The return of ‘Skinny’ and What It Says About WomenS Power

“If your stomach is growling, pretend it’s applauding you.”

“Too be small,eat small. to be big, eat big.”

“You don’t need a treat. You’re not a dog.”

“Everything gets better when you’re skinny”.

The photos of the Wicked actresses land with a thump in the middle of this content. One Tumblr user wrote of Grande: “I need to know her BMI so bad”. Another says: “She’s so goals”.

Not all of the content is this extreme, and much of the commentary shows women trying to take control of their health, but the advice goes far beyond just nutrition and fitness, to advocate for dangerously restricted calorie intakes.

Alongside this fashionable emaciation, numerous outlets have declared we have reached the “end of body positivity”. And those of us who lived through the heroin chic years are wondering how the hell we got hear again.

Can it be a coincidence – as women’s reproductive rights are being eroded in America, and female journalists are admonished to be “quiet, piggy” by a president who used to run beauty pageants, that women are quietly erasing themselves? Surely that’s too neat a line to draw.

Naomi Wolf’s intellectual output has been perplexing and often nonsensical in recent years, but the one idea she burnt into the consciousness of teens and young women in the 1990s with her book The Beauty Myth was that the closer, historically, women get to power, the more the pressure on them to whittle down rises.In other words, as women get politically stronger, the “ideal” shape becomes physically weaker.

It was a simplistic but compelling argument, mounted as near skeletal models stomped down catwalks with dark-ringed eyes and Kate Moss declared: “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”. Having been skinny at various times in my life, especially following major stress or major surgery, I can vouch for the falseness of this statement.