The tragedy of body entrepreneurs The physical will always prevail

Pre-surgeries, she was a perfectly attractive girl. But she was only a perfectly attractive girl, and the supply of those outstripped demand so much that (according to Price) in her early days of Page 3 modelling, her take-home from a photoshoot after agent’s fees and travel was just £30. It was only after she had her first set of implants that she began to be something exceptional. As she wrote: “I finally got the boobs I wanted and they brought me a great deal of work and made me famous, so respect to the boobs!”

Price’s profession was model. But her career was really in something different: she’s a body entrepreneur. She understood herself as an object, and she understood that the value of that object consisted in pushing it to its most extreme form. It was not beauty that she offered. It was shock. Her gigantic breasts were not a promise of fertility or an exaggeration of youthful perkiness. They announced exactly how much Price was willing to undergo in the service of making herself attractive to men — a willingness to undergo a gratifying level of pain and inconvenience.

The sharp edges of her implants declared her submission, and her submission secured her elevation. Page 3 girls almost never became stars in America: the concept didn’t translate. But Price was put on the US cover of Playboy and labelled “London’s legendary bad girl”. She also caught the eye of the century’s sharpest student of celebrity. In 2009, a starstruck Kim Kardashian tweeted: “Omg Katie Price aka Jordan and her husband Peter [Andre] are on my flight home from NYC!”

It’s easy to see how Kardashian — then barely two years into a reality TV career — could see a media role model in Price, who had been packaging her life as television content since 2002. But what Kardashian learned from Price’s body is probably just as important. Like Price, Kardashian made her fortune from one wildly exaggerated body part, though in Kardashian’s case it was her butt rather than her breasts, and according to Kardashian no surgical intervention was required.

Nonetheless, Kardashian’s public embrace of “waist training” (severe corsetry) and restrictive diets (the drastic slim down necessary to fit into Marilyn Monroe’s dress for the Met Gala, for example) encouraged scrutiny of her body, and that scrutiny encouraged speculation about what more radical procedures were allegedly involved; and that, in turn ensured her place in the public view. How she looked was fascinating, but the question of what she might have done to look that way was even more so.

Price’s embrace of the body as business was prescient. Her path to celebrity was one that would be in many regards followed by the woman who became the most famous person alive. And although Price was formed in the now-redundant print economy of Page 3 and lad mags, her attitude was right for the arrival of social media self-commodification. Filters and Facetune made it normal to reshape your image. Price was simply earlier in going one step further and reshaping herself to become the image.

All that matters for the consummate object is what shows up on screen. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is the last refuge of red-blooded heterosexuality in print now that Playboy has shut down, but over the last few years it has been keen to show inclusivity in its objectification: in 2023, its cover stars included the trans woman Kim Petras, and 81-year-old Martha Stewart. That both could be represented as desirable might be seen as a win — neither age nor birth sex can stop you from being sexy!

But there’s also an implied threat. If it’s possible to be this hot while being male or old, what’s stopping every other woman from achieving perfect body status? What parts of your personhood, or even which bodily organs, are you stubbornly holding onto at the expense of becoming the ideal image? You, too, could have a body like this. All you have to do is let go of the idea that your body exists for anything other than to be looked at.

The problem for the body entrepreneur is that she has to keep changing. Jodie Marsh — Price’s Page 3 peer and rival for the “biggest implants” title — reinvented herself in 2011 as a bodybuilder, boasting that she had dropped four dress sizes in seven weeks. The pictures of her, chestnut-tanned and flexing her ripped muscles, ensured a round of publicity for her at a time when she was in her mid-thirties and in danger of ageing out of sexiness by lad mag standards (which were themselves sinking towards redundancy).

But Marsh couldn’t keep pace with Price’s sheer commitment to transformation. (Today, Marsh has taken the Bardot option in post-sexiness: she runs an animal sanctuary.) The question for Price is whether her body is still able to serve her needs. Her willingness to remould herself sustained her when the fashion for supersize implants waned: as the natural look was revived, the sheer bizarreness of her look ensured interest even while other women were opting to have their implants removed. As the old soft porn income streams (magazines, calendars) dwindled, Price remained compelling enough to move into new markets such as Only Fans. Here, she could make the relationship between body modification and her commercial viability even more explicit: she offered a deal to fans whereby those who contributed to her boob job fund got a first look at the results. And, she promised, “The bigger the contribution, the more of my new boobs you will see.” Horrific? Absolutely. Desperate? Transparently. But also honest about the bargain she has always made. Her body is a resource, and she made her living by treating it not as a living thing but as matter to be chopped up and remade for other people’s paid pleasure.

It is possible and even profitable to treat yourself as an asset. It is, though, not sustainable. The surgically crafted body is less an ideal of the flesh than an ideal of mastery over the flesh. But it is a hollow ideal, because eventually the physical will prevail. Price has suffered from scarring, ruptures and infections in the pursuit of remaining the perfect object — and her financial woes suggest that project is coming to the end of its term. The body entrepreneur pushes herself harder than anyone else, but that only means she learns the same lesson as everyone else sooner: there is nothing but the body, and when the body is exhausted, there is no you.

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Sarah Ditum is a columnist, critic and feature writer.

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