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The New Body Panic Vogue Is Trying to Sell Me

No, I will not hate my knees.

Taru Anniina Liikanen
4 min readJul 13, 2022
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

By now, we all know most of our body insecurities are caused by media and big corporations trying to sell us products, right?

We know that hip dips and thigh gaps are irrelevant to a person’s health and wellbeing. We’re aware that the big Instagrammers have all had work done, and that they heavily edit their pictures and videos to adapt them to impossible standards.

We know by now that cellulite is just a word adopted by magazines and the marketing departments to sell us yet another body lotion, preferably more expensive than our previous purchases.

Well, I just bought Latin American Vogue a couple of weeks ago at the airport to have an easy read, and found an article that made me even madder than all the ones I’ve seen before about fat loss or pleasing men.

“The eternal dilemma of my knees,” the headline read. And no, it wasn’t about a person’s arthritic knee pain or sports injury.

(The headline is a little better in the English-language original: “As Temperatures and Hemlines Rise, an Oft-Overlooked Body Part Arrives in the Dermatologist’s Office”. Still not great, though.)

The story was about the skin around the knee needing surgical or “non-invasive” treatments…

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Taru Anniina Liikanen
Taru Anniina Liikanen

Written by Taru Anniina Liikanen

Stand-up comedian and recovering political ghostwriter. Finnish by birth, porteña at heart. Bad jokes frequent.

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