“There’s lots of chat at the moment about #SkinnyTok,” Jenny Stevens, the Guardian’s deputy features editor, tells Helen Pidd. “The TikTok influencers, TikTok users, who are documenting their extreme weight-loss journeys.
And activists are worried. But why should normal people who don’t follow celebrity trends care?
Stevens explains why she is worried about the rise in weight-loss drugs, as someone who suffered from an eating disorder. “I worry about them. And the wider media context, and their absolute fixation on who’s taking them, who isn’t, who’s lost the weight, how they’ve lost the weight. Look at their bones jutting out … I worry about the effects of it on vulnerable people who are already suffering with disordered eating.”
*Shrugs*
Also, we ask what a renewed fixation on thinness means for plus-size women?
Probably little, they are too busy eating doughnuts and makibg gross tiktok videos to care.
Gina Tonic, the author of Greedy Guts: Notes From an Insatiable Woman, talks about the origins of the body positivity movement and why it feels less visible than it did.
The TikTok generation lost interest in the shock value of women who look like drag versions of Jabba the Hut, perhaps?
“I think Covid put health into the forefront of society’s point of view as something that we really needed to prioritise for ourselves and also for our communities. And obviously, the first people to suffer under that kind of logic is people who are disabled, but also people who are seen as unhealthy, I guess, or willingly unhealthy. “And fatness is automatically associated with being unhealthy and has been for decades. So it just feels like a natural follow-on with a public obsession with health, and the perception that thinness is health, thinness becomes the priority again for so many people,” says Tonic.
Live by the trend, die by the trend....
"Also, we ask what a renewed fixation on thinness means for plus-size women?"
ReplyDeleteMaybe it means the fat whaps will loose a bit of weight themselves and stop demanding free extra seats on planes. Maybe it means we'll see less lard arses squeezed into yoga pants that really should not be made that large
Being a grossly obese Tik Tok influencer for body 'positivity' is really no better than starving yourself half to death to show off your protruding ribs in a bikini, but we've been told that calling out the fat whaps is fat phobic, because they've captured the victimhood narraitive.
Now they don't want thin women becoming popular again, because it might turn attention away from them. Not that we ever wanted to pay them any attention anyway
I've started to realise that my not giving a shit about what other people think of me is very underrated. All of these people's problems could be solved in an instant if they adopted this attitude and just got on with their lives.
ReplyDeleteStonyground.