When I was a millennial in my late teens, skinny was the beauty standard.
The sort of skinny that simply doesn’t lend itself to an Irish constitution and the spud-heavy diet traditionally advocated by generations of Irish mammies. No one here is getting scurvy on mammy’s watch – let’s put it that way.
This idealisation of extreme thinness has haunted millennial women from their girlhood; never mind that it could only be achieved for the vast majority of people through an elective form of malnutrition or a liquid diet following invasive jaw surgery.
Yet, we are all the product of time, context and culture.
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Celebrities in the early 2000s largely looked like a younger Lindsay Lohan.
It was an intense time in the culture. Kim Kardashian still had her original hair, face and lower body. Paris Hilton’s hip bones jutted sharply from low-rise jeans and if your clavicles didn’t look like the grab rail in your granny’s newly renovated walk-in shower, you were considered overweight. It was common to be told that you were.
Eating disorders were, unsurprisingly, widespread. Then, as now, much of our perception of young women’s value was tied up in appearance, though boys too are now more subject to similarly untenable aesthetic standards than they once were.
In the mid-2000s, we experienced a reactive swing in the opposite direction. Body positivity became almost as overbearingly dictatorial as the overt negativity that had preceded it. During this time, I was a beauty editor in London, working for the sorts of publications that disseminate the standards most of us feel so simultaneously erased by and covetous of.
[ Drugs like Ozempic aren’t changing negative narratives around diet and weightOpens in new window ]
While editors were putting plus-size models in magazines, they were also still personally hyper-conscious about weight. The lunch table at work events still murmured with comments about feared weight gain, the virtue of abstaining from “bad” foods, or the current popular weight-loss trend.
Whatever the angle, conversations on weight always seem to adopt a moral quality. That has never changed – our weight is treated as a proxy for virtue.
Women have spent the last decade or so talking a big talk about body acceptance, but the desire to shrink clearly never went away. It seems that the rise of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like semaglutide – better known by its brand names Ozempic or Wegovy – has merely proved the purported body positivity movement was at best for many a place holder mentality. It fell from favour as soon as thinness became chemically accessible. Actions are more telling than beliefs, however loudly professed, and thinner frames are once again dominating.
While times and trends change, the challenge for anyone who has looked in the mirror and felt inadequate is to somehow maintain a healthy relationship with body image when the standards simultaneously shift and influence how we are treated by other people.
Thinness is the standard for women again, though there is now an added pressure for the sort of muscle tone that only strict diet and specific kinds of exercise can achieve as weightlifting becomes more popular. For men, lean mass and impractical (for most) muscularity is the standard.
With advancements in aesthetic procedures and science, and with information on nutrition and fitness widely accessible online, beauty is theoretically easier to access now than ever before. But not for everyone.
These sorts of aesthetics are tied up with wealth, or at least not with poverty – they require gym access, significant free time for multiple lengthy workouts each week and a protein-rich diet. Beauty standards are always tied to status and wealth.
Our bodies are presumed to signal for our values, our habits, our self-discipline and our access to resources. With an estimated 1.25 – 1.5 million people in the UK taking GLP-1 weight loss drugs, the vast majority of whom are paying for them privately, according to the Guardian, a leaner body is very much higher status again.
We know that there is advantage in looking as close to whatever the current beauty standard is as possible. There was in the 1920s, when Coco Chanel popularised previously low status tanning as evidence of a moneyed, well-travelled life of leisure. There was in 2015, when Instagram-filler-face made so many celebrities and influencers look like uncanny facsimiles of Kylie Jenner. There was in the early 2000s, when emaciation was associated with youth and self-discipline, and there is now that wealth and thinness are once more (for however long GLP-1s remain expensive) concomitant.
We still on some level consider that lack of attractiveness by the current definition equates to lack of value. We judge ourselves and one another by ever-shifting standards while ignoring the mechanism by which they change.
Until we can notice them and their influence upon our thinking more actively, we’re doomed to perpetuate and fall prey to them endlessly.
The challenge now is what it has always been, and it’s a struggle conducted internally – to look in the mirror and see value, regardless of the external messaging.
That’s very tough in a world where distance from the beauty standard means relative disadvantage – none of us would want a harder life.
