Body fascism.

Aside from economic exploitation by means of the wages system, capitalism has many ways of cowering the proletariat. War hysteria, unemployment guilt and shaming, medical and fitness shaming, psychosexual obsessions, and body fascism.

This latter term was used in a documentary of some years ago to describe the cultural imposition, since the 1920s, of body image anxiety. Pioneered by the Hollywood film industry, it was also fostered in Nazi Germany, where Josef Goebbels took cues from Hollywood, which he greatly admired.

Exploiting the sexual imperative, body fascism exploits but also instils neuroses. People obsessed with physique and body image have little time, on top of everything else they have to cope with as wage-slaves or dole-beggars, to cultivate their minds and think about society. Body fascism locks into capitalism’s buying and selling culture and also its bullying culture, shrinking minds.

We fail to see this phenomenon in past societies, or in the few present-day societies which are yet to be absorbed into the dominant contemporary capitalist culture. Neuroses require a measure of affluence to develop, but then soon become another means whereby workers cower and bully one another, and cower themselves.