Creepy New Video Calls Thigh Gap “Magical”
Turns out, the Thigh Gap issue just won’t go away. The latest offender: a video that’s trying to get us to start calling the “thigh gap” the “magic gap.” The website The Nowness recently posted this video, by fashion photographer and director Guy Aroch, for its series #DefineBeauty. In it, Aroch takes an “abstracted” look at the thigh gap issue (translation: dreamy music plays while we see a lot of slow-mo close-ups of girls’ crotches and backsides as they rollerblade, unbutton their shorts, and shake their butts for no apparent reason while a Southern California-esque sunshine-y dreamscape plays backdrop) as an attempt to “diffuse” the issue (translation: glamorizing and glorifying the space that randomly exists between some girls’ legs more than others).
While we watch thigh gap after thigh gap, we hear audio of interviews where people muse what the “magic gap” could possibly be (guesses range from the space between your teeth to the emotional space between people).
“It was more a comment on the mysterious fixation women have,” states director Aroch, “because as a male, I didn’t even know it was a thing.”
So juxtaposing these musings with shots that make women look like meat instead of people is supposed to diffuse thigh gap insanity. . . . how? Aroch’s uses well-known models (Gigi Hadid, Chanel Iman, Alyssa Miller, and Elsa Hosk) but you’d never know because YOU NEVER SEE THEIR FACES. He’s chopped off the models’ heads and turned women into body parts. He’s literally turned these women into their thigh gaps. This doesn’t feel like criticism or commentary. This feels like straight-up #thinspo.
Posing as “art,” the video reaches royal levels of stupidity but what really pisses me off about this project is its straight-up dishonesty. Of course it’s not supposed to “diffuse” anything. It just upholds the fashion world’s narrow-mindedness about “acceptable” body shapes.. And it’s giving the thigh gap the vomit-inducing new title “the magic gap” which fetishes, glamorizes and makes it sound desirable and makes the whole issue about ONE THOUSAND times worse. Don’t pretend to be art or activism when you are actually exacerbating the problem and maintaining the (rather shitty for women) status quo..
I thought we put the thigh gap issue to bed. Thighs come in all sorts of gorgeous different shapes and sizes. A gap between your thighs is about how wide your hips are set apart, it’s an issue of bone structure, not health and fitness, there’s nothing “magical” about it. Pressuring women whose bodies don’t want to/straight-up can’t thigh gap is pressuring those women to ignore their personal health and safety in favor of hurting themselves.
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