The story of Kat Hernandez is a parable of our times. The Euphoria character, played by Barbie Ferreira, starts off as an insecure teen who, over the course of the season one, overcomes her body-image issues and finds power through engaging in online sex work. A triumph of our current model of empowerment feminism, body positivity and self-love. Once we revisit Kat in season two, nevertheless, things aren’t going as well for our teen dominatrix who’s in a decidedly more vulnerable position: lying on her bed in a state of self-loathing. “Kat hated herself,” narrator Rue says within the voiceover. “But the issue with hating yourself is sooner or later recently the entire world joined a self-help group and won’t shut the fuck up about it.”

Suddenly, Instagram influencers and models in Jacquemus hats appear in Kat’s room, bombarding her with messages about loving herself, smashing beauty standards, and becoming a “bad bitch”. When Kat says the arrogance she’d been portraying wasn’t real, the growing crowd of influencers express how disillusioned they’re in her for letting down the movement, proceeding to overwhelm her with chants of “love yourself” until she screams.

You see, Kat isn’t presupposed to be insecure. In every single place she looks, persons are telling her to feel comfortable within the skin she’s in. Online, influencers bend over to point out their tummy rolls in a bid to be relatable, while on the runway brands include the plus-size face of the moment, as skincare campaigns encourage us to have fun the “real beauty” of our pimples scars. Last 12 months, US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shared her own beauty routine, telling viewers “the one foundation of every thing is loving yourself.”

This messaging has been constructing because the mid-2010s when body positivity entered the mainstream. Originally a part of a Nineteen Sixties radical activist movement protesting capitalism and a eating regimen industry cashing in on anti-fatness, the revolutionary message was quickly co-opted. Soon self-confidence became the catch-all solution for all our problems – all we would have liked was a change in perspective (and a few Dove body wash) to interrupt barriers in society, the office, and at home.

To combat inequality within the workplace, women are told to be more assertive and in addition remove exclamation marks from emails. Struggling within the dating scene? It’s not the increasingly non-committal app-based interactions which can be in charge, but reasonably your individual confidence levels. Insecure about your body? Forget the years of cultural messaging about beach bodies and “eating like a skinny person” and just embrace your curves. Never mind that brands preaching self-acceptance oftentimes don’t hassle stocking above a size 12.

The message is evident: confidence can cure all, and the very real structural and societal issues which have caused these problems have been all but erased and glossed over in favour of individual responsibility. Kat, a teen with no power or influence, is suddenly the one answerable for “smashing beauty standards,” as an alternative of the capitalist systems that proceed to perpetuate these ideals for profit. The difficulty, in truth, isn’t Kat failing to like herself – it’s the continued prevalence of fatphobia; the very fact the typical size of a UK woman is 16 but plus-size clothing doesn’t even make up 20 per cent of the market; and the parable perpetuated even by doctors that lack of willpower is the rationale for obesity when 60 years of medical research shows diets almost categorically don’t work.

“Confidence culture turns away from wider social issues and encourages women to show inwards and work on themselves as a way of doing and feeling higher” – Rosalind Gill

This phenomenon of blaming the person reasonably than the structures surrounding them has been dubbed “confidence culture” by sociologists Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill of their newly released book of the identical name. “Relatively than identifying social issues and dealing collectively to vary them, confidence culture turns away from wider political, economic and social issues and encourages women to show inwards and work on themselves as a way of doing and feeling higher,” Gill explains to Dazed. 

This reinforces the notion that “exertions equals success,” while ignoring the entire barriers that dictate where on the starting line to success you stand. It’s seen within the likes of body confidence campaigns that include a various group of ladies but gloss over axes of power and identity, including race, class, age, sexuality, and disability, returning to a “one-size-fits-all” – love yourself and you’ll succeed – message. The concentrate on self-care and self-optimisation encouraged by the wellness industry specifically is “central to confidence culture,” says Orgad, due to the best way it fuels self-absorption (important character energy).

Essential to understanding confidence culture is that confidence itself isn’t what’s being criticised. Relatively, it’s the best way confidence has been hijacked and sold back to us, distracting us from changing anything outside of our own self-esteem. “Confidence isn’t our goal. It’s the individualistic and psychologised way of understanding it that locates the issue in women themselves reasonably than within the systemic injustices of neoliberal capitalism,” Gill explains. “We’re particularly critical of the best way that engagements about social inequality and injustice get refigured as problems with confidence. Social injustices are treated by way of internal obstacles, orientating us to changing the girl, not changing the world.” 

The proper example of this happened just last week, when a viral tweet showed a recruiter blaming an worker for being underpaid by $45K because she didn’t “ask for the salary [she] deserved,” adding the hashtag “#beconfident” at the top. Women are still paid on average 16 per cent less than men within the UK, but as an alternative of the corporate receiving criticism for lack of transparency, failure to pay people what they’re value, and failure to deal with the gender pay gap, the blame was shifted to the person and her lack of assertiveness. 

Rhetoric like “ask for what you deserve” and “sometimes you’re your individual worst enemy” that we come across in on a regular basis pop feminism and social media is more damaging than we expect, says Gill. “A lot of these messages, even when well-meaning, turn away from structural inequalities and wider social injustices to explanations that foreground psychological change which is made women’s responsibility.” And after we don’t live up to those responsibilities, confidence culture is increasingly creating an environment where we’re shamed each through internal guilt and external pressure. 

Just because the influencers in Euphoria express their disappointment in Kat’s failure to like herself, plus-size women are sometimes championed as ‘body positive icons’ simply for existing of their bodies and are then shunned should they ever dare to say they don’t feel confident or worse – like Adele – they drop some weight. Lizzo received huge backlash when she went on a juice cleanse, while Roxane Gay wrote a powerful piece on the shame she felt about having weight reduction surgery.

“That scene in Euphoria stuck with me a lot,” says Megan, 34. “You may often feel whenever you thrust back and unlearn eating regimen culture you are never allowed to slide up or go backwards otherwise you’re betraying yourself and other women who’ve struggled with these items. It’s so mentally exhausting.” Ferreira herself agrees. That scene for her was a private one: “I don’t want everyone to only concentrate on the indisputable fact that I’m confident, because I’m not,” she said in a recent interview. “If you happen to’re not the norm, in Hollywood or fashion, you’re robotically seen as a brave person, which I feel could be very offensive. It’s hard to all the time be put in that box and have this pressure to be joyful with yourself at a young age.” 

Fostering confidence is significant, but so too is “shifting the emphasis from the individualised and psychologised imperative to the structural aspects and resources required to nourish a ‘climate of confidence,’” Orgad says. “In such a climate government, corporations, workplaces, the education system spend money on supporting women and other disadvantaged groups so as to combat inequality.” If those women in Kat’s room got here together to query why they’re all struggling to practice what they preach, perhaps the conversation would move away from changing their outlook and towards changing society’s role in it. In any case, it’s together, not individually, that we’re going to dismantle the capitalist system that’s keeping us down.