But I think the fat positivity movement can also create a double burden. Instead of genuinely feeling good about themselves, women continue to want to look skinnier and then feel guilty for being unable to “love” their body the way they’re supposed to. It introduces a new way to feel bad about yourself, without getting rid of the original. Women still exercise and diet to lose weight, but aren’t allowed to be honest about the reason — instead they say they’re doing it to “feel good” or, the vaguest reason of all, “for myself.” These reasons might be true some of the time, but if exercise and diet had no effect on body shape whatsoever I think the gyms of the world would have far fewer women looking for “empowerment” and “self-improvement.” I feel very uncomfortable with encouraging women to speak this coded double-talk, to lie about their motives and their real inward thoughts. If anything, that seems a great way to encourage an eating disorder, and to teach them that they should hide their suffering behind a sunny veneer.
Maybe fat positivity is still nascent and it’s a “fake it until you make it” kind of situation. But I sometimes wonder if getting women to stop talking about their obsession with being thin (while they are still obsessed with being thin) is just a means of making others feel more comfortable with an uncomfortable topic, while still ensuring conformity. It’s like when women are asked to be “effortlessly” beautiful: we don’t want to hear about how the sausage is made, so on top of everything else, look happy while you do it.
What these conversations rarely cover is what I personally think is the solution. Blasting the message that “everyone is beautiful” still presumes the most harmful thing of all: that beauty is the most important thing. Beauty is so important, in fact, that we must twist and contort to make sure everyone fits. Because NOT being beautiful, NOT looking good, well that’s a fate so horrible it’s unimaginable.
The really radical message is not that fat is beautiful. It’s that beautiful just isn’t that important. Beauty should be like a wonderful singing voice: lovely if you’ve got it, but your world isn’t over if you’re born tone-deaf. There are other things to be. You can be talented, funny, intelligent, sporty; believe it or not, there’s an entire spectrum of human achievement completely unrelated to weight. And unlike “empowered” female scientists and superheroes on TV, those things don’t have to come ACCOMPANIED by beauty; beauty isn’t the prerequisite before you get to have other human attributes. This is more-or-less how men live, and I think it’s a way of being that is entirely achievable.
Celebrating fat beauty is just another way of saying beauty is still a requirement for female existence, but we’re going to let more women be people now. But what if we just didn’t give the word “beauty” that power? What if we just lived without that voice in our heads constantly assessing, positively or negatively, revising, trying to think what we “should” think, trying to see what we “should” see. What if it just didn’t matter? What if women could be something other than beautiful?
This. Been driving around recently worried about how I can't think of my current and future body as beautiful. The answer is as simple as you just explained. I don't have to be beautiful. I am many other things.
This is so great. I'm 37 and and am trying to grapple with how things will play out as I get older and my "looks" fade away. I recognize that it's stupid, but I feel like I just grew up under the influence of a woman's beauty being so important that I'm having trouble shaking it. I feel like even the woman who are showcased in the "still beautiful!" category in their 50s and 60s have all had [fantastic] plastic surgery defies what any of us "normals" will look like when we get there.
I remember when I texted my sister that the Golden Girls were around the same age as the current cast of Sex and the City and she replied "Oh great, now we have to be sexy into our sixties". It would be so freeing to not have physical beauty be the ultimate goal at any age.
This. This is what I'm struggling with so much...ah to be free of beauty standards as *the* measure of my worth. Elizabeth is so right, it seems like men get this privilege, where being beautiful is a perk not a lifeline.
I wish so badly that women could live our lives not being primarily evaluated by how attractive we are. I often have the sinking realization (or, if I'm feeling optimistic, sense) that all my other accomplishments carry such little value compared to my attractiveness - and because I don't feel particularly attractive by society's standards, it makes it hard to feel like I do matter.
Yes, we should all have intrinsic self-worth. But the unspoken flip side of the coin Elizabeth has so elegantly described, is that it is very hard to build self-worth entirely from scratch. When you also don't get the mirrored validation that beauty provides, or perhaps what your *other* accomplishments could provide, it's a slow journey. And our accomplishments and characteristics ever really noticed because in such a superficial society, does anyone care to look deeper?
Or do I just need more therapy to deal w/my insecurities...
As the mother of a Gen Z teen girl and 21 year old young man (both white), I suspect that their equivalent is also about skin care. The culture of Glossier and all of the other lite-makeup skin wellness products is strong. They all come delivered in minimalist packages, in white tubes or bottles with "clean" sans-serif designs, promoted through Instagram and Tik-tok (which are the Sassy and Seventeen for this demo). They are too old to hear me when I tell them that blemishes are not reflections of their character or worth. I wonder how this will play out when they are 40 or 50.
Oh god, and filters make that pressure even worse! I want all the time back I thought (and still think!) about being skinny; I bet younger people will someday want back all that money they spent on skincare.
Sara, I have felt the same way!! I'm just starting a serious skin care regime at 32 (before I only cared about acne) and I was talking with a college junior recently, and we had a ton of the same products! Why?! You're 21!
I'm an older millennial who grew up what I (proudly) called "pop-culturally illiterate." I didn't get "those" magazines (notable exception: a single-year flirtation with Teen when I was 12), I didn't like to watch TV, I wasn't into boy bands or Britney, etc. Until I read this essay, I would have told you I didn't know (or care) about any of the big pop-culture trends or moments that happened parallel to my adolescence.
Reading this, though? I'm crying tears of recognition. ALL of this influenced me, and although I didn't consume and obsess over any of it at the time, I absolutely remember it now. It all got filed away, tagged how-to-think-about-my-body, and holy moly does it power my unconscious thinking to this day.
I've only begun unpacking this very recently. AHP, your work has done so much to help with that: thank you. Culture Study community, our discussions have been hugely helpful as well. Thank you.
I relate to this a lot, I'm a young milennial who was also proudly pretty distant from pop culture (in part directly cultivated by my mother who insulated me from disney, barbie, cable tv, teen magazines etc and promoted a prominent late 90s / early 2000s liberal version of girl power and self-esteem). But that just meant that when I did develop an eating disorder (in part bc of the pervasiveness of the fatphobia and 'health' obsession everywhere including in my family), I knew that it was wrong and I should know better, that I shouldn't be like "those other girls". And that shame meant I lied my way out of receiving proper treatment as a teen, only to finally seek it a decade later.
Ah, that particular shame: knowing we shouldn't "give in" and "be like those other girls." The ways our culture sets us against each other cut so deep.
My dad forbid me from reading teen magazines growing up, and I always rolled my eyes at him. But honestly as a plus size woman, looking back, I am very grateful he wouldn't let me see that garbage. I think it saved me a lot of body image issues. I'm not completely immune by any means, but I know it would have been a lot worse if I had that additional influence in my life.
Same. Even having been homeschooled, the memory of failing to encircle my 9-year old thigh between both hands on a challenge from my white friends came flooding back.
I remember so clearly reading an interview with Gwen Stefani in which they asked her how she got her signature abs and she said “I’m hungry all the time.” It was so utterly confusing to me because I’d been convinced that you could look like that by just being a little disciplined and doing some crunches. What do you mean I can’t actually get Gwen Stefani’a abs?!
(I think that was also a turning point in realising I had very much Been Had by Stefani and Just a Girl feminism, which you have also written about brilliantly.)
Gwen Stefani has been a disappointment in a lot of ways, but I appreciate her and Beyoncé for being basically the only mainstream celebrities of that era that were honest about what they had to do to maintain their weight. I remember so many actresses saying they never dieted, just did yoga, and being confused. When I read that quote, or one I specifically remember from Beyoncé about how she ate 1200 calories a day and then worked out/danced for multiple hours a day, it finally started to click that maybe most of the other women were lying.
This is true, but I think the quote I’m thinking of is from the Rock Steady days, a good ten years after I probably needed to hear it, and it was from a non-teen magazine. I think that’s why I found it so jarring, because it was completely at odds with the narrative I’d been following for the previous decade.
I remember a similar interview with Amanda Seyfried where she said all she was allowed to eat while prepping for a film was spinach and seeds for weeks. It made me realize: Who wants to live like that?
I clearly remember an article/commentary about how 'weird' and 'crazy' Fiona Apple was for saying something to the effect of, "of course I have cellulite, we all do" and the magazine (Seventeen most likely) was like, 'what a weirdo' :/ that's stuck with me for SO LONG and has.meant alot of different things to me as I get older and wiser
I don’t consciously remember that Gwen Stefani quote but I must have seen it at some point because I often look at those bodies and think “I don’t want to be hungry all the time.”
As a 50+, 450-pound woman, this article speaks volumes to me. I grew up on Seventeen in the late 70s-80s. It has always been the same, and I DON’T see it ACTUALLY getting better or changing beyond the surface. It’s so far beyond depressing and I’m so, so tired. It runs way too deep, fat people will never /really/ be accepted because thin people are terrified they’ll become us. There will always be diets, they always leave us fatter. People will always shell out more money than they have to “fix” it. They’ll line up happily to be told they’re the “perfect candidate” in the hard sell for surgery that will mutilate and irreversibly damage their bodies in myriad shocking ways — no one really talks about the extreme damage because that also goes against the idea that they’re successful and “fixed”. And ALL the doctors who push referrals for surgery because they get that nice referral fee. The language they use is beyond offensive as they sell us out. As for all of these supposedly “size-inclusive” lines of clothing? Size 28 isn’t actually very “fat”. Going up to size 3x and no further? Not really size inclusive. I wear a 6x, and after that there isn’t anything. No more clothes for you because you’re a freak.—if you haven’t yet realized you’re cast out of society, here’s another reminder. Pushed off the cliff. At 23 and 220 pounds, I was told I was too heavy to have a pregnancy—/very high risk/, but I was also far too heavy to have an abortion. It never ends. When I think of all I’ve been through, I feel so exhausted and so hopeless. And it all started with my mom taking me to Weight Watchers (more shaming of my 12-year-old body) and the ever-present gospel of Seventeen magazine.
I read an article recently about some doctors who are pushing back against all the "obesity is DISEASE and therefore it's okay to bully everyone into thinness" narrative that dominates mainstream health care. Among other things, they don't weigh their clients at routine wellness appointments, knowing some of their patients would otherwise avoid those appointments because they don't want to talk about their weight.
My mom is like that -- she has a serious health condition, and it's hell getting her to go to the doctor, even when she needs to go -- and so is one of my co-workers. And I'm sorry, but if doctors are doing stuff in the name of health that keeps people from looking after their health, because they don't want to be shamed, that isn't health care. It's just nastiness.
It is and there’s a lot of it. Some doctors can’t see me as a person. My health is amazingly good for my age and size, I have a fantastic psychiatrist who is also into Functional Medicine who is helping me a lot, running tests to try and discover what nutrients my body absorbs and what it doesn’t. It takes a lot of tries to find a doctor of any kind who can see me as a human being, though. Also, now and then, I consider the surgery when I feel desperate. The hardcore sales tactics are just amazing. And I’ve seen the reality and horror of what can happen afterward. I’ve lost people to it. And even in my family I’ve seen the damage it does to bones and teeth starved by your new stomach.
Just want to say that I'm so sorry this happens, and just in case nobody has said it to you lately, you are a person who absolutely deserves compassionate medical care that exists solely to help you feel as good as you can in your mind and your body (regardless of your health status, which doesn't and shouldn't matter), and to have public and private spaces you can easily access, and to be able to choose foods and clothes and everything else that give you pleasure and don't stress you out or make you uncomfortable, and it sucks that there is so much noise and societal bullshit that makes those things needlessly difficult or even impossible a lot of the time.
Wow, thank you very much. I take it all in stride, or try to, but as I get older the cruelty sometimes pierces my armor. I appreciate your kind words. Going to screenshot and keep it in my faves to keep up morale! ❤️
I'm also fat, 50+, and despairing of things truly changing. I did my best to raise my daughter in a size-neutral way. Teen Voices was the only teen magazine in our household (and I mourn its absence as my granddaughter grows up - at least New Moon is still around). Homeschooling helped us to avoid some of the pressure, but my daughter took ballet and jazz dance classes from ages 3 to 16, and there was more than enough pressure there to make up for not being in school.
I don't think I'll ever get over the shock I feel when I look in the mirror and don't see my pretty, thin face from when I was 18 or so. And yet, at that time, I felt like a cow. I had SlimFasted to a weight that was 30 lbs. lighter than what was healthy for me. Everyone around me was so complimentary, even those (like my mother) who knew that I was anemic and fainting regularly.
Today I'm fatter than ever despite having tried bariatric surgery a few years ago (and, once again, anemic and with various vitamin issues as a result).
While my parents didn't take me to Weight Watchers (that cost money!), they forced me to take extra PE classes and restricted my food intake from age 11 or so. Looking at photos from that time, I wasn't fat yet. I had grown to my adult height (5'8") very early and was mistaken for a substitute teacher in the 6th grade.
I'd like to add to the discussion a link to Ragen Chastain's excellent Weight and Healthcare Substack, as someone who is pushing back and has created some amazing resources: https://weightandhealthcare.substack.com/
Regarding the Tweet, we also all have eating disorders because in elementary school they told us "the foundation of your diet should be 6-11 servings of pasta a day" and then in middle/high school the zeitgeist became "You must never look at a noodle again!"
I feel like I just found Roman ruins in my basement reading this, as this piece has truly excavated some feelings I haven't thought about or felt in years/decades. To aid in my own mental archeological dig through these ruins:
• Does anyone remember the jeans brand that was hugely popular (maybe just in the upper midwest?) in the early 2000s that had the SIZE printed on a little tag on the back? Silver jeans?? I just had a full-on flashback to standing in choir and noting the size of every girl in the row in front of me, so shout-out to the sadist who thought that was a good design decision!
•Was it a whole US thing that girls would place stickers on their hips when they went tanning so they'd have a playboy bunny or stars (or whatever) contrasted against their tan, which would of course peek out between the bottom of their multi-layered tank tops and low-rise jeans? The ubiquity of year-round tanning in my MN high school was so deranged, even the local gas station near our high school had some tanning booths. Our poor skin!
Anyway, thank you for this post, AHP! After decades (literally since I was pre-teen) of avoiding shorts, this has inspired me to declare that this is THE SUMMER OF THE SHORTS. I refuse to spend another summer sweating through my jeans bc I don't like how my legs look. I've wasted so much of my life thinking about how my body looks/behaves and this post is a great reminder that, just as I look back on my high school photos and think I look very stupid but also very cute, I'll probably do the same about this time in another 5+ years so I might as well let my legs out. Whew!
I know I have recommended it already, but everyone at all interested in any of this really needs to listen to the fabulous Maintenance Phase podcast. (They have done episodes on Snackwells _and_ Olestra already! And I believe the episode coming up will deal with celery juice...) Also, for a deeper dive into the Jessica Simpson discourse, someone/something that was never really on my radar in any significant way until I listened to this, the always spectacular You're Wrong About podcast has a multi-part series of Jessica Simpson episodes that, among other things, gets way into how everyone talked about/treated her body throughout the '90s and early '00s. They also, last year, did a 5-part series on the life and death of Princess Di, which gets deeply into her body issues and eating disorders. All worth a listen!
I listened to JS's book and not only was it great, but it made me realize that so much of my own body hatred was due to the aesthetic preferences of one dude at the top of the music food chain. I mourn for my insecure and thin (but feeling like an ogre) teenage self.
I've never directly "blamed" society or culture for my struggle with an eating disorder; years of therapy have helped me realize that there's a lot more going on there. At the same time, this "vernacular of deprivation, control, and aspirational containment" is a convenient way of expressing those deeper issues. Also, society's obsession with weight/diet/body image definitely made it so much more difficult for me to recover, because all of the damaging things I had been doing to my body were praised by the culture at large.
I consider myself pretty far along in my recovery, but I fall back to those old, disordered habits the moment the rest of my life feels out of control. Because somewhere along the way I learned that if I could control nothing else, I could control my body. I'm a college professor now, and I see young women falling into the same patterns - trying to maintain control through food and exercise - and it breaks my heart.
I'm a young millennial/old Gen Z, and this makes me think about the teens on Disney Channel and Nickelodeon who were so, so thin, and it's only just now coming out now that some of them struggled with eating disorders. And then girls like me watched them and thought that those were supposed to be normal, relatable bodies, achievable for everyone without great effort.
It always drove me crazy how very thin actresses would say stuff like, "I love eating, I eat all the time, I just have a fast metabolism." And I believed them! Why the heck did I believe them?!
I'll preface this by saying that I am not (maybe?) a millennial, being born in 1997. But I did develop a life-threatening eating disorder around 2009 after a few years of all-too-precocious reading of celebrity magazines, Oprah, Cooking Light and Time, and have spent the last few years trying to untangle the pervasive fatphobia of that period in media. These might have come a little bit later, but I think the separate, more "scientific" strain of "obesity epidemic" related fatphobia and the Michael Pollans of the world added another layer onto the list that was put here, and Michelle Obama -- bless her heart! -- really fuelled that, especially toward children. I won't get into the gory details of my disorder, but the messaging about counting your exercise minutes AS A CHILD and being destined for a life of poor health if you didn't have vegetables on half of your plate AS A CHILD was really scarring for the Millennial/Gen Z cuspers like myself, I think. Things like the "Eat This, Not That" franchise, "Supersize Me" which I think everyone my age was forced to watch at one point even though the science behind it is dubious at best, and KIDS VERSIONS of books like "Fast Food Nation" were so wildly irresponsible in their health messaging that honestly I'm amazed that more kids didn't end up with eating disorders around that time.
This framing is SUPER interesting to me. I've at points in my life strongly felt the effects of the way deprivation and weightloss were lionized (I once found and attempted to adopt a diet on Tumblr called the 'healthy skinny girl diet', which only allowed 900 calories a day; this came as sister to the straight-up 'skinny girl diet', which restricted itself to 400). At the same time, I think it's crucial to tear down the structural barriers to a healthier lifestyle--everything from food deserts to supermarkets whose real estate is almost entirely occupied with proessed crap to the way that erractic shift-style work or the sheer length of the American workweek make it near impossible to plan out and cook any form of healthy meal to the biologically addictive nature of sugar and sodium and cheese to the way that car culture and the corresponding planning has necessitated 'exercise' as a chore to be done rather than something integral to how you get to and from work or the supermarket. Like ANY conversation about structural barriers, this needs to be had without blaming or vilifying the current inhabitants of the structure, and in a race-disability-and-class inclusive way that acknowledges treadmill desks are certainly not the answer. But just as it took three waves of feminism to figure out how to condemn the patriarchy without condemning femininity (and presumably will take another two for this to really stick in society), it seems as though we have a ways to go in condemning structural barriers to health without condemning the bodies that inhabit them.
I absolutely agree! Don't want my comment to come off as if public health programs are all bad, and definitely speaking from a very specific perspective here lol. I honestly think that everyone who designed these programs had good intentions and at the same time perpetuated a lot of shame and didn't recognize these systemic barriers to health or more inclusive solutions (like including foods and meal structures outside of the "standard" white American diet in institutional definitions of healthy eating). It's all so complicated, and I really appreciate your comparison to the waves of feminism! I think that's a great way to bring perspective and scope to these issues
Oof my disordered eating totally has roots in educational programs too. We had this thing called "The Mileage Club" which was a program to convince kids to run/walk around the parking lot instead of, you know, playing, at lunch recess. I was the new kid and didn't have any friends so I just ran as fast as I could, collecting the stupid plastic foot tokens they gave you every 5 miles thinking that if the other girls didn't like me, at least I could be thinner than them--in third grade.
I listened to Michelle Obama's memoir on audiobook. It was lovely, but I was particularly struck by the section in which she mentions her daughters' pediatrician telling her that Malia's BMI was creeping up and how panicked she was. While I applaud efforts around healthy eating, I was so sad to hear her horror. And I have never see a picture of Malia looking anything but very thin.
As someone who was old enough to have actually had a subscription to Sassy, it wasn't really all that great. The models were still mostly white and pin thin and Jane Pratt was fully "Jane" so the whole thing was performative White Feminism 101. The notes from Jane section always read as yet another clique that wouldn't have me as a member. It wasn't Young Miss (what YM was before it was YM) or Seventeen but it was still for a "certain" type of alternative white teenager who was into Sassy's idea of cool bands, which I certainly was not.
YES! Better than Seventeen, but as someone who was formerly a Sassy intern just told me on Twitter, they were also out there suggesting that readers go shopping in the actual children's section for baby tees
I'm a younger millennial, but one of the defining features of my first year of college was that, at pretty much every party, at least one girl would have one drink too many and cry about her eating disorder. I went to a prestigious women's college, which is an environment that self-selects for overachieving, type-A, generally middle class and upper middle class women who hold themselves to impossible standards, but it was eerie. Like clockwork, a few hours into the party, the conversation would inevitably turn to our bodies and what we hated about them, and someone would cry. For so, so many of us, it was clearly on our minds, at least a little bit, at all times. I can't help but think about all of the things I could have done with that brain space...
Old (Geriatric? Whatever they're calling us now) Millennial here, and this happened in my sorority all the time. And I never would've guessed it about some of the girls who broke down sobbing. Prior to that, they'd struck me as so confident and incapable of self-loathing.
I went to grad school at a place where for undergrad women the freshman 15 was what they lost. I had a student (in a sociology of gender class, so these discussions were on topic) who was an identical twin and she said the first time she and her sister were home together after going to different schools was the first time even casual acquaintances could tell them apart.
There was such a white supremacist streak through all of this subtextual (and textual) media messaging about body size, too. I'd love a follow-up piece that delved into that.
I'm glad I missed this whole anti-bananas thing. For whatever reason, bananas were tremendously popular in my high school and we were all weirdly obsessed with potassium.
But I think the fat positivity movement can also create a double burden. Instead of genuinely feeling good about themselves, women continue to want to look skinnier and then feel guilty for being unable to “love” their body the way they’re supposed to. It introduces a new way to feel bad about yourself, without getting rid of the original. Women still exercise and diet to lose weight, but aren’t allowed to be honest about the reason — instead they say they’re doing it to “feel good” or, the vaguest reason of all, “for myself.” These reasons might be true some of the time, but if exercise and diet had no effect on body shape whatsoever I think the gyms of the world would have far fewer women looking for “empowerment” and “self-improvement.” I feel very uncomfortable with encouraging women to speak this coded double-talk, to lie about their motives and their real inward thoughts. If anything, that seems a great way to encourage an eating disorder, and to teach them that they should hide their suffering behind a sunny veneer.
Maybe fat positivity is still nascent and it’s a “fake it until you make it” kind of situation. But I sometimes wonder if getting women to stop talking about their obsession with being thin (while they are still obsessed with being thin) is just a means of making others feel more comfortable with an uncomfortable topic, while still ensuring conformity. It’s like when women are asked to be “effortlessly” beautiful: we don’t want to hear about how the sausage is made, so on top of everything else, look happy while you do it.
What these conversations rarely cover is what I personally think is the solution. Blasting the message that “everyone is beautiful” still presumes the most harmful thing of all: that beauty is the most important thing. Beauty is so important, in fact, that we must twist and contort to make sure everyone fits. Because NOT being beautiful, NOT looking good, well that’s a fate so horrible it’s unimaginable.
The really radical message is not that fat is beautiful. It’s that beautiful just isn’t that important. Beauty should be like a wonderful singing voice: lovely if you’ve got it, but your world isn’t over if you’re born tone-deaf. There are other things to be. You can be talented, funny, intelligent, sporty; believe it or not, there’s an entire spectrum of human achievement completely unrelated to weight. And unlike “empowered” female scientists and superheroes on TV, those things don’t have to come ACCOMPANIED by beauty; beauty isn’t the prerequisite before you get to have other human attributes. This is more-or-less how men live, and I think it’s a way of being that is entirely achievable.
Celebrating fat beauty is just another way of saying beauty is still a requirement for female existence, but we’re going to let more women be people now. But what if we just didn’t give the word “beauty” that power? What if we just lived without that voice in our heads constantly assessing, positively or negatively, revising, trying to think what we “should” think, trying to see what we “should” see. What if it just didn’t matter? What if women could be something other than beautiful?
This. Been driving around recently worried about how I can't think of my current and future body as beautiful. The answer is as simple as you just explained. I don't have to be beautiful. I am many other things.
This is so great. I'm 37 and and am trying to grapple with how things will play out as I get older and my "looks" fade away. I recognize that it's stupid, but I feel like I just grew up under the influence of a woman's beauty being so important that I'm having trouble shaking it. I feel like even the woman who are showcased in the "still beautiful!" category in their 50s and 60s have all had [fantastic] plastic surgery defies what any of us "normals" will look like when we get there.
I remember when I texted my sister that the Golden Girls were around the same age as the current cast of Sex and the City and she replied "Oh great, now we have to be sexy into our sixties". It would be so freeing to not have physical beauty be the ultimate goal at any age.
This. This is what I'm struggling with so much...ah to be free of beauty standards as *the* measure of my worth. Elizabeth is so right, it seems like men get this privilege, where being beautiful is a perk not a lifeline.
I wish so badly that women could live our lives not being primarily evaluated by how attractive we are. I often have the sinking realization (or, if I'm feeling optimistic, sense) that all my other accomplishments carry such little value compared to my attractiveness - and because I don't feel particularly attractive by society's standards, it makes it hard to feel like I do matter.
Yes, we should all have intrinsic self-worth. But the unspoken flip side of the coin Elizabeth has so elegantly described, is that it is very hard to build self-worth entirely from scratch. When you also don't get the mirrored validation that beauty provides, or perhaps what your *other* accomplishments could provide, it's a slow journey. And our accomplishments and characteristics ever really noticed because in such a superficial society, does anyone care to look deeper?
Or do I just need more therapy to deal w/my insecurities...
As the mother of a Gen Z teen girl and 21 year old young man (both white), I suspect that their equivalent is also about skin care. The culture of Glossier and all of the other lite-makeup skin wellness products is strong. They all come delivered in minimalist packages, in white tubes or bottles with "clean" sans-serif designs, promoted through Instagram and Tik-tok (which are the Sassy and Seventeen for this demo). They are too old to hear me when I tell them that blemishes are not reflections of their character or worth. I wonder how this will play out when they are 40 or 50.
Seriously, my niece is a freshman and she's already talking about the products she needs to avoid getting wrinkles as she ages.
Oh god, and filters make that pressure even worse! I want all the time back I thought (and still think!) about being skinny; I bet younger people will someday want back all that money they spent on skincare.
The only skincare that really matters is consistent sunscreen use
Sara, I have felt the same way!! I'm just starting a serious skin care regime at 32 (before I only cared about acne) and I was talking with a college junior recently, and we had a ton of the same products! Why?! You're 21!
I'm an older millennial who grew up what I (proudly) called "pop-culturally illiterate." I didn't get "those" magazines (notable exception: a single-year flirtation with Teen when I was 12), I didn't like to watch TV, I wasn't into boy bands or Britney, etc. Until I read this essay, I would have told you I didn't know (or care) about any of the big pop-culture trends or moments that happened parallel to my adolescence.
Reading this, though? I'm crying tears of recognition. ALL of this influenced me, and although I didn't consume and obsess over any of it at the time, I absolutely remember it now. It all got filed away, tagged how-to-think-about-my-body, and holy moly does it power my unconscious thinking to this day.
I've only begun unpacking this very recently. AHP, your work has done so much to help with that: thank you. Culture Study community, our discussions have been hugely helpful as well. Thank you.
It's not too late. <3
I relate to this a lot, I'm a young milennial who was also proudly pretty distant from pop culture (in part directly cultivated by my mother who insulated me from disney, barbie, cable tv, teen magazines etc and promoted a prominent late 90s / early 2000s liberal version of girl power and self-esteem). But that just meant that when I did develop an eating disorder (in part bc of the pervasiveness of the fatphobia and 'health' obsession everywhere including in my family), I knew that it was wrong and I should know better, that I shouldn't be like "those other girls". And that shame meant I lied my way out of receiving proper treatment as a teen, only to finally seek it a decade later.
Ah, that particular shame: knowing we shouldn't "give in" and "be like those other girls." The ways our culture sets us against each other cut so deep.
My dad forbid me from reading teen magazines growing up, and I always rolled my eyes at him. But honestly as a plus size woman, looking back, I am very grateful he wouldn't let me see that garbage. I think it saved me a lot of body image issues. I'm not completely immune by any means, but I know it would have been a lot worse if I had that additional influence in my life.
Same. Even having been homeschooled, the memory of failing to encircle my 9-year old thigh between both hands on a challenge from my white friends came flooding back.
Argh! ARGH! Sorry, it's all incoherent rage sounds over here for a minute.
I remember so clearly reading an interview with Gwen Stefani in which they asked her how she got her signature abs and she said “I’m hungry all the time.” It was so utterly confusing to me because I’d been convinced that you could look like that by just being a little disciplined and doing some crunches. What do you mean I can’t actually get Gwen Stefani’a abs?!
(I think that was also a turning point in realising I had very much Been Had by Stefani and Just a Girl feminism, which you have also written about brilliantly.)
Gwen Stefani has been a disappointment in a lot of ways, but I appreciate her and Beyoncé for being basically the only mainstream celebrities of that era that were honest about what they had to do to maintain their weight. I remember so many actresses saying they never dieted, just did yoga, and being confused. When I read that quote, or one I specifically remember from Beyoncé about how she ate 1200 calories a day and then worked out/danced for multiple hours a day, it finally started to click that maybe most of the other women were lying.
This is true, but I think the quote I’m thinking of is from the Rock Steady days, a good ten years after I probably needed to hear it, and it was from a non-teen magazine. I think that’s why I found it so jarring, because it was completely at odds with the narrative I’d been following for the previous decade.
I remember a similar interview with Amanda Seyfried where she said all she was allowed to eat while prepping for a film was spinach and seeds for weeks. It made me realize: Who wants to live like that?
I clearly remember an article/commentary about how 'weird' and 'crazy' Fiona Apple was for saying something to the effect of, "of course I have cellulite, we all do" and the magazine (Seventeen most likely) was like, 'what a weirdo' :/ that's stuck with me for SO LONG and has.meant alot of different things to me as I get older and wiser
I don’t consciously remember that Gwen Stefani quote but I must have seen it at some point because I often look at those bodies and think “I don’t want to be hungry all the time.”
As a 50+, 450-pound woman, this article speaks volumes to me. I grew up on Seventeen in the late 70s-80s. It has always been the same, and I DON’T see it ACTUALLY getting better or changing beyond the surface. It’s so far beyond depressing and I’m so, so tired. It runs way too deep, fat people will never /really/ be accepted because thin people are terrified they’ll become us. There will always be diets, they always leave us fatter. People will always shell out more money than they have to “fix” it. They’ll line up happily to be told they’re the “perfect candidate” in the hard sell for surgery that will mutilate and irreversibly damage their bodies in myriad shocking ways — no one really talks about the extreme damage because that also goes against the idea that they’re successful and “fixed”. And ALL the doctors who push referrals for surgery because they get that nice referral fee. The language they use is beyond offensive as they sell us out. As for all of these supposedly “size-inclusive” lines of clothing? Size 28 isn’t actually very “fat”. Going up to size 3x and no further? Not really size inclusive. I wear a 6x, and after that there isn’t anything. No more clothes for you because you’re a freak.—if you haven’t yet realized you’re cast out of society, here’s another reminder. Pushed off the cliff. At 23 and 220 pounds, I was told I was too heavy to have a pregnancy—/very high risk/, but I was also far too heavy to have an abortion. It never ends. When I think of all I’ve been through, I feel so exhausted and so hopeless. And it all started with my mom taking me to Weight Watchers (more shaming of my 12-year-old body) and the ever-present gospel of Seventeen magazine.
I read an article recently about some doctors who are pushing back against all the "obesity is DISEASE and therefore it's okay to bully everyone into thinness" narrative that dominates mainstream health care. Among other things, they don't weigh their clients at routine wellness appointments, knowing some of their patients would otherwise avoid those appointments because they don't want to talk about their weight.
My mom is like that -- she has a serious health condition, and it's hell getting her to go to the doctor, even when she needs to go -- and so is one of my co-workers. And I'm sorry, but if doctors are doing stuff in the name of health that keeps people from looking after their health, because they don't want to be shamed, that isn't health care. It's just nastiness.
It is and there’s a lot of it. Some doctors can’t see me as a person. My health is amazingly good for my age and size, I have a fantastic psychiatrist who is also into Functional Medicine who is helping me a lot, running tests to try and discover what nutrients my body absorbs and what it doesn’t. It takes a lot of tries to find a doctor of any kind who can see me as a human being, though. Also, now and then, I consider the surgery when I feel desperate. The hardcore sales tactics are just amazing. And I’ve seen the reality and horror of what can happen afterward. I’ve lost people to it. And even in my family I’ve seen the damage it does to bones and teeth starved by your new stomach.
Just want to say that I'm so sorry this happens, and just in case nobody has said it to you lately, you are a person who absolutely deserves compassionate medical care that exists solely to help you feel as good as you can in your mind and your body (regardless of your health status, which doesn't and shouldn't matter), and to have public and private spaces you can easily access, and to be able to choose foods and clothes and everything else that give you pleasure and don't stress you out or make you uncomfortable, and it sucks that there is so much noise and societal bullshit that makes those things needlessly difficult or even impossible a lot of the time.
Wow, thank you very much. I take it all in stride, or try to, but as I get older the cruelty sometimes pierces my armor. I appreciate your kind words. Going to screenshot and keep it in my faves to keep up morale! ❤️
I'm also fat, 50+, and despairing of things truly changing. I did my best to raise my daughter in a size-neutral way. Teen Voices was the only teen magazine in our household (and I mourn its absence as my granddaughter grows up - at least New Moon is still around). Homeschooling helped us to avoid some of the pressure, but my daughter took ballet and jazz dance classes from ages 3 to 16, and there was more than enough pressure there to make up for not being in school.
I don't think I'll ever get over the shock I feel when I look in the mirror and don't see my pretty, thin face from when I was 18 or so. And yet, at that time, I felt like a cow. I had SlimFasted to a weight that was 30 lbs. lighter than what was healthy for me. Everyone around me was so complimentary, even those (like my mother) who knew that I was anemic and fainting regularly.
Today I'm fatter than ever despite having tried bariatric surgery a few years ago (and, once again, anemic and with various vitamin issues as a result).
While my parents didn't take me to Weight Watchers (that cost money!), they forced me to take extra PE classes and restricted my food intake from age 11 or so. Looking at photos from that time, I wasn't fat yet. I had grown to my adult height (5'8") very early and was mistaken for a substitute teacher in the 6th grade.
I'd like to add to the discussion a link to Ragen Chastain's excellent Weight and Healthcare Substack, as someone who is pushing back and has created some amazing resources: https://weightandhealthcare.substack.com/
Where was Lizzo when I was 14?? I needed Lizzo! WE ALL NEED LIZZO
Regarding the Tweet, we also all have eating disorders because in elementary school they told us "the foundation of your diet should be 6-11 servings of pasta a day" and then in middle/high school the zeitgeist became "You must never look at a noodle again!"
I feel like I just found Roman ruins in my basement reading this, as this piece has truly excavated some feelings I haven't thought about or felt in years/decades. To aid in my own mental archeological dig through these ruins:
• Does anyone remember the jeans brand that was hugely popular (maybe just in the upper midwest?) in the early 2000s that had the SIZE printed on a little tag on the back? Silver jeans?? I just had a full-on flashback to standing in choir and noting the size of every girl in the row in front of me, so shout-out to the sadist who thought that was a good design decision!
•Was it a whole US thing that girls would place stickers on their hips when they went tanning so they'd have a playboy bunny or stars (or whatever) contrasted against their tan, which would of course peek out between the bottom of their multi-layered tank tops and low-rise jeans? The ubiquity of year-round tanning in my MN high school was so deranged, even the local gas station near our high school had some tanning booths. Our poor skin!
Anyway, thank you for this post, AHP! After decades (literally since I was pre-teen) of avoiding shorts, this has inspired me to declare that this is THE SUMMER OF THE SHORTS. I refuse to spend another summer sweating through my jeans bc I don't like how my legs look. I've wasted so much of my life thinking about how my body looks/behaves and this post is a great reminder that, just as I look back on my high school photos and think I look very stupid but also very cute, I'll probably do the same about this time in another 5+ years so I might as well let my legs out. Whew!
I know I have recommended it already, but everyone at all interested in any of this really needs to listen to the fabulous Maintenance Phase podcast. (They have done episodes on Snackwells _and_ Olestra already! And I believe the episode coming up will deal with celery juice...) Also, for a deeper dive into the Jessica Simpson discourse, someone/something that was never really on my radar in any significant way until I listened to this, the always spectacular You're Wrong About podcast has a multi-part series of Jessica Simpson episodes that, among other things, gets way into how everyone talked about/treated her body throughout the '90s and early '00s. They also, last year, did a 5-part series on the life and death of Princess Di, which gets deeply into her body issues and eating disorders. All worth a listen!
I listened to JS's book and not only was it great, but it made me realize that so much of my own body hatred was due to the aesthetic preferences of one dude at the top of the music food chain. I mourn for my insecure and thin (but feeling like an ogre) teenage self.
Seconded! On all counts.
I've never directly "blamed" society or culture for my struggle with an eating disorder; years of therapy have helped me realize that there's a lot more going on there. At the same time, this "vernacular of deprivation, control, and aspirational containment" is a convenient way of expressing those deeper issues. Also, society's obsession with weight/diet/body image definitely made it so much more difficult for me to recover, because all of the damaging things I had been doing to my body were praised by the culture at large.
I consider myself pretty far along in my recovery, but I fall back to those old, disordered habits the moment the rest of my life feels out of control. Because somewhere along the way I learned that if I could control nothing else, I could control my body. I'm a college professor now, and I see young women falling into the same patterns - trying to maintain control through food and exercise - and it breaks my heart.
"I fall back to those old, disordered habits the moment the rest of my life feels out of control." Oh goodness, yes. This right here, Anne. Me too.
I'm a young millennial/old Gen Z, and this makes me think about the teens on Disney Channel and Nickelodeon who were so, so thin, and it's only just now coming out now that some of them struggled with eating disorders. And then girls like me watched them and thought that those were supposed to be normal, relatable bodies, achievable for everyone without great effort.
It always drove me crazy how very thin actresses would say stuff like, "I love eating, I eat all the time, I just have a fast metabolism." And I believed them! Why the heck did I believe them?!
Also how they wouldn't stop talking about how they "drank a lot of water"
I'll preface this by saying that I am not (maybe?) a millennial, being born in 1997. But I did develop a life-threatening eating disorder around 2009 after a few years of all-too-precocious reading of celebrity magazines, Oprah, Cooking Light and Time, and have spent the last few years trying to untangle the pervasive fatphobia of that period in media. These might have come a little bit later, but I think the separate, more "scientific" strain of "obesity epidemic" related fatphobia and the Michael Pollans of the world added another layer onto the list that was put here, and Michelle Obama -- bless her heart! -- really fuelled that, especially toward children. I won't get into the gory details of my disorder, but the messaging about counting your exercise minutes AS A CHILD and being destined for a life of poor health if you didn't have vegetables on half of your plate AS A CHILD was really scarring for the Millennial/Gen Z cuspers like myself, I think. Things like the "Eat This, Not That" franchise, "Supersize Me" which I think everyone my age was forced to watch at one point even though the science behind it is dubious at best, and KIDS VERSIONS of books like "Fast Food Nation" were so wildly irresponsible in their health messaging that honestly I'm amazed that more kids didn't end up with eating disorders around that time.
This framing is SUPER interesting to me. I've at points in my life strongly felt the effects of the way deprivation and weightloss were lionized (I once found and attempted to adopt a diet on Tumblr called the 'healthy skinny girl diet', which only allowed 900 calories a day; this came as sister to the straight-up 'skinny girl diet', which restricted itself to 400). At the same time, I think it's crucial to tear down the structural barriers to a healthier lifestyle--everything from food deserts to supermarkets whose real estate is almost entirely occupied with proessed crap to the way that erractic shift-style work or the sheer length of the American workweek make it near impossible to plan out and cook any form of healthy meal to the biologically addictive nature of sugar and sodium and cheese to the way that car culture and the corresponding planning has necessitated 'exercise' as a chore to be done rather than something integral to how you get to and from work or the supermarket. Like ANY conversation about structural barriers, this needs to be had without blaming or vilifying the current inhabitants of the structure, and in a race-disability-and-class inclusive way that acknowledges treadmill desks are certainly not the answer. But just as it took three waves of feminism to figure out how to condemn the patriarchy without condemning femininity (and presumably will take another two for this to really stick in society), it seems as though we have a ways to go in condemning structural barriers to health without condemning the bodies that inhabit them.
I absolutely agree! Don't want my comment to come off as if public health programs are all bad, and definitely speaking from a very specific perspective here lol. I honestly think that everyone who designed these programs had good intentions and at the same time perpetuated a lot of shame and didn't recognize these systemic barriers to health or more inclusive solutions (like including foods and meal structures outside of the "standard" white American diet in institutional definitions of healthy eating). It's all so complicated, and I really appreciate your comparison to the waves of feminism! I think that's a great way to bring perspective and scope to these issues
Your comment is everything I wanted to say but didn't have the words for!
Oof my disordered eating totally has roots in educational programs too. We had this thing called "The Mileage Club" which was a program to convince kids to run/walk around the parking lot instead of, you know, playing, at lunch recess. I was the new kid and didn't have any friends so I just ran as fast as I could, collecting the stupid plastic foot tokens they gave you every 5 miles thinking that if the other girls didn't like me, at least I could be thinner than them--in third grade.
I listened to Michelle Obama's memoir on audiobook. It was lovely, but I was particularly struck by the section in which she mentions her daughters' pediatrician telling her that Malia's BMI was creeping up and how panicked she was. While I applaud efforts around healthy eating, I was so sad to hear her horror. And I have never see a picture of Malia looking anything but very thin.
As someone who was old enough to have actually had a subscription to Sassy, it wasn't really all that great. The models were still mostly white and pin thin and Jane Pratt was fully "Jane" so the whole thing was performative White Feminism 101. The notes from Jane section always read as yet another clique that wouldn't have me as a member. It wasn't Young Miss (what YM was before it was YM) or Seventeen but it was still for a "certain" type of alternative white teenager who was into Sassy's idea of cool bands, which I certainly was not.
YES! Better than Seventeen, but as someone who was formerly a Sassy intern just told me on Twitter, they were also out there suggesting that readers go shopping in the actual children's section for baby tees
I'm a younger millennial, but one of the defining features of my first year of college was that, at pretty much every party, at least one girl would have one drink too many and cry about her eating disorder. I went to a prestigious women's college, which is an environment that self-selects for overachieving, type-A, generally middle class and upper middle class women who hold themselves to impossible standards, but it was eerie. Like clockwork, a few hours into the party, the conversation would inevitably turn to our bodies and what we hated about them, and someone would cry. For so, so many of us, it was clearly on our minds, at least a little bit, at all times. I can't help but think about all of the things I could have done with that brain space...
Old (Geriatric? Whatever they're calling us now) Millennial here, and this happened in my sorority all the time. And I never would've guessed it about some of the girls who broke down sobbing. Prior to that, they'd struck me as so confident and incapable of self-loathing.
I went to grad school at a place where for undergrad women the freshman 15 was what they lost. I had a student (in a sociology of gender class, so these discussions were on topic) who was an identical twin and she said the first time she and her sister were home together after going to different schools was the first time even casual acquaintances could tell them apart.
There was such a white supremacist streak through all of this subtextual (and textual) media messaging about body size, too. I'd love a follow-up piece that delved into that.
OMG I just remembered the wisdom of cutting bananas in half because it was too dangerous to eat a whole one.
I'm glad I missed this whole anti-bananas thing. For whatever reason, bananas were tremendously popular in my high school and we were all weirdly obsessed with potassium.
I was also part of the generation obsessed with potassium-rich bananas...
I know bananas have potassium mostly because of the movie Honey We Shrunk Ourselves... just me?
Not just you!!