After a year-long NIMBY battle with my neighbours to build a community garden on our estate, we finally broke ground in March this year. Myself, my husband, our 4 year old and countless other neighbours from across the estate have spent backbreaking hours over the spring to get the garden to a state we could plant it up for the summer. We’ve dug, wheelbarrowed, lugged literal tons of hardcore and bark, drilled, painted, and shovelled mountains of topsoil. And after months of work, we were almost ready to start planting, save for topping up some of the beds with compost.
That’s when I spotted Captain NIMBY, Lord of the Gentrifiers, pilfering some of our compost. I tried to explain to him that we didn’t have enough compost for the community garden as it was, without someone syphoning some for their own use. I might have overlooked it had he not previously used an almost ton bag for his own – to quote Hackney Council – ‘guerilla gardening’.
His response?
He didn’t care.
He didn't care about using community resources. He didn’t care that there wouldn’t be enough for everyone else. Or that we couldn’t readily afford to buy more.
Know why?
Because he didn’t like the way it looked.
He said ‘it looks terrible and you’ve made such a mess’.
He ended his torrent by telling me he never wants to talk to me EVER. AGAIN. (True story; this is a grown ass man).
Now this guy is clearly a tool, and I would be glad to never have to deal with him EVER. AGAIN. But if he ever did deign to talk to me, here’s what I’d say.
I’d tell him that he was confusing aesthetics for value.
I’d tell him that, although gardens can be beautiful, that’s not the reason they exist.
I’d tell him that since our altercation earlier this year, the garden that he has so little respect for has brought people together, across class, across race, and a whole host of other differences we’ve been socialised to believe are insurmountable. I’d tell him how I’ve gotten to know my neighbours better; how we’ve shared food, recipes, and growing tips. I know more about how they spend their days and what is happening in their lives. I’d tell him how neighbours who’ve lived on this estate for 30 or 40 years come out to sow seeds and shoot the shit. How people who don’t live on the estate stop and lift their kids up to see over the wall, or offer us bamboo canes or a cold frame. I’d tell him how parents on the school run or in the park or football classes tell me and my husband how much they enjoy seeing the progress we’ve made. I’d tell him how the garden gives people a sense of purpose, accomplishment, and community that maybe they don’t get anywhere else.
From the moment they are born, children receive this exact same message – that their value and worth is tied to their appearance. That how their bodies look is more important than how they feel and move through the world. That they are there to be pleasing to look at for other people and to take up as little space as possible. Captain NIMBY is a father; I wonder if these are the messages he’s passing to his daughter too?
Kids are taught in a thousand tiny ways to abandon their bodies. To act on their bodies, instead of from their bodies. That their bodies are there to make them appealing to other people, and not for their own enjoyment.
We dress baby girls in frills, ruffles, bows, and flowers. Dainty clothes for dainty little things; objectifying them from the starting line. We tell them they’re so pretty. We keep them immaculate and pristine. As they become toddlers we stop them from messing up their clothes with paint or grass stains. They are to be neat and presentable.
We teach them fairytales, where doe-eyed, docile women, with waists that we could wrap our thumb and forefinger around are rescued by strong, broad, heroes with hard bodies; a one-two punch of impossible, gendered body ideals.
Children socialised as boys are similarly shoe-horned into narrow ideals. T-shirts and bed spreads emblazoned with heavy machinery, dinosaurs, superheroes, volcanoes: big, strong, mighty. We play more roughly with boys, throwing them around, letting them get messed up, but not always respecting when they say ‘no’ or ‘stop’. We teach boys to be brave and adventurous, but not how to be vulnerable. They internalise that they can’t be soft and gentle, emotionally or physically.
Research has found that parents talk to children about their weight from as young as two years old; in reality it starts a lot younger. We scrutinise babies’ bodies from the off: growth scans in utero, talk about babies being ‘too big’ or ‘too small’, weights being posted on birth announcements, and of course plotting and tracking their weights. We expect babies to be perfectly plump; not too small and not too big, as though it was under anyone’s control. I will never forget my friend being told her 9 month old was ‘too fat to crawl or walk’ by a paediatrician, and being told to decrease their milk intake in favour of solids. I recently overheard a parent describe their joyful 2 year old as ‘clinically ob*se’, the look of disdain visible on their faces. We have normalised scrutinising children’s weight, shape, and size, as if our words are benign.
While ‘Dad Bods’ are celebrated, mothers are under enormous pressure to ‘get their bodies back’ after having a baby; their young children see them picking over their soft bellies; the hips that are wider than they used to be; their generous thighs. Children learn how to scrutinise their own body from the people who they love the most. They see their mothers berating themselves over what they eat, weighing and monitoring, logging and controlling everything that passes their lips. They see us looking in the mirror and sighing, tugging on our bodies, wishing that part of them was smaller or didn’t exist. They see us squeezing into compression garments that cut off our circulation or jeans that are too small and pinch and dig into us. They hear how we talk about our bodies. When we say something is flabby or saggy or wrinkly. When we talk disapprovingly of cellulite or stretch marks. They see that there is an expectation to ‘work’ on our bodies. To always be improving, refining or enhancing how we look; often this is synonymous with trying to attain thinness. We have been taught to hate our bodies, not because there is anything wrong with our bodies, but because it keeps us docile and distracted. A hungry woman can’t use her voice. She has no power.
I say this, not to shame or judge anyone (we are all swimming through the same shit soup), but because I don’t always think dads, or cis-men more generally, know or fully understand the extent of the pressures on women to contort their bodies into unrealistic body standards.
And dads, of course, are not immune to the pressures of diet culture. From the ‘triangle’ shaped torsos with rock hard abs that grace the cover of Men’s Health, to David Beckham – in his mid 40s and a father of four – on the cover of GQ with no t-shirt, and apparently no body fat. How men perform body surveillance and control has a different flavour to it, of course. More ‘masculine’ or ‘science-y’ sounding diets like intermittent fasting, Paleo, counting macros, and keto. More ‘extreme’ exercises like Iron Mans and Tough Mudders. Dads would never say they're on a diet – a feminised and therefore inferior way to spend your time – but our kids gist nonetheless.
However it’s packaged – whether from parents, grandparents, teachers, doctors, sports, faith, or community leaders – the message is clear; your body is not good enough as it is.
