- 30
- July
- 2025
Having explored how the female body is seen, this second part turns to how it is shaped, edited and marketed. On screens and in our minds, it becomes something to control rather than a body to inhabit.
In today’s world, the female body is under constant pressure. It must be smooth, toned, youthful, desirable but not vulgar, slim but not unhealthy, maternal yet flawless. On social media, in advertising and in television shows, a single ideal takes hold: a body that is controlled, edited and put on display. The ideal is now algorithmic. It is measured in pixels, filters and likes. It’s no longer the mirror that unsettles young girls, but the screen. The cult of thinness, fitness and digitally perfected beauty has taken hold like a modern religion. Yet behind this performance of perfection lies a quiet distress.
Young girls are increasingly falling into patterns of disordered eating, self-harm and excessive body modification. Their bodies become battlegrounds where the tensions of the time play out: too much or too little freedom, not enough grounding, too much exposure, not enough connection.
What these bodies sometimes express in their own way is not just a passing discomfort. It is often a desperate attempt to reclaim control over an imposed image. In extreme cases, as seen in pregnancy denial or certain forms of self-mutilation, the body speaks what words cannot. It becomes a messenger of inner conflict, trauma and a refusal to accept the world.
Young girls are often the most vulnerable. They grow up in a world where their bodies become their digital identity. They constantly reshape their image, applying filter after filter, posting story after story, until they sometimes no longer recognize themselves. The rise of eating disorders, driven by TikTok algorithms and the notorious #SkinnyTok trend, highlights this reality. Beneath the pursuit of lightness lies a deep existential fear: a quest to vanish.
At a conference, psychoanalyst Geneviève Morel, author of La loi de la mère and Les femmes et le sacrifice, reflected on the contemporary struggle to truly inhabit one’s own body: “Today’s woman is forced to build a body that conforms to an ideal social image, yet in the process loses all personal sensation. This body, no longer truly lived in but merely displayed, resembles what I would describe as a living dead body. The body must be visible, but above all, it must not disturb.” By constantly seeking approval, the female body risks becoming rigid, merely one object among many in the world’s showcase, a beautified commodity stripped of its essence.
Art often offers a unique way of approaching the elusive nature of the female body. Literature, painting and cinema create spaces where this mystery can be expressed differently. In Gustave Courbet’s famous Origin of the World, the artist presents a woman’s genitalia head-on, without a face. The painting caused scandal, was censored, hidden and reinterpreted. What unsettles is not so much what it reveals, but what it exposes: an absence of discourse, an absolute silence, a raw presence. This image is not meant to seduce, it simply exists. And that alone is enough to disturb.
Likewise, in Delphine and Muriel Coulin’s film 17 Girls, a group of teenage girls from a small town choose to become pregnant simultaneously. Far from a mere whim or scandal, their act expresses a deeper search for meaning, connection and agency over their own destiny. They use their bodies as subtle means of reclaiming their voice.
Psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva has often said that art provides the feminine with a space where it can emerge. In an interview published in Le Monde des Livres, she explained, “The female body is a discontinuous text. It has been torn apart, forbidden and then mythologized. Writing or images can sometimes mend this fractured fabric. Women who create or read can recover a part of their voice in these in-between spaces.” What Kristeva calls a “discontinuous text” is a form of repair and a way of expressing that through words or artistic gestures, women can reclaim a space to experience themselves differently, apart from the demands of what is visible.
In a different language, the language of thread, marble, latex and fabric, the sculptor Louise Bourgeois explores throughout her work the flesh of the feminine as a surface where memory, trauma and desire are inscribed. Marked by a childhood filled with wounds, her artistic practice gives the female body a silent yet haunting voice. In her sculptures, often abstract but never cold, the body appears fragmented, disjointed, enlarged and wounded. It is sometimes maternal, sometimes monstrous, but always marked by pain and meaning.
Her iconic series Femme Maison depicts female silhouettes whose torsos are replaced by houses. The body has become both home and prison. It is trapped within the demands of roles, the violence of the household and the weight of containment. For Bourgeois, the body is rarely erotic in the classical sense. It is desiring, but that desire is anxious, suspended and sometimes painful. It does not seduce, it speaks. Or rather, it writes. As she once said, “The body is a diary. I write with my sculptures what I cannot say.”
Today, we should do more than seek the liberation of the female body. We must listen to it and accept its complexity, contradictions and constant evolution. We must also acknowledge that it does not fit into any single category, neither the ideal mother, the muse, the warrior nor the victim.
The female body is etched in its hollows, wrinkles and imperfections, in its corrections and marks. This is not about erasing the differences between the sexes or denying the specific pains this body may carry, but about giving each woman the possibility to make it a space of invention, her own unique territory.
We leave the final word to Jeanne Defontaine, “Reconciliation between women and their bodies requires embracing disturbance once again. It is essential to restore the right to the imperfect body, the body that ages, that cries, that bleeds and that does not perform. For within this very vulnerability, another form of strength can emerge.”
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