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Kim Kardashian posted a picture of herself on Instagram yesterday showing off her pregnant body in the buff. You can read about it here and here and here if you want. But for the purposes of this article, that is the last time we'll bring up Kim Kardashian, because as we have evolved into fully digitized creatures—each with a megaphone in our hands capable of blasting personal statements into the world—Kim Kardashian posting a tasteful naked photo of herself means far more to the rest of us than it does to her.
No, the real issue here isn't Kim Kardashian. The real issue is keeping her fight going at a grassroots level, and thanks to the proliferation of platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr, the 99 Percent has as much agency to reshape the narrative around what is beautiful as the One Percent does.
We have long decried that Mainstream Media promotes rigid and unrealistic standards of beauty. That is accurate. But seriously, screw those guys. Twitter has more than 300 million users. Instagram has an additional 300 million and there are more than 200 million registered blogs on Tumblr. We can be pissed about the sameness of images fed to us by Hollywood or we can look at our phones and realize democratic media is the new mainstream. That's not to say that thought leaders and curated content from venerable institutions like the The New Yorker and The Paris Review are obsolete. They are incredibly valuable. But it does mean that on any given day a college student in Michigan can generate as many media impressions as The Gray Lady or Megyn Kelly.
And those impressions can be used for good. When Caitlyn Jenner made her grand and glamorous debut as a cover girl for Vanity Fair the positive reaction to her beauty was hearteningly broad and enthusiastic—and then it was objectifying. And then Laverne Cox wrote a very thoughtful, intelligent response to the hoopla on her personal Tumblr putting Jenner's coming out in perspective for a society new to the trans rights movement. She explained that conforming to beauty standards is a pressing a concern for everyone, even out trans celebrities, and that we must be mindful of showing favoritism to the rarified among us:
Trans people from the proletariat class applauded Jenner, but wanted to know where their Vanity Fair covers were. So they took to Tumblr, the very same service utilized by fancy and gorgeous Laverne Cox, and made their own headlines under the label #MyVanityFairCover.
[To the people out there who aren't fighting for societal acceptance in addition to the unifying human struggle of self-acceptance, this may have just looked like another hashtag. But it's not. It's a vital form of activism that didn't require anyone to spend time organizing a march or trying to drum up media attention. People from all over the world started posting their Vanity Fair covers and then it got picked up by BuzzFeed where it went viral, creating visibility for a community that so often goes unseen.
Look, this may sound ridiculous, but it's time we started putting our media toys to good use by applying some Silicon Valley principles to our social media practices. A startup achieves success when a person or group identifies a need and uses the technology and often-limited resources at their disposal to effectively serve that need. Do you have to get somewhere fast but don't have a car? Take an Uber! Want a fast, user-friendly way to connect with your peers at college? Facebook to the rescue! Are you tired of wading through rivers of BS on Facebook but still want to stalk people in pictures? Instagram is here to help! The founders of all these billion-dollar enterprises saw a problem and used tech to solve it. It's our turn to do the same to promote individuality and build a better humanity. You don't need 40 million Instagram followers to make a difference. You just need 40 million people agreeing to be better together. Considering Ellen DeGeneres' all-star Oscar selfie generated more than 3 million retweets on its own last year, it's not hard to believe in our ability to rally around a cause if we want it badly enough.
If the problem is awareness, let's all sign a social contract saying we will use our smartphones and apps to change the way the world sees people. We can do that through the simple act of making sure all people are seen. We don't need to break the Internet. We need to start responsibly using it to make positive change. When platforms like Instagram and Twitter were new, we didn't know how to use them, and that's understandable. But as these apps have matured and become embedded in our lives, we've learned that they're good for more than just food pictures and SMH moments in line at Chipotle. Movements like #MyVanityFairCover and #BlackOutDay and #effyourbeautystandards and #iLookLikeAnEngineer prove that we are communities with a great unifying power in our hands (literally). If we exercise it responsibly we can effect a real revolution, and come together in ways we never previously dreamed possible.
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And now we'll admit that we lied to you before when we promised to not mention Kim Kardashian again, but this isn't about the pregnant selfie. On her recent book tour to promote Selfish, Kardashian stopped at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. The conversation was moderated by LaDoris Cordell, the outgoing Independent Police Auditor for San Jose and a former vice provost at Stanford University. She was also the first African-American female judge in Northern California. In other words, it wasn't a local shock jock tossing softballs. Cordell asked Kardashian questions like how she and Kanye West plan to raise a mixed-race child in a society that doesn't yet fully embrace them and how she feels about the idea of promoting unreasonable beauty standards for women.
In addressing the latter question, Kardashian made a good point. When she was growing up, there was no au currant standard of beauty that included her. When she was a teen in the 1990s, desirable looked like Kate Moss and Cindy Crawford, and even a woman of color like Naomi Campbell was long, leggy, and athletic. As a short, curvy Armenian-American girl there weren't coveted public figures she could aspire to emulate or find confidence by identifying with (except, she noted, Jennifer Lopez). People who were desirable or famous or successful just didn't look like her. So as an adult, she went out and created an archetype all her own.
And, yes, Kardashian has had the help of major media outlets like W and GQ and the dozens of other titles that have plastered her on their covers over the years, but the 354 pages of selfies in her book were all taken by her over the course of nine years. And she has been so effective at fetishizing a body type once considered too fat or too short or too dark-skinned that she is now derided for reinforcing impossible standards of beauty for women to uphold. Damned if you do and damned if you don't! But the point is still crucial: People don't get to decide who or what you are if you tell them for yourself, loud and clear, and our apps give us the platform to declare ourselves whenever we want.
Over the past couple of years, famous people like Kim Kardashian and Selena Gomez and Amy Schumer and Nicki Minaj and Laverne Cox and Andreja Pejic and many more have all started using their social media channels to push positive messages about body and identity confidence. Thank God for that. But here's the thing: They're on the same networks we are! You don't need a follower minimum or an invitation to Tweet or Tumbl. You just need an Internet connection. It's essential that cultural influencers use their influence to fight body shaming based on race or weight or gender identity, but there are more of us than there are of them, and we can’t keep asking the one percent to do all the work.
Back in May, a New York writer named Brianna Snyder wrote an article for WIRED called "How I Learned To Stop Hating And Embrace My Fat Selfie." In it, she talked about completing her first 5K run and her long process of coming to terms with herself as a "fat woman" in a very public world, and reconciling what that means to society versus what it means to her. She also talked about how the increased visibility of bodies on Instagram and Twitter that don't conform to conventional beauty standards inspired her own path to acceptance.
"It's not just the act of taking the selfie that's powerful," she wrote. "I feel empowered seeing people's selfies. I love and am inspired by the selfies I see on black, LGBT, disabled and fat Twitter. It gives me a sense of people I otherwise never see at my office or on TV or in magazines. I'm seeing faces and bodies like mine, and unlike mine. And I'm seeing those faces the way they want to be seen. These aren't caricatures. These aren't stereotypes. They are people getting to represent themselves. ... I can't see my butt, but when I think of my butt I think I like my butt. I like your butts, Internet. You're helping me like mine, too."
It's time we the followers become the leaders, and turn pregnant Instagrams of women like Kim Kardashian into old news. We have the technology in our pockets to become the faces of our own personal revolutions. We just need to be bold enough to use them.](http://naidje.tumblr.com/post/120634486394/call-me-nadia-im-a-28-year-old-pansexual)
