The authoritarian temptation to abolish aesthetic canons3 reading minutes

The body positive movement aims to neutralize beauty standards under the guise of fighting discrimination. This approach, taken to the extreme as under the Maoist regime, deprives the individual of the vital impulse inspired by beauty.

In Mao Zedong's totalitarian China, from 1949 to 1976, the Cultural Revolution put a brutal end to the free expression of beauty. Crowds were forced to don an austere uniform, a collective mask meant to reflect revolutionary ideology. The graceful lines of a garment, the singularity of a walk, the originality of a haircut or the subtlety of a make-up were relegated to the rank of bourgeois artifice.

To reduce the body to a mere cog in the service of the collective, the Maoist regime demanded that it no longer distinguish itself. All self-aggrandizement became