Khloe Kardashian and the Female Body: anatomy of a monster
Disclosure: Please be aware that some of the links in this post are affiliate links. If you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission. The commission does not affect your purchase price, nor my willingness to include them. I include them because I believe they are worth supporting.
In the beginning of April, pictures of Khloe Kardashian were leaked from a private family Instagram account of her in a bikini. Her body is flawless, and the perfect representation of the ideal female body from a social perspective. The public went nuts for the pictures due to the seeming lack of photoshop or other filters on the photo, something commonly found in the photos she posts on her public account. The public loved the photo and talked positively about how ideal her body truly is.
Despite this, Khloe and her legal team hunted down photos being shared to try and pull the photo from the public discourse. She hosted an Instagram live where she stripped for the camera to show her “real” body and to condemn people for their insistence to find her flaws. “It’s almost unbearable,” she wrote, “trying to live up to the impossible standards the public have set for me.”
The leaked image of Khloe Kardashian in a bikini.
An important aspect to keep in mind when looking into this response is that Khloe is not upset that the photo was leaked, nor that people were negatively discussing the way she looks (most comments were positive). The photo is also of a body that is, quite frankly, unattainable for most women. The issue was a focus on the mere potential of fatness.
For ages, the female body has been seen as a monster. Not just the female body generally, but specifically the fleshy female bits. The rounded female – the curves which are not carefully crafted – is something seen as reprehensible. Most of the responses to Khloe was not negative toward her body, but negative toward editing. Her response spins the narrative to focus on her own greatest fear: being fat. Because fatness is seen as monstrous for society – bubbly flesh seen as not sexy and as definitely not wanted.
Much of the fear regarding fat women is that the female body is constantly a piece of culture which is highly sexualised, highly internalised, and highly controlled. Through this process, the female body came to be something which had to look a certain way to be accepted by society – it had to be controlled, with sexuality being seen as the “reward” for proper controlled female bodies. The stressors of this control and sexuality has been routinely internalised by women over the course of decades and centuries.
Corsets have physically contained women historically, forcing the bodies to become “tight” and constrained.
Mary Russo, a scholar of literature and critical studies, has linked the female body to the grotesque and the carnivalesque in the sense of historical and literary expressions of the monstrous. Women’s bodies have always been “transgressive”, crossing boundaries and aspects of what needs to be in place for society and the patriarchy. Susan Bordo also commented on the ideal body in contemporary American culture, saying the ideal female body is one which is “absolutely tight” and “contained”. Societies modelled on this type of body lens tends to leave bodies which do not fit into this behind. The soft and wiggly bodies, the fleshy bodies, are unacceptable. Not because of health, but because they are uncontrolled.
The monster, therefore, is not Khloe Kardashian for her responses, nor is the leaked image itself. Rather, the monster is the looming threat of the fat woman – the woman whose body is not the tight, controlled, small frame, but rather is the large, wiggly, and uncontrolled body that allows itself to move beyond the boundaries of acceptability.
The fat woman as monster is seen fairly frequently in popular culture. The most notable is Ursula in the Little Mermaid, an octopus-mermaid whose rolling flesh is one of the greatest characterisations of her as a person. In fact, the animation plays into her large nature, making her shake her shapely hips in time to the music of her song, accentuating every curve she has. She is seen as monstrous and grotesque not just in actions, but by her actual body.
While one of the better fat female villains, Ursula is by far not the only one. The Queen of Hearts in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland is another. The Witch of the Waste in Howl’s Moving Castle and Yubaba in Spirited Away also display not only the large woman, but also the large old woman. In the Harry Potter universe, the almost universally despised Dolores Umbridge is depicted immediately by her physical size, described as a “large, pale toad”. In fact, the toad metaphor continues regularly throughout all interactions with her, as well as descriptions of her fingers being stubby and thick. Descriptions of women lingering on their physical size is meant to illicit disgust in the audience, most obvious in the written description of Umbridge. Of course we are disgusted – fat women are outside of what society deems as acceptable.
Essentially, the social construction of female beauty and female ideal body types are based on systems of oppression and social hierarchies – most notably patriarchy and capitalism. Ideal female bodies are constructed through misogyny and the need to have the feminine controlled and held completely by the masculine. The intense need to be tight, rather than wiggly and fleshy, is a form of internalised misogyny. Khloe’s complete and utter fear toward being fat is more than just an interest in her own personal body, but a fear of being the transgressive woman whose flesh is left unregulated and outside the boundaries of what is acceptable for the patriarchal system.
Internalised misogyny is also not unique to Khloe Kardashian. The desperate need for women to fit into what society has determined to be feminine is something that many people who identify as women understand and embody. Even knowing the sociological background of many of these elements, I find myself fearing leaving the house without makeup, or worrying about how protruding my stomach is. Patriarchal societies rely on this – needing for everyone to embody the oppression and determination of what it means to be a woman under the control of men – and intensely requires women to assume these aspects as true. To transgress these openly and unapologetically is to be outside of the social hierarchies that are comfortable and familiar, because we are not just going against what has been set for us outside of ourselves, but also what has been instilled within us from birth.
So Khloe’s reaction to the leaked image of a body not meticulously considered before release to the public makes sense. She is so very scared of being that monster – becoming fat is the worst fate for someone who sees fat as transgressive and anti-feminine. Being fat means she is not sexy, but this is only considered as such because once she is fat, she is also physically uncontrolled by the constraints of the patriarchal systems of oppression which forces her to pour over every photo. Khloe shows exactly what happens to the female body – that our bodies as women are monsters, grotesque, and inherently transgressive.
Disclosure: Please be aware that some of the links in this post are affiliate links. If you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission. The commission does not affect your purchase price, nor my willingness to include them. I include them because I believe they are worth supporting.