Strong Isn’t the New Anything and Shouldn’t Be

I was glancing through the latest issue of SHAPE magazine (they send it to me for free and for some stupid reason I keep looking at it), when I saw the cover of a new book entitled Strong Is the New Pretty. I know this is a popular meme right now, since I have seen “strong is the new skinny” and “strong is the new sexy”, etc. all over the place recently. While some may find these slogans empowering, I am not a fan of this way of thinking.

First off, these slogans seem to suggest that women being strong or seeking to be strong is new. That’s B.S. All throughout human history and in many parts of the world today, women have ploughed fields, hauled water, and picked crops by the bale, from sunrise to sunset. Women’s hands are no stranger to the shovel and the axe. Alongside men, they have done and do the physical labor that has built our world and sustains it today. Now, some women in the “first world” mostly freed themselves of this kind of toil some time ago. As a result, they seem to have forgotten that in the wider view of things, both historically and geographically, women have always been and are strong, really fucking strong. So female strength as “new” is just the product of a very privileged mind-set. And, to describe women’s strength as “new” is kind of insulting to all the women who have and still need to be physically strong just to earn their daily bread.

My second problem is that “strong” as “skinny”, “sexy”, “pretty” or any other typically feminine label seems to clutch at those stereotypes more than abandon them. Basically, these slogans seem to be saying that skinny, sexy, and pretty are labels that I want, but I have just found another way to get there. I know, the idea is that women are redefining these labels - but are we really? Any way, why should women need to be pretty at all, as defined through strength or any other metric you might want to imagine? Also, you have to ask yourself, is this strong female body that we are now labeling as pretty any less fetishistic than the other images of the beautiful female throughout history, e.g. Twiggy, the Venus de Milo, or even the Venus of Willendorf?

So let’s stop being “strong as the new whatever” and just be strong, if we choose, as simply our biological birthright. Is it pretty, sexy, etc.? Who fucking cares? Just be strong to be strong, if you want to be. And recognize that it is a blessing if you have a choice whether to be physically strong or not.