We’re talking about unreal women, I think (as self-consciously opposed to the well-lit-so-not-too-real ‘real women’ of Dove’s ad campaign). Women who have literally ceased to exist, who have become pure image, decorporealized, removed from all that messy bodily stuff, all that awkward nature. This is the ideal that is presented as the ultimate ‘choice’ for modern women with aspirations – modern women who don’t want to be tied to the kitchen sink at 23 with a mewling brat hanging from each nipple – as though it were the only alternative.
It’s got a long history of course. Previously legitimized by religion’s fear of sex, revulsion towards the physical and fetishization of 'spiritual' discipline (fasting virgins, documented cases of anorexia from the Middle Ages among certain ‘devout’ young women), it has now been absorbed almost perfectly into the mechanisms of capitalism, with its fetishization of infertile youth and paradoxical desire to transcend its own material basis through unmitigated material consumption. The unattainable (size zero) can be yours – if you have enough money and buy the right products religiously enough. Do this, and complete freedom and control will be yours. You’ll be completely independent (and completely dependent on others to tell you how independent you are). You’ll be the version of yourself – hardened, sealed, perfectly impervious – that you think you are when you’re on cocaine. (This must be a reason why models do so much coke, and why its use is rising generally.) You won’t be a body that does things you don’t like and can’t control (bleed, shit, have babies), you’ll be a blank palette for whatever decoration you choose (is chosen for you), a Facebook-profile-picture version of yourself (updated every day to fit the fashion), an advert for yourself. You’ll be a perfect emotionless manifestation of your own will, a realization of your own desires (decided for you by others), a little nugget of acceptability. You’ll do.