Author’s Note: As you read this, please note that this essay isn’t a critique of Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, or any individual’s body or health (or the rightness or wrongness of their choices, when applicable). My focus is on the cultural forces that shape our ideals—and what it means when certain body trends re-emerge—not on the people (celebrities or otherwise) who happen to embody them. I know that even naming what we notice about bodies can feel close to the surveillance many of us are trying to move away from. My intention is not to reinforce that gaze, but to examine the systems behind it and how these shifts land collectively, especially for young people. This piece looks at one slice of a much wider landscape of body politics, and it’s offered as reflection, not certainty. My hope is to create space for thoughtful conversation about what we’re seeing and how it affects us. I’d love to hear what you think.
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Like much of the American populace, I spent a few hours of this Thanksgiving break tucked warmly in a movie theater with my peanut butter M&Ms (there were no Sno-Caps for sale, which deserves its own rage post – coming soon) and my kids watching Wicked: For Good. It was delightfully mesmerizing in the way that I’d expected it would be. Even my middle school boys gave it high praise.
After skimming some of the online discourse on the shrinking bodies of the film’s two stars, I was curious to see what it was like to spend two and a half hours seeing their small frames in IMAX. It was impossible to say whether I would have been as struck by the degree of their thinness if it hadn’t already garnered such attention, but I suspect I would have – partly because it posed such a striking contrast to the mildly fuller frames of the movie heroines of late.
Don’t get me wrong, popular media has still been far from representative when it comes to body diversity. But it’s undeniable that things look markedly different for my daughter than they did for me as a child. While truly larger-bodied lead characters are still mostly absent, Disney and others seem to have made some concerted efforts to not depict female characters with waists smaller than their necks. The body positivity movement, which began as the Fat Rights Movement in the 1960s but picked up more mainstream steam in the early 2000s, is largely credited for the turn.
The turn seemed so complete that I think many of us thought that the waifish, heroin-chic aesthetic of the 1990s was a relic of the distant past. And along with the modest increase in body sizes represented, we also saw people finally stop talking so often about other people’s bodies. Commenting – whether around the dinner table or online – about other people’s size became not just passe, but eventually offensive and cancelable. For those on the front lines of the body positivity movement, much of this felt like a win.
Which is what made staring up at the big screen at a frail-looking Ariana Grande as Glinda lunging toward Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba in what’s been called the “cat-fight scene” so disconcerting. I couldn’t help but cringe, fearing one of them was about to break. I couldn’t help but glance at my daughter, curious how her young mind was processing all this. I couldn’t help but wonder: are we going backwards?
A quick scan through history will prove that every movement has a pendulum effect, and so body positivity was bound to meet its match. The arrival of GLP-1s on the mainstream scene seems to have heralded a different era in how we relate to bodies. We are watching weight loss in real time again.
But what we haven’t returned to is talking about it – at least not openly. And so we we find ourselves in this interesting third era: one where bodies are shrinking in our social feeds, friend groups, and big screens, but we now have learned it’s not our place to name it. Or if we do, we risk sacrificing the values of body neutrality and autonomy that we hold so dear.
Have we wandered backwards in time but with our mouths now taped shut?
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In case you haven’t seen it yourself, the back and forth about the Wicked stars’ apparent weight loss sounds something like this:
Ariana Grande is too thin! She must have an eating disorder!
How dare you comment on her body! That’s sexist and damaging!
But these Wicked stars are supposed to be role models! What are impressionable girls seeing!?
You have no idea what is happening with their bodies! Respect for women means respecting all body types!
It goes on from there, of course – round and round in endless loops of concerned outrage. I don’t mean to make it all sound banal. There are some really thoughtful perspectives and think pieces mixed into the internet chatter. Kara Kennedy’s “In ‘Wicked,’ There’s a Very Thin Elephant in the Room,” being one that inspired this essay. But the reality is that most of it is rage-baity arguing about the specific women in question.
And there’s where we so often seem to get stuck in this type of discourse. We get caught in the fruitless debate about whether Ariana Grande has anorexia or about whether it’s acceptable to debate whether Ariana Grande has anorexia, and in doing so we miss the broader questions at hand: What, if anything, does having extreme thinness spotlighted on screen do to our desire for thinness? What, if anything, is happening that may be re-normalizing extreme thinness? How do we feel about all this? What, if anything, do we want to do about it?
Those aren’t questions I’m going to try to answer here. Well, I actually will throw a theory out about the second one shortly. But mostly I raise them to point out that they are social questions – culture questions. They are, at least to me, important questions.
If the question is instead posed as this (as it mostly is in the online debates): Should we be talking about Ariana Grande’s body or weight loss? Then I don’t believe that the answer can ever be a simple yes or no. Whether Ariana Grande’s body comes into the public discourse depends on a couple of key factors: the reason we’re discussing it and how we are discussing it.
To be ultra clear, if we are discussing Ariana Grande’s weight because we believe we are concerned for her and that we hope she seeks help if she needs it, we need to stop. Unless you happen to know Ariana (in which case still don’t discuss it publicly), keep your concern as an inside thought and work it out in therapy. There are probably people much closer to you in your own life who could use that slice of concern more.
Not to mention – and this an aside but an important one – that if you think you know that Ariana or Cynthia has an eating disorder based on their small body size, you might be missing an important awareness that only about 6% of people with eating disorders are considered underweight. Our hyperfocus on small bodies as equating to eating disorders perpetuates the bias and leaves millions undetected.
That said, if we are noting the body changes that we are observing in celebrities in the context of questions about the way we as a society are responding to bodies, then we may be rightly raising concerns – not for an individual – but for our cultural ethos.
Even then, how we talk about what we are observing matters. Using alarmist or derogatory terms to talk about others’ – including celebrities’ – bodies is not okay. Making claims – or frankly, even hypotheses – about their health status is not okay. Talking to others about our friends or colleagues specifically is not okay. We keep ourselves safe from falling into these traps by sticking to critiquing culture, not individuals about whom we know next to nothing.
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And I certainly do hope we will critique the culture. Not because the body positivity movement in its heydey was ideal – far from it, in fact. Not because there is something inherently wrong with thinness. No, I hope we take the tape off our mouths and start talking about what we are witnessing because if we don’t, in a cruel irony, we will be trapped in the very fate of the citizens of the Land of Oz.
If you’re not as familiar with the storyline, Wicked has been said to be an allegory for authoritarianism, and it has some bizarrely timely themes for the time in which we find ourselves. It explores how those in power manipulate information, suppress dissent, and control the narrative. I personally found myself with my mouth agape at certain parts of the movie, chilled by the resonance.
And throughout history, authoritarian systems have used women’s bodies as symbolic and literal terrain to reinforce concepts of order, morality, and national identity. Women’s bodies have been constructed into moral barometers, with thinness (in more recent human history) being associated with self-denial, modesty, and goodness. Authoritarianism also tends to reinforce traditional gender roles, prioritizing feminization, which fascist regimes associate with smallness and thinness. And then, of course, there’s the whole restriction of bodily autonomy thing.
If we sit back and watch the shrinking of society – specifically female bodies – without comment, because we’ve constricted ourselves from commenting in the name of bodily autonomy, then we will be consigned to watching our own oppression. Again, it cannot be overstated, this is not about calling out specific people or casting judgment on how someone individually relates to their body. It’s not even suggesting that all that’s happening is a problem – much of it is not, or is at least nuanced. This is about staying awake to what is happening more broadly – how the larger social pressures are influencing us all. This is about offering questions and exploring what it all means. Not even with certainty or judgment, but with curiosity.
It’s a delicate line, and one that I know we will crisscross in error. We will need to stay conscious of that and correct when needed. But as someone studying and working with people with fractured body relationships for nearly two decades, as a mom of kids still landing into their conceptions of their own bodies, as a woman who had to work hard to recover from the impact of heroin-chic culture – I hope we can talk (with respect and humility) about trends we are witnessing. I don’t want to go back.
