#11 I'm just gonna say it

We need to talk about extreme thinness

This week, I’ve been thinking about bodies.

More specifically, Ariana Grande’s body.

In case you missed it – and I’m not sure how you could’ve, since we’ve all been “holding space for the lyrics of ‘Defying Gravity’” for at least two weeks now – the movie version of the much-loved musical Wicked has finally dropped. I hear it’s great. But the film has been overshadowed somewhat by the waif-like appearance of its star.

In footage from junket after exhausting junket, Ariana Grande looks scarily thin. She’s like a preened skeleton – all pale skin and sallow complexion, her concave body swathed in overly puffy or structured couture gowns, chosen to give the illusion of weight.

Even so, she looks like she could blow away on the wind – so underweight that everyone I know has been talking about it.

The thing is, though, we shouldn’t be… and I shouldn’t be writing this. To comment on Ariana’s weight would make her very uncomfortable.

“I’ve been a specimen in a petri dish since I was 16 or 17,” she said in an interview this week in response to the public’s worried reaction to her weight loss.

“I've heard every version of what's wrong with me. And then you fix it, then it's wrong for different reasons. It's hard to protect yourself from that noise… I don’t leave space for it anymore.”

In case you didn’t catch that, it’s Glinda for Stop. Fucking. Talking. About. My. Weight.

The internet’s rallied round Ari, clipping up her interview and patting her on the back for being so honest and speaking out for body positivity.

I find this disturbing.

The impact of the return of heroin chic, exemplified by Grande’s appearance on this press tour, and the ubiquity of Ozempic and other weight loss drugs, has had a truly negative impact on the way my friends and I view and feel about our bodies.

It feels even more stark as a point of contrast to the positive impact the so-called ‘body positive’ or ‘plus-size’ movement the fashion world was having till about a year ago. I put those terms in quotations because plus-size wasn’t always all that ‘plus’, and ‘body positivity’ could encompass difficult to achieve things (ahem… bubble butt, snatched waist, huge tits, etc). It wasn’t perfect.

What we’re all still waiting for is that special thing, body neutrality… where our weight isn’t something we think about all the time, and we love the skin we’re in, like the Dove advert tells us to. Fat chance of that.

I’m not saying it’s easy being in a body when the world is constantly yelling at us about what we’re supposed to look like. But if health is what we’re going for, then we can’t give Ariana Grande snaps for saying she is in the best shape she’s ever been in. To do so sends a confusing, harmful message to her young fans. It glamorises extreme thinness – even if that isn’t her intention.

I grew up in the era of Heat Magazine’s circle of shame, and let me tell you the hours I spent crying in changing rooms as I tried to squeeze my legs into skinny jeans that didn’t fit me. I loved crisps and chocolate and was disgusted with myself that I did, and was constantly coming up with fitness routines that I invariably didn’t stick to, to try to be “thin.” Thinness was the goal. The apex, the glory. But it wasn’t my natural state.

Then I did get thin. I broke my jaw, and couldn’t eat anything. I drank bone broth, like Kendall Jenner (probably). Without solids, the weight fell off me. And guess what? I felt terrible. I missed food. SO. MUCH. I even missed the soft belly I’d spent years trying to get rid of. Even though I now “looked good” (finally!!!!) in my jeans, I knew that it was temporary. I put the weight back on, and decided I wouldn’t spend my life thinking about my body anymore. But it literally took me having a perspective-shifting injury to realise that my weight was the least interesting thing about me.

I agree with Grande that we need to butt out of policing other people’s bodies. To do so here is not my goal. But I don’t think speaking about bodies should be taboo either, and I’m worried it’s becoming so. I know weight is such a triggering topic for so many people – but I want to talk about it.

Here’s why. I don’t want another generation of women to grow up like mine did – indoctrinated into thinking we were fat, when we were slim size 10s. That’s wholesale body dysmorphia, and we all suffered from it. The chance to see people of different shapes and sizes in magazines and campaigns over the last few years – Paloma Elsesser, Naomi Shimada, Ashley Graham, to name a few – has been healing. It was the first time ever for me and my friends that we’d seen bodies more like our own. It was normalising.

Over the summer I was on a train with a bunch of Goldsmiths students. They wore skimpy crop tops, no bra, and low slung combat trousers, soft squidgy bellies pillowing over the zip. Did they not care they were also wearing the most dreaded accessory of my youth… the muffin top??

My eyes would have drawn a red circle of shame around my hips in the mirror and tossed away the trousers in favour of something more “forgiving,” probably in tears, lamenting how “fat” I was and blaming my body, never the clothes.

But these girls, rightly, couldn’t have given a shit.

They had lives to live. Art to make. And confidence.

More of that, please.