TW: This article includes discussion of eating disorders and diet culture.
Remember when tabloids circled women's cellulite, and presented it as a news story? Or how the bodies of teenage girls - like Hillary Duff or Lindsay Lohan - were dissected by adults for entertainment? How America's Next Top Model called women who were a size 6 fat? How plus-size meant mid-sized? If you're getting flashbacks then you probably grew up in the early 2000s; where diet culture was rife, and women were crucified constantly for their weight.
Every so often, social media will go viral with an image from the 00s of a celebrity being subject to body-shaming, and remind us of the huge gap between reality and perception (warped by paradigm).
This time, it was a photo of Jessica Simpson, in double leopard belts and high-waisted jeans. Seeing it again, after more than two decades, made me unsteady. This was who the tabloids used to call ‘jumbo Jessica’? As someone born in 1995, I was a child when I first saw these pictures, and without the blessing of critical thinking that comes with age, I dutifully believed the writing accompanying them.
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There were hundreds of instances like this, where women were publicly shamed for the size of their bodies (mostly for being ‘too big’, but sometimes ‘too thin’ too) by the media. People on Twitter have been sharing examples, and realising that what they were told was ‘overweight’ or ‘obese’ was often incredibly slim.
Kate Winslet, during the promotion of Titanic, was called ‘blubber’ in the press. The director of the film even got involved with this bullying, and dubbed the actress “Kate Weighs-a-Lot” a the time.
In 2001, a main character plot of Bridget Jones Diary was that Renée Zellweger's character was overweight; “136 lb” is the very first thing Bridget writes in her diary. The film constantly referenced her weight, and made fatness a defining personality trait. She was straight-sized, which is a reoccurring theme in popular culture: a fat character is written, a slim actor is cast, the slim actor is then seen as fat by viewers and media, and fat people continue to not be cast or represented.
On Twitter, a user points out that “In Devil Wears Prada, Andy has lines about how she’s not as thin as the other girls, and she’s considered fat by multiple characters. She gets a cup of soup for lunch one day and Nigel tells her, “You do know that cellulite is one of the main ingredients in corn chowder.”
Then there's Khloe Kardashian, who was relentlessly bullied for being the ‘fat’ sister. Who, in the even to this day, has still not escaped a constant narration around her weight (she's now seen as too skinny).
Jennifer Lawrence was called “too big” to play Katniss in The Hunger Games, opening up to Vanity Fair she said "I remember the biggest conversation was ‘How much weight are you going to lose?’ Along with me being young and growing and not able to be on a diet, I don’t know if I want all of the girls who are going to dress up as Katniss to feel like they can’t because they’re not a certain weight. And I can’t let that seep into my brain either.”
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Beauty standards, body-shaming and fatphobia hasn't, really, come that far in the years since: Lizzo is subject to constant discourse around her body, women in the public eye are begging for their weight to not be discussed, a very slim woman on Love Island is being called ‘fat’. We're just more literate in understanding that it exists; we now have words like ‘fatphobia’ and ‘beauty standards’ in our lingo. But, there is progress in the fact women are finally having these conversations and questioning the propaganda, and hopefully setting a better example for Gen-Z and younger generations.
“Someone asked me ‘what’s happened to you’, because my body has changed a lot in the last ten years. I said, ‘do you mean what’s stopped happening to me?’”, Stephanie*, 35, from Kent tells GLAMOUR. “During the 00s I was a teenager and was bullied for being fat. I, objectively, wasn't. I developed an eating disorder, and for years hated my body and tried to keep myself thin. Now, I actually am fat, and I love my body.”
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I took to Instagram to ask my followers if body-shaming from the 00s warped their own self-image, and the answer was a resounding yes. 1000s of women replied in a few hours, with stories echoing one another: “Only 2/11 of my school friends haven't had disordered eating/an ED at some point”, “Circle of shame? Celeb's weight in magazines? ED from 16 as a result”, “100%- I was 7 at the start of the millennium and it made me think anything over a UK12 was fat.”
Kate, 26, from Liverpool says she “lived by the rules of ‘what not to wear’ without even realising it for years,” which meant “no horizontal stripes, peplum was only for very thin women, black was your best friend. There was no one saying getting older would mean looking different [from our teenage selves], instead we had Britney Spears being criticised for putting on weight in comparison to her teenage body”
Stephanie tells me how distorted her perception of beauty was “I thought you had to be a size 0 to be beautiful. I thought anyone over a size 8 was obese. It's ridiculous looking back, that someone like America Ferrera from ‘Ugly Betty’ was seen as being ‘ugly’ and ‘fat’”.
“To be wifey material is to be monogamous, and to agree with every word – it’s depressing."
Stephanie's point highlights an important issue for me, which is that whilst these viral posts are fuelling positive discussions, it's imperative that we don't further add to fatphobia by reinforcing the idea that ‘fat’ is a bad word, or a bad thing to be. Women like Jessica Simpson were bullied by the media for being fat, when they weren't. But fat people did exist in the ‘00s, because they always have and always will, they just were just very rarely allowed to flourish in the public eye.
Generations of women before us faced body shaming, as have the ones since; but that doesn't mean things won't ever be better, and that society isn't evolving. In the ‘00s, I never saw plus-size women in media, now they grace magazine covers and have best selling albums. They are still an exception, though, which is what we collectively need to focus on changing next. I can't wait for the day when I see a plus-size woman cast in a romcom that makes no mention of her size!
A woman's body has nothing to do with her worth; this is a hard lesson to learn when we grew up ingesting the rampant diet culture and body-shaming of the ‘00s, but conversations like this are a step in the right direction. Millennial women were taught a whole load of bullshit about bodies, and it affected us, but it does not define us. If you're now challenging those beliefs, well done. I'm proud of you.
