Have some cake with that, if you want. Photo: Rayani Melo, 2008

This is just a quick little post inspired by my recent visit to the Belle & Sebastian merchandise website. I was all ready to buy a charming new twee-shirt when I noticed that in this little corner of planet indiepop a UK size 12 apparently constitutes ‘extra large’. I have no photographic record of the face I made, but here’s a rough approximation.

This survey from 2004 places the UK average dress size for women at size 14. And yet a 12 is not just ‘large’ but ‘extra large’… something here doesn’t add up. I know the band probably have nothing to do with their merch, but I still felt disappointed. Aren’t we all shy indie outsiders together? Or are girls with curves not allowed to join the hairclip brigade?

I shouldn’t have been surprised, of course – every scene has its spoken or unspoken rules and standards, and just because they’re ‘alternative’ in some ways doesn’t mean they’re not deeply conventional in others. Besides, ‘indie = skinny’ is well established. Here’s a nice comment on the Stereogum 2007 awards for ‘Ms Indie Rock Hotties’ from the Idolator:

once again the winners… prove that when it comes to wank-mining material, your average indie-rocking male is looking for (gasp!) a skinny white girl with a shaggy haircut. Emphasis on the “skinny.” And did we mention the “white”? Aside from a few notable tokens exceptions, there are enough pointy elbows and too-sad-to-leave-the-house complexions here to fill up a year’s worth of American Apparel advertisements. Way to reject mainstream standards of beauty, dudes! The guy hotties list also features many downy, bony gents, yet somehow offers a slightly wider range of body types than the chick list’s parade of waifs.

It also reminded me of a post by Laurie Penny from a couple of years back, about the prevalence and acceptance of self-objectification in alternative subcultures. As she says, “there is an assumption that misogyny and beauty fascism don’t count outside of the mainstream, that they don’t hurt.” Penny also points out that the notion that getting your kit off is empowering for women is as readily accepted as it is in mainstream pop culture: “the idea being that because the young women with no clothes on aren’t necessarily blonde and permatanned, it’s all fine and dandy and edgy and exciting.”

This stuff can still hurt, perhaps even more when it’s under the banner of quirky individualism; be as eccentric as you like, as long as you’re thin and sexy while you do it. EJ Dickson did a great post for Nerve about how the message to ‘be yourself’, so beloved of all kinds of alternative subcultures, can actually contain coded pressures to look and act a particular way when you are being dripfed an ideal, in this case Zooey Deschanel.

Would Zooey Deschanel have sex after eating a bucket of chicken wings?, I often wondered. Would she be self-conscious about the way her stomach looked while she was on top? The answers to these questions, of course, was invariably no, she would not: Zooey Deschanel would be thin and awesome during sex, and after she blew the guy’s mind she’d take out her ukulele and write a song about it.

Dickson is honest about the damage she did to her relationships with others in pursuit of the version of herself she felt she ought to be. People will always want to be attractive, whatever that means to them. But it feels like a lot of goths and punks and indie kids are missing the point if we just swap one set of impossible beauty standards for another.

Not for the first time I find myself wishing I’d had something like Mookychick when I was a teenager. Alongside tutorials on applying neon eyeshadow they have features about health, self esteem, and a whole section on alternative plus size fashion including stockists.

In case it’s useful for anyone out there struggling with body image issues and self esteem (and I think everyone does sometimes, surely), one thing I’ve found that helps me chillax and stop thinking about it is remembering that no one is studying me as hard as I’m studying myself. Most people won’t even notice whatever it is that’s bothering you, not least because they’re too wrapped up in their own lives and their body worries to care if your pores look big or your hips are cellulicious.

It’s not easy, and I certainly haven’t cracked it, but one of the most radical choices you can make is to give up thinking you’re ugly.