You are what you eat: What a rise in skinny culture reveals about the Western political climate
Image Credit: core primary care
What has become increasingly more noticeable in the media is the frequency of celebrities and influencers flaunting how skinny they are. Many of our favourite celebrities look like they’ve been shrunk in the wash. This ‘chic’ malnourished aesthetic that has been resurfacing since the 1920s flapper era is being rebranded yet again as the pinnacle of health, elegance and beauty. Why is being slim and gaunt the latest trend to hop on?
Changing beauty standards reveal a lot about the shifting political and social climate which oscillates under the web of patriarchal control. History is not a straight timeline as we traditionally view it, but instead a loop that always coils back on itself. The repeating tactic of keeping women occupied with their physical appearance seeks to distract them from a bigger world outside themselves, making them more susceptible to political control due to a cultivated ignorance hammered into us from infancy. If a woman is taught to be absorbed by what she looks like on the outside, she begins to neglect her soul. I heard countless times within secondary school of girls being mocked by boys for wearing too much makeup but also being ridiculed for not being beautiful enough, reduced to being rated as a number on the attraction scale. Similarly, boys mock girls for having no hobbies or interests, but paradoxically disdain towards a girl who could be so audacious as to compete in sport. I was ridiculed for engaging in martial arts during school, and now in university I consider sparring men in training sessions a great pastime that allows me get payback for this.
What I am trying to get at is that women are condemned for being strong and are insulted and ridiculed because many deem strength only as a masculine pursuit. Why on earth has strength been gendered? Even in Ancient Greece, Spartan women were mandated by the state to engage in wrestling, running and boxing to strengthen the state’s glory. The new tactic to control women is to diminish them so completely that they believe physical weakness is beautifully feminine. And so, in a time where the West is turning fascist and with the economy crumbling, it is not surprising to see the bodies of women crumbling away also – because thin is so in!
Celebrity ambassadors of glamorised thinness such as Adele and Cynthia Erivo as well as the Ozempic trend has seen swarms of women and men engage in skinny culture through dieting or barely eating, as Ozempic acts as an appetite suppressant. I have also noticed many videos on social media of women promoting weight loss despite looking a natural and healthy weight beforehand and disguising this as healthy gym culture. The gym, a place with the primary goal of becoming strong, is now being promoted conversely. The idea that ‘every body is beautiful,’ even if it requires rigorous self – policing, medication or surgery simply for aesthetic purposes, is becoming worryingly normalised.
Not eating enough or engaging in physical activity makes a person physically and mentally drained, making them more malleable to the political elite. Skinniness has become a sedative. Politicians in power are more capable of manipulating the masses if they have no energy. This is the same reason as to why social media algorithms are so ruthlessly addictive, why there are no longer any youth community centres, and why drinking culture has reached an all – time low in young people: a society who is moulded into doing less and less will carry this apathy into their political motivation.
It seems obverse for women to be obsessed with being skinny during a time of scarcity. A more voluptuous build has been traditionally promoted during times of scarcity to promote a false feeling of abundance. This time is different. Skinniness is being glorified by society to normalise not being able to feed yourself as fascism will leave more and more people in poverty and deprivation in a more and more expensive world.
The world is pressuring women to literally not take up space, and this bleeds into social spaces. A period of celebrating diversity and empowering women seems to have withered away post – pandemic. Donald Trump in 2025 described DEI programmes as ‘dangerous, demeaning and immoral,’ with Reform following in his footsteps by wanting to rip apart the Equality Act. Mark Zuckerberg has also called for ‘neutered’ corporations needing more ‘masculine energy.’ Advocacy for a masculine invasion from billionaires is, to put it bluntly, an attempt to make men feel as though they are in control of women, when in reality they are still aggressively subjugated by capitalism and patriarchy.
In a time of societal dysphoria where skinny rhetoric is being forced down our throats, what is essential for people to recognise is that eating enough is not something that has to be earned. Nourishing the body is not a moral action, it does not make you a good or bad person if you eat less or more. For anything to get better class consciousness is necessary: an awareness that a societal shift is needed as the elites are dead set on disallowing us the freedom to live as individuals, preferring us to exist by their demands.
And so, when the notion that ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’ is thrust upon you, consider instead that nothing feels as good as having the strength to live in your own image.
Words by Eloise Sullivan-Flatt