Too Fat, Too Thin, Too Muscular. Have You Tried Not Having a Body?

Danielle Camporini

1 day ago

4 min read

Between body shame, fashion and silence, we'll still punish those for trying to fit in. It's funny, really. Perfect bodies are THAT thing nobody can actually define. We keep redefining what they should look like every few years. Call it progress, call it evolution, call it whatever makes you feel better about the absurdity. But fundamentally, nothing changes. The loop keeps spinning.

Just like I wrote last week about desperately buying basic jeans and smoking cigarettes to feel "authentic". Or how women in Congo have their bodies literally weaponised for minerals. Same machine. Different settings. Same objective.

Because here's the consistency: women's bodies are always up for public discussion. We were born with THAT thing between our legs, and suddenly we're communal property. As if your stomach, your thighs, your hormones require a referendum.

Meanwhile, men can smoke, balloon to 300 pounds, drink themselves into oblivion or emotionally devastate an entire family, and society just shrugs. Moves on. But us? We can't even say the word. We say everything else. "Lady parts." "Down there." "Your area." The taboo isn't accidental. It's strategic.

Now, Ariana Grande. She just dropped the video for her new album, and within hours, nobody was talking about the song. They were talking about how thin she looked in it. Not the vocals, not the visuals, not the actual art she spent months building, just how much space her body took up on screen.

And this isn't new, is it? We saw the same thing happen during the Ozempic phase. Different artists, different eras, identical obsession. The cruelty shifts; the surveillance never stops. The loop was never about finding the "right" body type. It's about making sure there never is one.

Same Machine, Different Settings

We freak out about Ariana's thinness while women in Congo are being systematically weaponised for coltan. As I was saying, different settings. Because this goes far beyond aesthetics. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, militias financed through the same global supply chains that power our phones use rape as a calculated tool, not incidentally, but strategically. Clear the land, break the community, empty the territory, start mining. The female body becomes infrastructure. Literal infrastructure of control.

Bring that lens back home and the mechanism looks eerily familiar, just with gentler tools. No militias needed. Just mirrors, algorithms and a diet industry worth billions. Whether it's a militia or a magazine, the message lands the same: your body doesn't belong to you.

The Smarter System

Naomi Wolf saw this coming decades ago. As women gained real power throughout the twentieth century, education, jobs, a seat at the table, the culture didn't loosen its grip. It got smarter. It couldn't legally say no to us anymore, so it started whispering: be smaller instead. Literally and figuratively.

Look at the timeline. Women flood universities, boardrooms and politics, and right on cue, an entire culture around body size explodes. Gyms become temples. Calories become currency. When you can't control women through law, you control them through shame, and a woman busy correcting herself has no energy left to challenge anything else.

That's the Beauty Myth: sell a standard that keeps moving so the exhaustion becomes the only permanent thing.

Fashion's Amnesia

Fashion loves selling you back your own oppression as liberation. Body positivity campaigns shot in sample sizes that stop at a medium. "Invest in yourself" ads that really mean you are not enough as you are, so buy something to fix that.

It wasn't always like this. When Chanel took women out of corsets, that was a political act. The bikini was a battleground. Women got arrested for wearing one on public beaches because it meant owning your own body in public space. Suffragettes coded protest into the colours they wore.

Fashion used to be a manifesto. Somewhere along the way, the industry realised it could sell the manifesto back to us and rewrote the language of freedom as a new set of rules to fail.

The Scientific Wrapper

Take Ariana again. She followed every rule, stayed thin exactly as demanded, and got crucified for it anyway. The criticism didn't stop; it just changed vocabulary. Now she's not "too thin", she's "unhealthy", diagnosed by strangers on the internet suddenly worried about her wellbeing. Same judgement. Scientific wrapper.

That's the trick. Control dressed up as concern is much harder to fight. You're not fat, you have "inflammation". Your weight isn't wrong, you have "metabolic dysfunction". We've traded the mirror for the lab report, and the goalpost still moves exactly as it always did.

The Word We Won't Say

We know all of this. We've read the pieces, we can recite the theory, we've traced the line from Congo to Chanel ourselves. And we still won't say the word. We still say "lady parts", still apologise for our bodies, still buy the product promising the fix.

Knowing the mechanism was never going to be what freed us from it.

Because the cost of breaking the taboo is real. It makes you crude, unfeminine, someone who doesn't know her place, and isolation is the price. So we stay comfortable. We become complicit in our own erasure. Not by force. By habit.

If one of the most famous women in the world can't survive being thin, or survive being seen as too thin, without her whole body becoming a referendum, what exactly are the rest of us supposed to do?

I don't have the full answer. But it starts with getting uncomfortable, with accepting there's no "right" body and no single "health" that applies to all of them, and with understanding that you don't have to be everyone to still belong somewhere.

The question was never whether we can change the system. It's whether we're finally willing to stop performing for it.