Joyce Fegan: Sports Illustrated is not radical, but Cork’s Siobhán McSweeney is

Those selected include 81-year-old Martha Stewart, known for merchandising domesticity, as in creating a global media and retail brand based around home-cooking and hospitality. In 2023, millionaire Martha is the oldest model to ever grace the cover of this magazine.

Then there is famed beauty Megan Fox, the 37-year-old actor, who used the cover shoot to discuss her lifelong struggle with body dysmorphia.

You could slip easily into the cynical corner, declare both of these women as aesthetically perfect, and believe not a word that comes out of their mouths when it comes to their own personal relationship with their bodies. But to do so, would be to sorely misunderstand the soup we all swim in, the behemoth that is "diet culture", and whose centuries-old roots are purely racist in origin.

“I have body dysmorphia,” Fox said in her video interview that accompanies the photoshoot.

“I don't see myself the way other people see me. There was never a point in my life where I loved my body. There was never ever," said the actor.

She said the "shoulds" around her appearance began very early in childhood, a hyper-awareness she found odd for someone raised in a culture that avoided consciously acknowledging bodies at all.

"When I was little, that was an obsession I had of ‘but I should look this way,’ and why I had an awareness of my body that young, I'm not sure. And it definitely wasn't environmental because I grew up in a very religious environment where bodies weren't even like, acknowledged," Fox said.

Body size trap

Katie Sturino, author of Body Talk, and internet influencer, called this "a trap", but not for the reasons you would instantly assume — that Fox is somehow trapping us into believing falsehoods, the sob story of her supposedly enviable body.

"The whole system is messed up. We're all trying to look like Megan Fox because that's what we're taught is the ideal, meanwhile Megan Fox is like: 'I don't even like my body' because she's been fooled into the system.

"It's a trap, don't you get it? That's why there's no destination with size, you have to learn to love your body as it changes, in the size it is now, because there is no place you're going to get to where you'll be like: 'Oh great, this is the size I want to be'," she told her near million followers on Instagram this week.

But what exactly is "the trap" Sturino is speaking about? What's this "system" she talks of?

In 2019, Sabrina Strings, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, published her multi-award-winning book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia.

Prof Strings details the major magazines of the 1800s, warning "upper-class white women" to watch what they eat. Harper's Bazaar led the charge. But it wasn't this random magazine-led creation of diet culture, of shaming women to get skinny, and stay skinny. This media content 200-plus years ago was informed by colonists who wanted a way to separate black people and white people.

"One of the things that the colonists believed was that black people were inherently more sensuous, that people love sex and they love food, and so the idea was that black people had more venereal diseases and that black people were inherently obese because they lack self-control," wrote Strings, "and of course, self-control and rationality, after the Enlightenment, were characteristics that were deemed integral to whiteness.

"And so it was important that women ate as little as was necessary in order to show their Christian nature and also their racial superiority," said Strings.

Fast forward 200 years, we now think eating as little as possible is about beauty, and oftentimes, ironically, health. One of the more recent crazes is existing on 1,200 calories a day. It's important though, that we know about the origins of our own internalised fatphobia and body biases that inform our nutritional choices.

It would be easy to jump down the throats of people like Megan Fox and Martha Stewart, but that's what we always do — make it about the individual, as opposed to the system we're all in.

Take Martha's depiction of her photoshoot for Sports Illustrated, bearing in mind that her gracing the cover at 81 has been hailed as radical and progressive.

"All these people were prodding me and talking about 'the girls.' I have never called my breasts 'the girls' in my life. I hate stuff like that. The whole time, these people were nudging, 'poke this out, push that in.' I had to put up with that for eight hours.

"Still, we were shooting in the Dominican Republic and I had a really good time," she told the New York Times.

Body desire

Body dissatisfaction, including a desire for a thinner body, is present in many girls by 6 years of age — that's from four separate research papers, the latest of which was published in 2014. So with another nine years of social media under our belt, you'd wonder where that research lies now.

And separate research shows that a girl's image of her body is predicted by how they perceive their mother feels about her body. This research is often used to beat mothers across the head with — it's your job to adore every inch of your body to stop this in its tracks. If only it were that simple, that easy.

And then in comes the now BAFTA-winning Cork actor and Derry Girls star Siobhán McSweeney. While the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition was enjoying its birth in the world this week, Siobhán McSweeney was enjoying her win at the BAFTAs and discussing bodies, in a much more radical way than any glossy magazine ever could.

Wearing her red vinyl gown from American brand Fashion Brand Company, which offers sizes from XS-5XL, and also goes from XXS to 7XL on occasion, McSweeney said she was only interested in showcasing designers who dress everyone.

"I'd prefer to support people who dress for people like me — the very average woman — all the time," she said, while stating that she had lots of offers from other designers.

She also gave details on the footwear below the gown — a pair of Air Jordans "because I can't be bothered with uncomfortable shoes". High heels, while originally designed for men, became a way for women's bodies to appear more feminine.

A Cork woman winning a prestigious international award having made her own way in an industry as precarious and subjective as the arts, and turning up to receive said award in a vinyl gown and a pair of Air Jordans, is what's radical and truly transformative when it comes to deconstructing the behemoth of diet culture.

I don't want to look like Martha Stewart when I’m 81, or Megan Fox now, but I would like to be more McSweeney in my thoughts and actions.