Written by Stephanie Voytek
Hip bones that stick out of low-rise jeans. Rib lines that run parallel to hollowed cheekbones. Legs that resemble arms. Thong straps that search for fat to grip onto. So many of us Millennial women don’t need to be reminded of the images of heroin chic that informed our body image.
In the early 00’s, “heroin chic” became a “thing of the past”, as evidenced by a newer wave of models who carried a whole pound more of fat than their predecessors. Our bodies matured as a 30-something Carrie Bradshaw, easily a size 0, asked her 20-something boyfriend if she was too heavy to sit on him. We feared that if we were to gain weight, Jillian Michaels would have to save us with her terror. We went to prom as Regina George convinced us that going up a pant size made her fat. And our developed womanly bodies endured as a thin Lady Gaga was criticized for having too much fat on her body as she forcefully danced across a Super Bowl halftime show stage.
Then, from the shadows of photographs of Paris Hilton - the thinnest of thin icons in the early 00’s- rose Kim K. Generations of women were granted permission to have fat on their booties despite the fact that the body who gave us that permission was still completely out of our reach. Yet as we age and our bodies continue to change, so many of us still rely on media to inform our body image.
Introducing: The Body Positivity Movement
As we matured into adulthood, the body positivity movement of the late 00’s and early 10’s tried its best to challenge the thin ideal. BoPo leaders questioned the use of weight as a measurement of self-worth by sharing photos of women of the same weight but contrasting shapes and sizes. Body positive pioneers encouraged us to question why the average woman’s body looked so different from the thin ideal and gave us answers by blaming the fashion industry, magazines, and Mattel for holding a grip over the self-image of multiple generations of women.
We’re letting a group of men in a boardroom make money off of our insecurities.
Body positivity activists successfully redirected blame from thin models to the industries that exploited them. But most conversations within the movement about the origins of the thin ideal ended there.
Digging Deeper
While we repeat the assumption that the 00s & 90s thin ideal was simply designed to profit from our insecurities, we ignore how it developed from socio-political events in the late 20th century. During the AIDS epidemic of the 80s, heroin usage declined due to the risk involved with injecting the drug. This concern led to the development of purer and more affordable heroin that could be snorted or smoked. The lower cost, risk, and increased access made it popular among young middle-class individuals and effectively became associated with glamor.
Heroin's reputation as a glamor drug combined with its physical effects of making users appear tired and emaciated ultimately led to the popularization of the term “heroin chic”. The drug became popular amongst musicians in the grunge music scene in Seattle as some of these musicians rose to fame. Due to glamourization of fashion, images of models who used the drug, such as Kate Moss, helped make the aesthetic accessible to a wider audience.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat
Although the emaciated aesthetic of the 90s was influenced by various factors of the time, this wasn’t the first generation to popularize thinness. According to Warren Belasco in his book Appetite for Change, the body ideal in the 1950s was “a woman in her mid-twenties, who, after having a baby or two, had lost some weight but had not recovered from premarital size. Such a norm was appropriate to culture idealizing early marriage and childbearing” (Belasco, pg. 177). The image of this woman had some weight in her lower belly and hips, signifying that she was physically mature enough to have children. It’s no surprise that the women of the 1950s were expected to have some curvature, as fertility was essential to the boom of the nuclear family following WWII.
This body ideal slimmed down in the following two decades as the United States entangled itself with the Vietnam War in the 1960s. A movement of older adolescents and young adults who opposed the war claimed their loyalty to the counterculture by changing their diets and lifestyle behaviors. This included giving up meat, which had been the center-piece of American dinner plates since the pre-colonial era. As the counterculture grew, some hippies also believed in a coming doomsday and practiced caloric restriction in an effort to prepare. They believed that the physical and mental discipline required to practice caloric restriction would give them an advantage over others when famine inevitably hit the nation during a believed doomsday event.
As diet became the act that identified one's commitment to the counterculture, thinness became the defining aesthetic. Belasco notes that magazines published`` twice as many articles on dieting in the 1970s as in the 1950s” and suggested that “slimming down the ideal may have related to the way the media isolated the gestures, accoutrements, and look of the youthful rebellion: to be energetic, fun loving, and ultimately, sexy, one had to be as fit, single, and ultimately, thin as an eighteen year old student/hippie protestor- the eternal child” (Belasco, 177).
Uncovering the Iceberg
Even if the ideal body type transformed from the post-partum body of the 50s to the pre-pubescent figure of the hippy era, women of the 50s were still pressured to maintain some amount of thinness. In her book Fearing the Black Body, sociologist Sabrina Strings offers another influence that defined the ideal body types of the 19th and 20th century- racism.
For most of my life I heard my mom discuss my grandmother's body image as it related to her peers. Her first generation Italian-American mothers jet black hair, big thighs, appetite, and audacity was a stark contrast from her Czech-American sister-in-law's pale skin, svelte figures, quiet voices, and bird-like appetite. My grandmother was highly observant of this difference for the same reason her father would keep quiet to hide his accent around Irishmen- the pressure to prove their whiteness to validate their citizenship.
In her book, Strings uncovers how hundreds of years of racism in the western world shaped our modern-day body ideals. According to Strings, many white eugenicists in the 19th century racially grouped Italians and Southern Europeans as closer to black Africans than white North Europeans. As Europeans from different nations immigrated into the U.S., many white “Americans” felt the need to stronghold their nationality, and in classic American fashion, did so by questioning the nationality of other European immigrants. As even free black Americans had little rights, pushing darker-skinned Europeans close to this racial category asserted the “high” reputation of Northern Europeans within the U.S.
What gave this group even more evidence to discriminate against their tanner neighbors was the perceived association that both Southern Europeans and black Africans had with fatness. Thinness became a tool to distinguish one nationality from another, securing the status of a select few. As a result, thinness became associated with whiteness, purity, and true American-identity, while blackness and fatness became othered. Thus leading to generations of people, particularly women, chasing a thin ideal in order to prove worthy of their citizenship.
Beyond Body Positivity
The influences that promote thinness don’t end here but we can at least conclude that body ideals both reflect and uphold sociopolitical values. What the body positivity movement of the late 00’s and early 2010’s failed to address is that if photographs, advertisements, fashion shows, and dolls were purely superficial they wouldn’t wield so much power over us. They are not a cause for our thoughts and behaviors but a reproduction of them, illuminating our cultures conflicts and desires.
Body ideals help us identify who within that community holds the most power. The late 00-10’s body positivity movement attempted to identify abuses of power by blaming advertising executives for profiting off of women’s insecurities but failed to explore how centuries of patriarchy and white supremacy created said business model. A boardroom of business executives doesn’t look much different than a painting of our founding fathers.
The media's display of the thin ideal is not always a design of propaganda but a materialization of sociopolitical norms and values. Designers reflect social shifts in fashion while marketers make it profitable. Consumers demonstrate their alignment to social values based on how they interact with bodily fashion. High consumption upholds the ideal body type until the next generation attempts to dismantle a commonly held social belief and a “new” bodily fashion is born. The pattern repeats itself and fashion evolves so much that we cannot identify its origins and forget that the social values we challenge today are not much different than those challenged a century ago, just slightly more evolved.
If we want to truly eradicate unhealthy bodily ideals, we need to recognize the depth behind a photograph, advertisement, or body ideal. We must recognize that its creation was not spontaneous, but rather developed from every human experience that came before it. If we allow ourselves to see body ideals solely as superficial images as opposed to the materialization of our collective suffering, they will continue to appear superficial and we will continue to feel stuck. If we want to truly eradicate body ideals, we must look not just at the roots that anchor them into the ground but also the soil that allows those roots to grow.
Where to find more of Stephanie's writing:
Instagram: @aspoonfulofstories_
Sources:
Durrant, Russil. Thakker, Jo. Substance Use & Abuse: Cultural and Historical Perspectives. Sage Publications, Inc. Thousand Oaks, California. 2003. Pg 87.
'Seattle Scene' And Heroin Use: How Bad Is It?". The Seattle Times. April 20, 1994. Retrieved January 29, 2017
Belasco, Warren J.. Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014.
Kauffman, Jonathan. Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat. William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2019.
Ward, Christina. Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat: An American History. Process Media, 2023.
Strings, Sabrina. Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. New York University Press, 2019.