How a hairy stomach pic can help women reclaim their bodies online

She's only an 18-year-old student of Iranian, Indian and Pakistani origin living in Dallas, Texas but Suraiya Ali has taken Twitter by storm. Ever since she posted a "belly selfie", that's not just not photoshopped or filtered through self-flattering digital manoeuvrings, but also happens to be "hirsute", replete with body hair, the brown beauty has caused a veritable commotion in the crowded corridors of cyberland.

walmart underwear vibes pic.twitter.com/wo66OQGIdo

— yasmin was here (@iranikanjari) December 24, 2015

Ali was trolled and lauded alike for the post, which she said was actually an innocent expression of "I was really just feeling cute and was loving my body shape". Yet, "body hair" is something that transnational cosmetics giants spend several millions of dollars to de-feminise, vilify and eradicate from the female form from every continent.

Suraiya Ali, with her South and West Asian descent, however, had the temerity, as well as the intelligence, to simply not care for once and offer up the gift of the unmonetised body, glistening with downy hair follicles, as an ode to self and self-love.

In an interview to Vice, Ali puts it brilliantly: "So, when people started defining hair as gross, I redefined the terms for myself: I am not hairy, I see myself as a garden, asa forest, as the geography of my homeland. What those men see as appalling, I redefined to be a garden so beautiful Epicurus dare enter it - something to put Eden and Babylon to shame."  

Ali's Twitter fame, a trial by fire of sort with bouquets and brickbats in equal measure from quarters various, curiously enough, poses a question that is relevant to us all, particularly to those young and impressionable among us. Can social media, so often used and abused by makeup companies to promote a patently false, unattainable, Eurocentric body ideal, can really strike back and reclaim our bodies for us?

Barely a month back, American stand-up comic and television star, Amy Schumer, made headlines and raised many a baffled eyebrow when she posed semi-nude for the famous Pirelli Calendar, all body fat, cellulite, belly tiers and fleshy arms.

Schumer's tweet - "Beautiful, gross, strong, thin, fat, pretty, ugly, sexy, disgusting, flawless, woman" - has since then, got over 20,000 retweets, while her picture has been admired for its candid self-confidence and gentle straight-forwardness, looking directly into the camera.

Beautiful, gross, strong, thin, fat, pretty, ugly, sexy, disgusting, flawless, woman. Thank you @annieleibovitz pic.twitter.com/kc0rIDvHVi

— Amy Schumer (@amyschumer) November 30, 2015

The Pirelli Calendar, featuring unconventional images of high-achieving women, photographed by Annie Leibovitz, also featured tennis ace Serena Williams, musician Yoko Ono, artist Shirin Neshat, among others, was hailed as a bold intervention to break stereotypes and traditions that hold women hostage to permanent guilt about their body forms.

Body shaming is a process that is perpetuated by the gigantic wheel of entertainment industry - including our movies, pop music, so-called women's magazines, pulp fiction, pornography, etc - in which real women are made to feel embarrassed and unsure of themselves while trying to live up to airbrushed ideals of the beauty industry.

And social media had been, for long, the instrument of such continual monetisation of our half-baked hypocrisies about bodies and self. As Essena O'Neill, former Instagram star who quit the image-driven social networking site says, she was tired of the "contrived perfection to get attention" when she deleted over 2,000 pictures of hers "that served no real purpose other than self-promotion", carefully peppered with brand placements, so that every "like" amounted to a penny in someone else's pocket.

On the other hand, Megan Jayne, a "recovered anorexic", attained super fame on Instagram once she showcased her "cellulite to promote positive body image". From surviving on just a bottle of jelly a day to adopting healthy eating habits that did not involve guilt, shame and the accompanying tendencies such as bulimia, compulsive over-exercising and periodical self-starving, Jayne became an Instagram guru of the happy body.

Her "fitspiration" now consists of a walk on the beach with cellulite showing, happy and self-assured.

Suraiya Ali, Amy Schumer, Essena O'Neill, Megan Jayne - these are only a handful of women who have raised the stakes on social media, put their entire careers at risk and hazarded the unmistakable orgy of body shaming that accompanies any such acts of boldness.

Because the beauty industry, inherently capitalist and patriarchal, requires women (and men) to be submissive drones of skin-deep obedience, buying and selling every new instrument of tweaking and tampering the body to continue the eternal struggle to strive for (but never attain) "perfection", it is only by a thorough questioning and ultimate rejection of such a system that a real change can be brought about.

The path to resistance is sure paved with selfies.