Ultra Skinny Is Back. And Now You Can Buy It.

Sophia Leon S.
1 day ago
7 min read

Apparently Body Positivity Ended The Moment We Could Buy Skinny. We survived heroin chic, size-zero culture and decades of being taught to hate our bodies. We spent years trying to undo the damage. Now thinness can seemingly be bought in an injection, and suddenly the bodies we fought so hard to accept are disappearing before our eyes. I'm sorry, but we're not putting that fucking VHS back in. We are not doing this to women again…

Something has been bothering me lately. And by bothering me, I mean genuinely sitting in the back of my mind every time I open Instagram, watch a red carpet or see another celebrity suddenly looking... different.

You know exactly what I'm talking about.

Women are getting really, really thin again. And before anyone starts typing furiously, let me make something very clear. This is not an essay about Ariana Grande's body. It isn't about Jenna Ortega, Demi Moore, Charlize Theron, or frankly, anybody else whose body the internet has suddenly decided to dissect.

I don't know these women. I don't know their medical histories. I don't know what they eat, what medication they take or what's happening behind closed doors. And neither do you. So no. The women are not the story.

What their bodies are being made to represent culturally is. And THAT is something I think we desperately need to talk about. Because I swear to God… I've seen this movie before, I grew up during an era when being skinny wasn't enough. You had to be tiny. We had heroin chic, we had size zero. We had magazines zooming into women's stomachs looking for folds of skin they could circle in red. Women who, looking back now, were objectively slim were somehow being called fat.

And an entire generation of girls absorbed it. We learned to fear bread, we learned to count calories, we learned that hunger meant discipline. That taking up less space meant succeeding, that somehow, disappearing was an achievement.

Then something changed… Or at least we thought it did - Body positivity happened.

And listen, it wasn't perfect. Like every movement humanity gets its hands on, parts of it became commercialised, contradictory and occasionally completely fucking ridiculous.

But underneath all the noise was something important: Bodies aren't trends.

We saw different body types in campaigns. Stretch marks stopped being treated like medical emergencies. Cellulite occasionally survived Photoshop. We talked about strength, acceptance and representation. We started trying to undo decades of damage. And for a moment… It genuinely felt like we might finally be getting somewhere.

Then came GLP-1s. Now, let me be very careful here. Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and other GLP-1-based medicines are medications. They can be incredibly valuable treatments for people who medically need them.

The drugs aren't the villain of this essay. Our culture is.

Because give our culture an extraordinary medical development and apparently we'll eventually find a way to turn it into another beauty standard.

A medicine becomes aesthetic. An aesthetic becomes aspiration. Aspiration becomes expectation. And suddenly… If everybody can be skinny now, why aren't you?

That's the part that scares the shit out of me. Because during heroin chic, extreme thinness was an aesthetic women were expected to chase. Now we're increasingly being sold the means to chase it too. Thinness hasn't simply returned, thinness has become purchasable.

So what happens to body positivity now? For years we told women: Your body is worthy. Your body doesn't need fixing. You don't owe anyone thinness. You are allowed to take up space.

And now that changing your body can appear as simple as obtaining a prescription… What? So, fuck body positivity? Was it only empowering to accept your body when changing it was difficult?

Because there's an absolutely terrifying new message lurking underneath all of this: We accepted your body when changing it was hard. Now that thinness can be bought, what's your excuse?

And weirdly enough, while writing this, I couldn't stop thinking about Ryan Murphy's The Beauty. If you haven't watched it yet, don't worry, I'm not going to spoil it for you because honestly... you need to experience that insanity for yourself. But the entire premise suddenly feels a little too close to home.

There's a drug that can make you extraordinarily beautiful. Almost instantly. Of course there are potential consequences. Potentially horrifying ones, actually. But people want it anyway.

Beauty now, consequences later.

And there is one storyline involving a teenage girl (Season 1, Episode 11) that I genuinely haven't stopped thinking about. She watches another girl transform. She wants the same thing. She can't access the drug through the legitimate, expensive route, so she becomes willing to obtain it another way.

She's warned about the potential consequences. “I know, and I don't care,” she says. And then, moments later: “Whatever small chance of something bad happening, it's worth it to me.”

I won't tell you what happens to her. But let me tell you... those two sentences hit very differently once you know. And watching it, I remember thinking: Isn't that the terrifying part of all of this? What are we willing to risk for beauty when the reward is immediate and the consequences belong to some hypothetical future version of ourselves?

What are we willing to risk for beauty when the reward is immediate and the consequences belong to some hypothetical future version of ourselves?

Because apparently future me can deal with it. Future me can deal with the side effects. Future me can deal with whatever happens to my body. Future me can deal with the psychological consequences. Just make present me beautiful.

Obviously, The Beauty takes this idea to a grotesque, fictional extreme. But the psychology underneath it isn't particularly fictional.

There's a new protocol every week, a new injection, a new peptide, a new procedure, a new supplement. A new person explaining that the thing you didn't even know was wrong with you yesterday can apparently be fixed tomorrow. And the system keeps selling us solutions so we keep buying.

That's the business model, isn't it? First convince us there is something wrong with us. Then conveniently sell us the solution. And once we've fixed that? Don't worry… They'll find something else.

Maybe that's why The Beauty unsettled me so much. Beneath all the body horror and insanity, it asks an incredibly simple question: How much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice for the privilege of being considered beautiful right now?

And listen… If Dua Lipa suddenly starts disappearing before our eyes, I swear to God, I'm going to war. I'm serious! We're not doing this to our girl. Actually… Scratch that.

We're not doing this to any of our girls.

Not Ariana, not Jenna, not the woman sitting next to you, not your best friend, not your sister, not your daughter. Not yourself.

And that's where I think we need to be incredibly careful. Because protecting women does not mean commenting underneath a woman's photograph telling her she looks sick. We cannot diagnose someone's health from Instagram.

But there is a huge difference between saying: "That woman is too skinny." and asking: "Why is extreme thinness becoming culturally aspirational again?"

One turns a woman's body into public property, the other interrogates the culture surrounding her. And I think we desperately need to learn the difference. Because bodies aren't trends. A woman's body isn't a low-rise jean, it isn't leopard print, it isn't a fucking handbag.

Women shouldn't have to spend one decade growing an ass because Instagram decided curves were sexy and the next desperately trying to erase it because suddenly bones are fashionable again? Hello? WTF? Can you hear how insane that sounds?

And yet… Here we are… Again…

And perhaps the most frightening part isn't what this is doing to us. It's what happens next.

Intergenerational protection. That's what I keep coming back to. Because we already know how this movie ends. We watched women starve themselves through the '90s. We watched size zero consume the 2000s. We spent the 2010s trying to repair the damage and teaching women that bodies were allowed to occupy space.

And now, because medicine has changed what is possible, we're apparently contemplating putting the fucking VHS back in. No. We've been through enough. Our sisters have been through enough. Our mothers have been through enough. And our daughters should not have to inherit this shit from us.

Because a thirteen-year-old girl doesn't understand that bodies move in and out of fashion. She simply sees the women everybody calls beautiful becoming smaller. She sees dramatic weight loss celebrated. She hears:"You look amazing!" "What's your secret?" "How did you lose it?"

And eventually her perfectly normal body starts looking wrong. Not because her body changed. Because the reference point did. Maybe that's where our responsibility begins.

Stop automatically congratulating every dramatic weight loss. Stop treating hunger like discipline. Stop treating appetite like a character flaw. Stop treating medication like a beauty accessory. Stop allowing "tiny" to quietly become synonymous with beautiful again.

And when someone we actually know and love seems to be struggling, maybe instead of saying: "You've gotten so skinny." We ask: "How are you?" And then we actually fucking listen.

Because I don't want another generation of girls standing in front of mirrors pulling at perfectly normal skin. I don't want them learning that disappearing is an achievement. I don't want them inheriting a wound we already know how painful it is to carry.

So no. I don't want to police Ariana Grande's body. I don't want to diagnose Jenna Ortega from a photograph. Frankly, I don't want to know what any celebrity weighs. I want to know why women's weight can still become international fucking news. I want to know why we keep confusing smaller with better.

And most importantly… I want us to catch ourselves before we teach another generation of girls to do the same.

Because one day your daughter might stand in front of you, pull at a perfectly normal part of her body and ask: "Do you think I'm too big?"

And for God's sake… Let our generation finally have a different answer.