‘Pixel Flesh’: exploring the complexities of modern womanhood

Ellen Atlanta’s Pixel Flesh is a book for all girls, women, mothers, aunties, grandmothers, sisters, great-grandmothers. It is for those who have never felt beautiful enough, thin enough, feminine enough, those who have been made to feel less than because of their looks, or the way their Instagram feed looks, or simply because they are a female.

It is a book for men also; to teach them the complexities of modern womanhood.

It is to help them understand why women feel a constant pressure to look ‘the part’, and to help the women in their lives fight the subconscious habits that fuel toxic beauty culture. Pixel Flesh was published earlier this year, coincidentally, at a time when Gen X and Gen Z are allegedly the unhappiest in centuries. Children’s Society recently reported that British teenagers – particularly girls –are the unhappiest in Europe.

Overwhelmingly, 25% of girls aged 10-15 are “significantly less happy” with life, appearance, family and school than the average boy – and their happiness is still declining. Boy’s life satisfaction, however, remains broadly stable.

At its core, Pixel Flesh is a novel that unpicks one of the many reasons why women are so unhappy – and how they can find their (real) smiles again. It attempts to answer the question: how can we make a beautiful future for girls and women? That is, how can we as a community fix the problem of our toxic beauty culture?

It does this by passionately tearing apart the layers of history, judgement, and expectations tied to the beauty industry, explaining why women continue to strive for unachievable beauty standards. Ellen takes the reader through her long journey of self-acceptance; the powerhouses of the industry (think Kylie Jenner, men, and big conglomerates); tropes such as desire, social media, motherhood, youth, sex, the definition of ‘pretty’; and finally, concludes with advice on how to change our attitudes.

No topic is off bounds for her, and it is heart-warmingly comforting.

At first, I didn’t know if I would enjoy the book. I find that many on this topic can come across as downhearted and depressing by becoming a discussion of all the bad things about the beauty industry and why we will never escape the patriarchal beauty standards set thousands of years ago.

However, this book was different. It was a perfect blend of personal and informative, where interludes of Ellen’s personal experiences weaved into interesting facts and purposeful points. I enjoyed the freshness of Ellen’s approach, along with her optimism that women are capable of escaping societal beauty standards one day at a time.

What I especially loved was the personal touch.

Throughout the book, Ellen explains where she fell victim to toxic beauty culture. Her accounts are raw and honest, and I salute her bravery. There were many moments where I thought: it wasn’t just me? She remembers crying over a friend posting a picture of her she hated, she remembers never smiling in photos because someone once insulted her smile, of suddenly becoming insecure about a body part because suddenly it was ‘untrendy’.

At times, it felt like I was reading her diary – yet that is the beauty of the book: it harshly opens your eyes and makes you really think. It forced me to confront the deeply entrenched beauty standards I hold to myself. To question where, in my daily life, I am reaffirming the very thing that causes me so much pain.

It stirred up many of my experiences as a young girl, where I subconsciously conformed to the beauty standards around me. The flirting with eating disorders, heavily editing Instagram pictures, thinking I wasn’t thin enough, the constant comparisons with models. My secondary school days were, I remember when my thoughts became consumed by my appearance. Unluckily for me, I was at school when Instagram became the app to be on. I spent so many hours doing photoshoots in my bedroom, sitting on my carpet choosing the best picture, and uploading it onto the retouching app, Perfect365, which everyone (ashamedly and secretly) used. On autopilot, I blurred my blemishes, brightened my eyes, whitened my teeth, and perfected all the features I considered ‘imperfections’.

A thirteen-year-old should not have to spend hours blurring their identity away, and it upsets me that I – and so many other girls - operated this way for the entirety of their childhood. Ellen has a craft for beautiful wording. Such examples include: ‘Gen Z and millennial women were raised in a social experiment, on stacks of images and an endless scroll of self-compassion’; ‘Instagram is a space of slicing, for offering the best bits for the feed.

This was my life in 280 characters or 1080 pixels squared.

How could she ever expect to find me whole?’; and finally, the sentence that hit me: ‘In this digital world, everything is beautiful and nothing hurts’. As young girls, we are taught that beauty is everything […] to be beautiful is to be loved, to be special, to be good. Ugliness is inherently evil, inherently othered [...]. It’s to live in a world that criticises beauty standards whilst continuing to uphold it. It is to know that this beauty standard is unhealthy whilst being painfully aware that adherence is the best way to thrive,’ she further writes.

She believes that ‘to exist as a young woman today is to exist in a sea of paradoxes’. This is exactly what the book is: a sea of paradoxes. The paradox of beauty. The paradox of social media. The paradox of living. To live as a woman today is a paradox in itself. The title of the book is a paradox within itself. A pixel is a series of small dots or squares that make up an image – akin to an Instagram feed – and flesh, well, is what humans are made of. It is a clever allusion to the virtual and the corporeal, and how the two slowly blur into one. Ella unpicks this, explaining what it means to grow up surrounded by so many contradictions. What we should do, what we shouldn’t do, what we can do, what we can’t do, what we get judged for, what is suitable, what is expected, what is not expected, what is beautiful, what is ugly.

Beauty, as it seems, is the sharpest double-edged sword: “a simultaneous blessing and a curse.” Some figures that astonished me – or, well, confirmed my expectations – was how booming the beauty industry is. It is valued at a whopping $500bn and is predicted to grow by more than 50% by 2025. That is another 250 billion dollars!

The quantity of money behind the industry proves that beauty will always be capitalised upon; however, we have the power to shift the dialogue. We have the power to make beauty something to be celebrated and embraced in all its uniqueness; not controlled, homogenised, or ridiculed.

The book, I believe, gives readers all the tools to be free and comfortable in their skin. I learnt a lot from her work and feel that I have loosened the pressure on myself to conform. I recommend it if you have ever nitpicked at your appearance, or you have witnessed your friend, girlfriend, wife or a colleague who has. This is for you.