A few weeks ago, a TikTok creator shared a video declaring that skinny was her favorite thing to be and her biggest fear not to be.
The discourse that ensued was truly something for the TikTok history books as people quickly pointed out the various ways in which the video was problematic. For one, the prioritization of thinness is far from a new concept as we have years of historical context demonstrating the harms of glamorizing excessively skinny bodies, so for her to frame her obsession as a novel ponderation was disingenuous at best and willfully obtuse at worst.
It would be like a content creator getting online and saying, “Wow, I love having light skin and benefiting from my proximity to whiteness,” because despite there being some level of truth buried in the crux of these statements. People treat you better the more you ascribe to Western ideals, posting about how you benefit from the vanities of society is tactless, and when you have a large audience of young followers — the results can even be deadly. Over 10,000 people die each year as a result of eating disorders; that’s one death every 52 minutes.
But what makes this video so alarming is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. When you factor in the rise in popularity of drugs like semaglutide and the recent influx of celebrities looking skinnier than ever, society is primed to repeat one of its most harmful image cycles.
From certain celebrities to viral TikTok creators, there has been a noticeable shift toward thinness amongst influential figures, a trend that has unsurprisingly trickled down into the general public.
Discussing the appearance of others is so often done in bad faith that now any conversation acknowledging this shift is painted as malicious. Most poignantly, people online are pointing to the untimely passing of Chadwick Boseman, whose appearance was cruelly mocked until his death.
But when we can see what so clearly appears to be a rapid shift toward dangerous thinness, we’d be remiss to ignore the implications of this shift for a new generation of young girls who don’t just have to worry about seeing hyper-thin women on the covers of magazines. There’s also the added omnipresence of social media influencers and creators peddling this same unrealistic ideal yielding existentially damning results are damning to the psyche in a way that needs to be called out.
Plus, with the upcoming administration’s red-painted proliferation of alt-right views, including ultra-thinness, it would behoove all of us to interrogate which systems benefit from women shrinking themselves.
The post Who Wins When ‘Thin Is In’? appeared first on Blavity.
