Under the Microscope: Celebrity Female Bodies
Our culture has a cruel double standard when it comes to celebrities and their bodies.
Look at the enormous amount of public attention devoted to singer Ariana Grande’s body. Her weight, her appearance, the size of her body–strangers have spent countless hours analyzing, debating, and speculating about all of it. Comments about Ariana Grande seem to fall into three camps:
“Leave her alone”
Concern about a possible eating disorder
Sarcasm: “Eat a cheeseburger, girl!”
Why?
We don't know what is happening in Grande’s life. We don't know what is happening with her health. We don't know what she eats, how she feels or what her body has been through. And she deserves privacy.
And it is also hard to watch when we see a young woman lose so much weight. We do not know what she is going through and yet weight loss is often met with praise, especially in the entertainment industry. I have had numerous teenage clients tell me how triggered they were to see her very thin body, a body that has lost much weight.
We have a brutal double standard about women's bodies. When women are larger, we shame them. When they gain weight, we ask ourselves what’s wrong. When they are thinner, we congratulate them. When they become extremely thin, we can become fascinated and also alarmed.
In other words: We punish women for taking up space and reward them for disappearing. Larger bodies are treated as a problem to be corrected, while extreme thinness is too often celebrated as an achievement.
Female entertainers have lived under this degrading microscope for generations, to the point where their talents and contributions are overlooked due to their bodies. Singer Cass Elliot (of the Mamas and the Papas) was mocked for her size. Actress Kate Winslet was criticized for her body. Alicia Silverstone has spoken publicly about the scrutiny she experienced. Amy Winehouse's changing appearance became part of the spectacle surrounding her life–and her brother ultimately blamed her death on bulimia. The names change; the cultural machinery doesn't.
There is something particularly dangerous about the way we respond to dramatic weight loss.
As a psychologist, I once worked with a patient with anorexia nervosa who experienced repeated relapses. She would enter intensive treatment, restore her weight and begin recovering. Then she would start restricting again. As she lost weight, people complimented her.
Eventually, she became so thin that the compliments stopped. Only then did people become concerned. Consider the dysfunctionality of that sequence: The behavior that was making her sick was socially rewarded until she became visibly sick enough for people to recognize it.
That is diet culture.
Diet culture teaches us that thinness is not merely one body type among many, but a form of moral and social achievement. It tells us that weight loss is inherently good and weight gain inherently bad. It encourages us to monitor, restrict, compare, and judge. It turns bodies into projects and teaches women that their worth is somehow visible on the scale.
And then we act surprised when people develop eating disorders.
To be clear: We do not know if Ariana Grande or other celebrities who lose a significant amount of weight have eating disorders. Yet we do know the pressures female celebrities endure for the bodies they are in. And we do know that weight loss can promote more weight loss and can go down a path to an eating disorder.
There is another conversation we could have. Instead of asking, “What is happening with Ariana's body?” we could ask, “Why do we support an industry that first values a thin body rather than talent and contributions?”
Cass Elliot spent so much of her career trying to lose weight. What if she could have focussed solely on developing her amazing talent? She died in her sleep in 1974—and it was initially, falsely reported that she died choking on a ham sandwich, which turned her death into a kind of “fat joke.” In fact, it appears that chronic dieting and weight cycling are what caused her death.
How sad! And how sad that now Ariana Grande needs to take time off from her career, specifically to escape this speculation about her weight and health. I hope so much that this time off will be healing for her and she can come back to doing what she loves.
Why don’t we instead ask:
Why is so much time, energy, and scrutiny placed on female bodies?
Why should a woman’s weight be news at all? Why do we treat women's bodies as public property?
And why, after decades of eating disorder research, are we still so willing to reinforce the very cultural pressures that can contribute to disordered eating?
We should be asking those questions not because celebrities are uniquely important, but because the messages surrounding them reach everyone else.
A teenage girl sees the headlines. A woman recovering from an eating disorder sees the comments. A person who has spent years believing that being thinner will finally make them worthy sees thousands of strangers celebrating a smaller body.
Those people are listening. So let's change what we are saying.
While it’s the culture and the systems around us that need to change, we do have many examples of individual celebrities who have successfully pushed back against diet culture.
Take ice-skating champion Alysa Liu. As she told Elle magazine: “Ever since I was a kid, I was told stuff like, ‘Don’t eat that,’” she says. “You can’t drink water even, because of water weight. Imagine telling a 13-year-old that they can’t drink water because of water weight!” It all compounded until she reached a breaking point, feeling like “this sport is disgusting and I want nothing to do with it,” she says.
Her response? She famously took time off for the sake of her mental health—and she has proudly said she is going to eat what she wants to eat. It was her resilience and her strong body that won her the Olympic gold medal. And since then, she’s been there to lift other skaters up.
We do not need to know what is happening inside someone else's body to know what is happening in our culture. Rather than dwelling on the bodies of celebrities, let’s spend our energy pushing back against diet culture and weight stigma, expanding our ideas about beauty, and creating a world where women and girls don’t have to earn their worth through their bodies–so that we can instead celebrate their talents and skills.
REFERENCES
Wikipedia: Cass Elliot
Article: I’m Going To Stop Trashing My Body for Its Appearance
Stewart, T. M., Martin, C. K., & Williamson, D. A. (2022). The Complicated Relationship between Dieting, Dietary Restraint, Caloric Restriction, and Eating Disorders: Is a Shift in Public Health Messaging Warranted? International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(1), 491. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19010491
Miskovic-Wheatley, J., Bryant, E., Ong, S.H. et al. Eating disorder outcomes: findings from a rapid review of over a decade of research. J Eat Disord 11, 85 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-023-00801-3