We’re All a Bit Body Dysmorphic, Aren’t We?
by Don Hall
The concept took hold like a virus spawned in a Chinese lab. The body born with was somehow… wrong. Wasn’t this always true? Or maybe it all started in 1980?
Somewhere in the flickering static between a VHS workout tape and the greasy sheen of a diner menu, we lost ourselves. Not in the noble, poetic sense—the way a man loses himself in a love affair or a war—but in the gnawing, insidious way you lose yourself in a house of mirrors at the county fair, every reflection a funhouse version of the thing you thought you were. That’s the disease. The virus. The great American hallucination. Body dysmorphia, by any other name, is just the condition of being alive in an era where reality is a sales pitch and your flesh is the product.
It started somewhere between the chiseled absurdity of He-Man and the gravity-defying pomposity of Aqua Net hairdos, an era where Schwarzenegger’s biceps were bigger than your dad’s dreams, and Jane Fonda’s thighs could crush a man’s skull like a grape. The eighties weren’t just a decade—they were a war on the natural human form. Everything was bigger, better, louder. You weren’t just supposed to be in shape, you had to be a sculpted, oiled-up demigod with abs you could use as a washboard in a country song. But the joke was on us.
Nobody saw themselves right. The dweeb with the Cyndi Lauper cassette thought he was one drum solo away from rockstar abs. The girl with the Olivia Newton-John headband saw cellulite where there was only skin. And the jocks, well—they stood in front of the mirror in their Top Gun bomber jackets, flexing and snarling, oblivious to the fact that no amount of Nautilus reps could make them Tom Cruise.
We were all drinking from the poisoned chalice of perception, fed on a steady diet of Miami Vice glamor and Max Headroom surrealism, where even the news anchors looked like they’d been airbrushed into existence. It wasn’t about what you actually looked like—it was about what you thought you looked like. The eyes lied. The brain edited. Reality was a conspiracy.
Somewhere along the way, body dysmorphia stopped being a niche disorder and became the default operating system of Western civilization.
And so, the scalpel came. The Botox. The liposuction. The gyms turned into temples, and the tanning beds into shrines. People pumped themselves full of chemicals, strapped on spandex, and hit the pavement like Mel Gibson (complete with government approved gun license) was chasing them through the streets of a dystopian Los Angeles. And still, they weren’t happy.
Because here’s the clincher—body dysmorphia isn’t about what you look like. It’s about what you think you look like. It’s about the fact that no matter how much you chisel, inject, or starve, you’ll still see that scrawny kid from gym class in the mirror, the one who got a swirly in front of that one cute girl with the advanced rack. It’s about the idea that no amount of bronzer or bulking will erase the fact that deep down, you still feel like the fat nerd who got picked last for dodgeball.
That’s the beast we’re wrestling with. A whole civilization trapped in its own reflection, tweaking, adjusting, reshaping, and still never satisfied.
Even though the neon has faded and the cassette tapes have unraveled, the eighties never really ended. They just uploaded themselves into Instagram filters and Photoshop, into personal trainers and juice cleanses, into gym selfies and AI-generated perfection. The dream of the perfect body, the perfect face, the perfect life—it’s all still there, glowing like a rerun of Baywatch on a hotel room television at 3:00am.
And so we stand in front of the mirror, tilting our heads, sucking in our stomachs, flexing just a little. We all think we’re fooling someone. But the truth is, we’re just trying to fool ourselves.
Because in the end, that’s all body dysmorphia really is: the American condition, sold to us in TikTok videos and primetime commercials, promising that if we just work a little harder, tweak a little more, chase the illusion just a little bit further, then maybe—just maybe—we’ll finally like what we see. We were all born in the wrong body, gang. You know, unless you’re Brad Pitt or Margot Robbie and then you can go fuck yourself.
