If you listen to most mainstream media, the new year is all about finding the new you. But what’s wrong with the old you?
We want to break away from the soul-crushing onslaught of negative New Year’s resolutions – eat less, lose weight, spend every waking moment at the gym – and promote feeling good about the skin you’re in.
While weight loss and fitness conglomerates would have you believe “healthy” looks like a size 6 or bulging biceps, good health doesn’t discriminate based on size or body shape. Wellness is about respecting and caring for the body you’re born with, not forcing it into an unrealistic cookie-cutter mould.
On many fronts, 2014 was a great year for the body-positive movement and diversity in general.
The rise of androgynous and genderless fashion represents society’s increasing acceptance of the LGBTQ community, as well as body types that don’t read as traditionally “masculine” or “feminine.”
The viral #FreeTheNipple campaign, backed by celebrities like Rihanna, Miley Cyrus and Chelsea Handler, challenges gender-biased policies and sexist societal taboos both online and off.
American Vogue boasted a record number of black stars on its covers, and while magazines still have a long way to go, there have never been more discussions about the need for increased racial diversity in media, entertainment and ad campaigns.
Then there were those who appeared to jump aboard the body-positive bandwagon only to appropriate the movement’s language to sell us the same old crap.
The “no makeup makeup” trend, supposedly all about natural beauty, often requires more time, skill and product than heavy-handed smoky eyes and ruby lips. Fitspiration promotes the same ideals of thinness, whiteness and youth as its sickly predecessor, thinspiration. The big booty craze helmed by Nicki Minaj, Iggy Azalea and one champagne-popping, internet-breaking Kim Kardashian, claims to embrace curves but really just fetishizes and objectifies yet another female body part and a new set of proportions unattainable for the average woman.
In the spirit of moving past the bullshit and reaching a higher level of body acceptance in 2015, we asked 13 inspiring Torontonians to bare (almost) all for our camera and tell us about the complicated relationships they have with their bodies. In these pages, you’ll find a wide array of sizes, shapes, sexualities, ethnicities and more. The images celebrate the human body in all forms, but our subjects’ stories, in their own words, go way beyond skin deep.
True, most of the people we photographed were initially (and understandably) nervous, but the consensus was that being shot nude was an incredibly liberating experience. Perhaps the whole thing is an apt metaphor for the secret to self-acceptance: stripping away the layers of insecurity and self-doubt imposed on us by society and, at our most vulnerable, choosing love over fear. Sabrina Maddeaux
