Susie Orbach - The exploitation of the body

The commercialisation of the body hides the amount of work that we put into producing our bodies.

About Susie Orbach

"I am a psychoanalyst, psychotherapist and writer, and the co-founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre in London and New York.

I look at how the issues of society are structured into the individual, and constitute how we become who we are, but holding on to the notion that we live in a society and that every relation that exists is imbued with the power relations, the unconscious desires, the longings, and the struggle for subjectivity that exists between people."

Key Points

• Today, beauty labour is accepted as part of what we need to be engaged with. The commercialisation of the body hides the amount of work that we put into producing our bodies. This beauty labour is presented to us as pampering, as self-care, as pleasure. • Cosmetics and fashion press on our bodies in ways that are extremely disturbing, especially for girls. Their anxieties about their bodies are stoked by commercial exploitation, which creates the sense that the body they live in is not OK. • Pre-adolescent boys are being introduced to sex as something that has to do with performance. What sex is for girls and women is less brutal, it’s just very different. I think there’s a terrible mismatch what porn is and what sex is. • We’ve brought up a generation that requires confirmation of all their acts and all their physical being through the camera and through the sharing and the acknowledgement that what they’re sharing is acceptable.

Today, beauty labour is accepted as part of what we need to be engaged with. When you take a selfie, whether you’re in England or China, you can have an app that will give you seven different degrees of beauty to enhance yourself by. The commercialisation of the body hides the amount of work that we put into producing our bodies. Ingeniously, this beauty labour is presented to us as pampering, as self-care, as pleasure. We find ourselves enjoying the act of producing a self that is OK in the world.

We often think of the industries that are involved in the production of beauty labour, health and fitness and the fashion industry as being small industries. When it comes to fashion, the richest people in Europe are producers of fashion and cosmetics.

The diet wellness industry is an absolutely enormous industry that does very well because it’s based on a 95% failure rate, a recidivism rate. Every time you go on a diet, or a wellness regime, you’re mucking around with the most basic of mechanisms that tell you when to eat and when to stop, and if you do that repeatedly, you will mess up that mechanism; but, more importantly, after you come off a diet, you will feel success for a very short time, and a few months later, you will feel you need to go on another one. Companies like Weight Watchers rely on repeat customers. They don’t want customers who are successful. In fact, under questioning at the British Parliament, Weight Watchers could only show results of a weight loss of about five kilogrammes, which is absolutely nothing when you think about the amount of budgets going from our health systems into their coffers.