Being dangerously thin is back in. Is the body-positivity era officially over? | Arwa Mahdawi

Being dangerously thin is in again

Ladies, have you been waiting with bated breath for an association of plastic surgeons to tell you what your body should look like this season? Have you lost sleep wondering whether your waist is on trend or not? Are you worried that your hips, which don’t lie, might be a little too 2005?

Well, you are in luck! The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) have put their beautiful Botoxed heads together and decreed that we are entering the “ballet body” era. In a recently published annual report that analyzed procedures done in 2023, the world’s largest plastic surgery organization noted that demand for an ideal “ballet body” is driving interest in liposuction and breast enhancement. Since ballet is notorious for eating disorders , one imagines it might also drive an increase in women starving themselves.

“There really has been almost a decade of ‘more curves are better’, and really glorifying those,” the ASPS president, Steven Williams, told the Washington Post in an interview last week. “And now it seems like we’re taking a bit of an abrupt turn to something a little bit more slim.”

While it might be abrupt, the turn hasn’t come completely out of nowhere. For a few years now, there has been a steady drip-drip of articles in the style press exclaiming that skinniness is back in fashion, that “ thin is in ”. The Kardashians, it will not surprise you to hear, seem to have played an oversized role in shifting body-related discourse. While Kim Kardashian has always denied getting a Brazilian butt lift (BBL), she has been credited with driving massive uptake of the posterior-enhancing procedure over the past decade. Then, in 2022, she gushed about going on an extreme diet in order to fit into Marilyn Monroe’s dress for the Met gala, which seemed to help encourage a new cultural obsession with thinness.

I’m not blaming all the world’s woes on the Kardashians, to be clear. The fashion industry as a whole has started glamorizing thinness. Vogue Business released a new size-inclusivity report on Tuesday and said : “We are facing a worrying return to using extremely thin models” with “a plateau in size inclusivity efforts across New York, London, Milan and Paris”.

“There’s been a decrease in size across the board and that includes already straight-size models,” one fashion insider told the Guardian this week. “A lot of models that used to be plus-size are now mid-size.”

Some of the shrinking models may have had a little medical help. The rise of the “ballet body” comes amid a boom in anti-obesity drugs like Ozempic (which was originally developed to treat diabetes). Numerous celebrities, including the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Elon Musk, have talked openly about taking semaglutide (the active ingredient in drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy) for weight loss. Some celebrities are even cashing in on the trend: Kourtney Kardashian Barker has launched a wellness brand that is selling what has been described as an Ozempic-style supplement.

The obsession with Ozempic has now reached such a fever pitch that some politicians are including it in their campaign promises. Eduardo Paes, the current mayor of Rio de Janeiro, recently promised to make a generic version of the medication widely available if he wins re-election. Paes told the Brazilian newspaper Extra that he lost 66 pounds on Ozempic and wanted to introduce it to the public health system. “Rio will be a city where there will be no more fat people. Everyone will be taking Ozempic at family clinics,” Paes said according to a translation of the original interview by Quartz .

Drugs like Ozempic can obviously be incredibly valuable for people who need to lose weight for health reasons. But a cultural shift towards idolizing “ballet bodies” coupled with this new category of weight-loss drugs is a dangerous combination. Doctors are already seeing people who shouldn’t be using these medications (and who have often got hold of them via online pharmacies) presenting with serious symptoms because of inappropriate use. The writing has been on the wall for a while, but now it feels like the body-positivity era is officially over and we are back to a world where women are dying to be thin.

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The week in pawtriarchy

A strong contender for the 2024 Nightmare Neighbor of the Year award goes to an anonymous woman in Washington who had been feeding wild raccoons in her yard for the last few decades. What’s so bad about that? Oh, those racoons just told some other raccoons about the free meals who told some others raccoons who also told a few friends. Now, 100 or so raccoons are prowling the neighbourhood, demanding snacks and genuinely creating havoc . On a more positive note, they’re about the cutest nuisances you’ll ever see.