobe

@beyondbeautifulbook

So last week I watched a YT video of Aidy Bryant talking about her new show "Shrill" on The View, and I immediately felt the need to talk to you guys about it, because it illustrates perfectly what's bothering me about the current mainstream approach to body confidence.⁣ ⁣
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Aidy herself made me super excited to watch @shrillhulu – she talked about the problem of society telling women they're not worthy unless they are thin and about consciously deciding to no longer put her time, energy and money into "making my thighs smaller" and instead following her dreams – all amazing body-neutral messages that I am fully on board with.⁣
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But here's where it gets problematic: When Aidy mentioned reclaiming the word 'fat' as a descriptor and that, yes, she is fat, but she is also smart, funny, creative and talented, she was immediately interjected by Abby Huntsman adding "and you're also sexy!". ⁣
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When the table moved on to discussing how Aidy shows a lot of her body in sex scenes on the show, Sunni Hostin's first comment was: "But you look good in them, so what's the big whoop about?" As if sex scenes are super fine, AS LONG as you look good. ⁣
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Both Abby and Sunni no doubt meant well, but they also derailed what could have been a powerful message against the massively inflated value of beauty in our society, by once again focusing on LOOKS. Yes, Aidy may be sexy and she may look good in those sex scenes, but as the very first response when Aidy is talking about what makes her feel worthy, those compliments do nothing but once again emphasize that looking and feeling attractive matters big-time. ⁣
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I understand that it's important to push back on narrow beauty ideals and help women of all sizes feel seen and worthy. But my point is that – if we want to get to a place where women no longer feel like their looks dictate everything in life – doing these things is not enough, we need to go further every chance we get. If our discourse on body image never goes beyond affirming a woman's attractiveness, we'll never get to a place where we actually start questioning whether a woman's attractivenes SHOULD EVEN BE ALL THAT IMPORTANT. ⁣
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#bodyneutrality #shrillonhulu

5/14/19 🤗 Have you pre-ordered your copy yet?⁣
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📸 by @brunascorsatto⁣

Who is with me? 🙋‍♀️⁣
#ditchthescale #bodyneutrality #beyondbeautiful⁣
🎨 by @marinaesmeraldo⁣

Yes! by @hi.ur.beautiful via @notanotherwomanmag

Here comes the second instalment of our Beyond Beautiful Baby Step series in which we show you super concrete things you can do to improve your body image!⁣
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This week's baby step: Stop tracking your appearance! That includes weighing yourself, but also taking measurements, "progress pictures" and random selfies you take on the subway to check if your new skin care routine has made any difference yet. ⁣
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Why tracking hurts your body image: For starters, regularly quantifying your body is a great way to keep yourself stuck in a constant state of self-objectification, where you're assigning your body a value based on external criteria. ⁣
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But what's even worse is that concentrating so hard on minor physical changes is like looking at your body through a magnifying glass. Every tiny “flaw” looks critical and even if you eventually reach your #bodygoals, you still won’t be satisfied— because that magnifying glass is still there, showing you plenty more to nitpick. ⁣
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So do your body image a favour and ditch the scale, ditch the measuring tape and stop taking body-selfies for the sole purpose of being able to fixate on your outer shell. Stop wasting any more mental space on arbitrary numbers that have zero relevance to your life. ⁣
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What's your experience with "tracking" your appearance? ⁣
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#ditchthescale #bodyneutrality

Hands up if your brain has a tendency to immediately start rattling off calorie counts, sugar content or saturated fats whenever you're trying to figure out what to have for dinner or brunch? Yep us too...⁣⠀
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This week's pick for the Beyond Beautiful reading list is the luscious, sticky delight that is "Eat Up": Written by baker, columnist and author @ruby.tandoh. At its heart, this book is a love letter to food and a reminder that it doesn't just nourish our bodies, but also our hearts, our minds, and our relationships too!⁣⠀
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According to Ruby, the go-to approach to food in the Western world – where think of ingredients as nothing more than macro- and micro-nutrients and 'Nourish bowls' aren't much more than beautifully-arranged vitamin dispensaries – is one big missed opportunity! We miss out on the beauty, comfort and messiness that comes with the alchemy of cooking. We miss out on marking important celebrations and tasting different cultures by experiencing their cuisines. We miss out on walking past a kitchen where the smell alone triggers a memory of one of your favourite meals, cooked by one of your favourite people. ⁣⠀
It goes beyond the idea of "you are what you eat". To open ourselves up to the food around us is to open ourselves up to the outside world. ⁣⠀
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The book is peppered (pun intended😉) with a few simple recipes as well as chapters covering our relationship to food in all the places it appears: on our plate, in the movies, during sex, in the supermarket and in our minds. ⁣⠀
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It is a pleasure to read and will rethink the way you look at food!⁣⠀
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Have you read Eat Up? What other books do you think should go on the Beyond Beautiful reading list?⁣⠀
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Photo by @brunascorsatto

Remember this episode of Sex and The City? It’s aptly called ‘Old Dogs, New Dicks’ and it’s the ep whereby Charlotte is so put off by her date’s uncircumcised penis that she makes him get the snip! He eventually does and soon dumps her, deciding to share this new version of himself with the rest of Manhattan’s women. 🙄🙄🙄 ⁣⠀
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The reason we'd like to remind everyone that this happened, is a) it's not just women that are shamed for not conforming to our society's beauty ideals and b) beauty ideals are so culturally constructed, they are completely nonsensical to anyone NOT growing up in that culture. Because to non-Americans – who did not grow up with the idea that foreskin is gross – that episode (and any kind of "turtleneck" joke for that matter) is strange AF. ⁣⠀
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Male circumcision (for non-religious reasons!) is also another example of a beauty ideal (like underarm hair removal) that's a left-over of the Western society's cleanliness craze that happened in the late 18th/early 19th century. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that most English-speaking countries realised that the heath benefits of circumcisions actually don't outweigh its risks and stopped cutting baby boys by default…except for the USA. Nowadays, even the American Association for Pediatrics no longer recommends the procedure, but turtleneck jokes are still going strong and women's magazines still have to answer reader questions from women who feel grossed out by their new guy's intact penis.⁣⠀
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Please leave your thoughts on penis foreskins in the comments! And also mention where you grew up for context!⁣⠀
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And just to clarify: We are not criticizing male circumcision itself, but we are definitely criticizing the fact that it's 2019 and non-circumcised men are still regularly body-shamed in the media.

We love this post by @pink_bits talking about her everyday bra evolution: "The second bra took up so many years - which is quite sad reflecting on it now. I was wearing under-wire, push up, male gaze designed crap as my everyday bra. ⁣
Now, lingerie itself is nothing to demonise, it can be empowering, a fabulous means of self expression and just lovely to wear - but it was not these things for me and was worn as someone who was very insecure and dressing for the male gaze in the hopes of something - perhaps wanting to be found attractive? Who knows. ⁣
[...] Today when I get dressed, I’m putting myself first, which would’ve been a revelation to younger me, and I’m not sure she’d recognise me now."⁣
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We 100% agree! If you love wearing lacy lingerie and feel confident and comfortable in it, then go ahead and wear it everyday for YOURSELF (and check out @thelingerieaddict for lots of empowering lingerie inspiration). But if you find under-wire or push up bras uncomfortable and would never wear them if you didn't feel like you HAD to – for your partner, to make your boobs look a certain way or whatever – then please consider no longer confining your boobies into an unpleasant, scratchy cage on a daily basis! ⁣
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When shopping for bras, what influences your purchase decisions more: comfort or what your boobs look like? Have you ever felt pressure to wear sexy lingerie?

@anuschkarees @beyondbeautifulbook Blog Archive Impressum