‘Anorexia nervosa’ is a famously rubbish term for whatever anorexia nervosa is. Some people who have received the diagnosis probably do ‘lose their appetite for nervous reasons’, but plenty of us don’t. Given the diversity of reasons why a person might starve themselves, and the misconceptions attached to the label ‘anorexic’, I’ve sometimes wondered how useful it is, even as a shorthand. Yet it’s one I still use since it captures a status, if not the experience itself.

In recent years the ‘-orexias’ have proliferated, in a way that’s felt quite lazy too me (if ‘anorexia’ isn’t quite accurate but will sort-of do, why not treat all these other conditions the same way?). There is now orthorexia, tanorexia, bigorexia, drunkorexia. What seems to connect them is that they are conditions that could be written off as vanity or a lack of self-control, or could be put in a meaningful context with regard to social expectations about bodies, except we’ll do neither. We’ll make them into illnesses, but do so in a cavalier way which shows we don’t if mind they sound totally ridiculous.

The latest addition appears to be ‘cosmeticorexia’ (or ‘dermorexia’), defined in a March 2026 study as “a culturally reinforced preoccupation or obsession with achieving ‘flawless’ skin that can lead to excessive, age-inappropriate, or compulsive use of cosmetic products and procedures”. As someone who has often wandered into Boots or Superdrug and thought “WTF?” when it comes to the proportion of skincare products aimed at women and girls compared to those aimed at men and boys, I wonder how “excessive, age-inappropriate, or compulsive” are being defined here. What’s the ‘reasonable’ amount of time and money one should be spending on attempting to fix something that isn’t broken? What’s a suitable age at which to start feeling inadequate? How many times should you be cleansing, toning, moisturising, exfoliating, slathering on serum etc. before it is deemed ‘compulsive’? I find myself reminded of an Onion ‘top 10 compulsive obsessions’ joke listicle from years ago, which included “always scrubbing hands before surgery”. Are multi-stage skincare rituals a sign of madness or aren’t they? And if it’s ‘sometimes, but only when you take them really, really far’, isn’t that treating something that shouldn’t be normal – female human beings being groomed to see their bodies as in need of correction, excessively female and insufficiently feminine – as perfectly acceptable?

According to a Guardian report, “when Italian authorities cracked down on big beauty brands for allegedly targeting younger and younger shoppers, they cited cosmeticorexia as a cause for concern […] [Researchers] suggest it requires further understanding, tracking, research and potentially treatment”. Does ‘treatment’ involve any engagement with the ideas found in, say, Sheila Jeffreys’ Beauty and Misogyny or Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth? Or is it more aimed at getting you down to a ‘reasonable’ number of lipstick re-applications per day, starting at a ‘reasonable’ age? That the beauty industry profits from and exacerbates the insecurities of women and girls, constantly seeking new ways in which to target them, is hardly front page news. Indeed, one of the arguments Wolf made was that the industry encourages women to see their supposed flaws as akin to an illness in need of treatment. ‘Cosmeticorexia’ seems to take this a step further.

The inadequacy you feel, and the drive to fix it, is also a type of illness, at least if you don’t have it under control. Even if the illness model reserves some censure for the beauty industry, criticising “the growth of ‘cosmeceutical’ markets” and “social media platforms that reward routine-based content and appearance-focused self-presentation”, what it doesn’t do is address the relationship between these performances and the fundamental mismatch between femaleness and femininity. How can you expect women to feel acceptable when the preferred definition of what they are is something they’re not? Isn’t what you’re focussing on here just one tiny part of a bigger picture?

In her memoir My Good Bright Wolf, Sarah Moss recounts a midlife relapse into anorexia which begins when she follows some ‘intermittent fasting’ podcasts. Clearly one can’t blame a few podcasts for someone almost starving themselves to death. As Moss also stresses in the book, there are many other messages – some of them rooted in a feminism which seeks to transcend the body – that fuel her illness. Nonetheless, the way in which her illness develops is by following every single rule and picking up every single hint offered to her by the fasting ‘experts’:

“she pushed their voices into her ears, pressed play on podcasts that lasted an hour, two hours, exhaustive, and as she ran they told her what she must do. She must fast two days in seven, and should that not be enough to achieve a more acceptable number, every other day. […] The men of reason did not experience hunger. Their concentration improved. They became even better scientists and experts. Their fasting was not a diet, to be followed for a certain purpose and discontinued when a goal was reached, but a permanent state of grace, a life sentence.”

Even when she is hospitalised, she worries about having any substance that could lead to a “blood sugar spike” during fasting hours:

“diet soda is forbidden during fasting hours because it still raises your blood sugar level even though it has no calories, and the same applies to chewing gum, we see through your ruses. No, you may not add milk to your coffee except during the eating window. No, it is the last mouthful of your dinner and not the first that must be swallowed when the eating window closes.”

These might sound like the crazy imaginings of someone in the depths of an eating disorder, but they’re not Moss’s inventions. They’re rules casually thrown out by fasting gurus on the basis that ‘the normal person’ knows to take them in the spirit in which they’re intended – which is what?

I recall from my own time being treated for anorexia the frustration of constantly seeing ‘diet’ or ‘healthy eating’ rules and being told these were for ‘the normal person’ to sort-of, half-heartedly follow, but not me. Obviously if you followed every single rule, the message seemed to be, you’d end up where I was, which is why ‘normal people’ understood not to. I’d think ‘but are these rules or aren’t they? Which is it? Why, from month to month, does every single food group have a spell as the food you’re not meant to eat? Am we meant to eat it or not?’

There’s a parallel, I think, with the rules for femininity overall. You are supposed to feel incredible pressure to meet the behavioural and presentational standards, but you’re not actually meant to meet them because that would be ridiculous and impossible. You’re meant to live your life with that constant feeling of not-quite-making-it, and if you’re the kind of person who says ‘no, actually, I refuse to fail at this’, you will be deemed ill, or morally and intellectually inferior, or both. In its relationship to social codes, anorexia has always been that weird combination of total obedience and a total fuck you. You’re defying the rule not to follow the rules down to the last letter, because that would show the rules up for what they are.

Girls with ‘cosmeticorexia’ are, in their own way, showing the rules up for what they are. It is easy to say ‘yes, but no one is actually meant to follow every single beauty rule laid out for women because women would never leave the house’. You’re meant to choose, even though everything is presented to you as ‘essential’. You’re meant to be ‘the normal person’ who never feels good enough, and can always blame herself for never feeling good enough, because there’s always more she could be doing. The ideal itself is never to blame, only ‘taking things too far’.

Whatever cosmeticorexia is, it does not seem to me particularly new. Its impact may be more severe, fuelled by greater access to advertising and products, but girls have always been encouraged to see themselves less as fully formed human beings, more as dolls. To treat an obsession with the rituals of ‘feminine grooming’ as a modern phenomenon is to minimise the extent to which it is rooted in the age-old construction of woman-as-feminine-object as opposed to woman-as-adult-human-female. It depoliticises self-objectification, and it does so at a time when both cosmetics companies and self-identified ‘progressives’ are more invested than ever in conflating femaleness with femininity.

An Unherd article claims that ‘cosmeticorexia is a symptom of social media replacing play’:

“Children cosplaying adult routines is nothing new: little girls — and boys — have always tottered around in their mother’s high heels, smeared lipstick on their mouths, or posed with candy cigarettes. Yet this pretend play has a new fixation: skincare. Tweenagers are no longer asking for Barbies and bikes but toners, serums, cleansers and moisturisers, practising their multi-step skincare routines for performative ‘get ready with me’ videos.”

A supposedly innocent age is contrasted with one in which little girls are becoming TikTok obsessives. Yet I would argue that even a Barbie doll is a very different thing to a bike. As a former child of the eighties, I’d suggest that even then, the boundaries between play and performing ‘health and beauty rituals’ – rituals that were supposed to make you thinner and more beautiful – could be very blurred for girls. A friend and I recalled how we both desperately wanted ‘Crayon Girl’ cosmetics – real make-up styled to look like crayons – and ‘Get in Shape, Girl!’ gym equipment. Our mothers wouldn’t buy them, partly due to the expense, but partly due to their view that such things were a bit tarty. There was a very fine line between being a girl who was appropriately obsessed with feminine things and a girl who was deemed to be too interested, too soon, and hence on the road to slagdom. One Christmas I got a ‘Girl’s World’ head-without-a-body toy, with a face to which you could apply make-up and hair you could style (since one couldn’t do such things with an app). I took the wig off and wore it round the house but got told off for wearing it outside because apparently it made me look ‘like a hussy’.

In the late eighties and nineties – around the time we were getting our ‘period talks’ at school – paperback ‘life guides’ for girls were becoming popular. These would blend sensible advice for girls about, say, contraception and choosing period products, with ‘grooming tips’ (placing having a cleanse-tone-moisturise routine on the same level as remembering to shower and use deodorant) and ‘advice’ on weight and diet. I had one called How To Be A Supergirl which bothered me greatly, since it went on about female strength while all the leotard-clad ‘supergirls’ had jutting hipbones and looked too thin even to menstruate. Then there was another by TV doctor Miriam Stoppard, which included a complex ‘ideal weight and build chart’ which indicated that if I had a ‘small’ build, the target weights set for me when I was in treatment for anorexia may have been too high (so obviously I was obsessed with this). The underlying message of so many of these books was, yes, don’t be obsessed with your looks – but if you do everything we tell you, you won’t need to be (except, not literally everything, for even that would be obsessive).

Making ‘cosmeticorexia’ about social media subtly implies that girls today have been made narcissists by their phones. Ill narcissists – narcissists to be pitied – but narcissists all the same. There’s a subtle moral shaming to it, as though historical, non-digital obsessing was more wholesome. It’s easier to blame the medium than the message when challenging the message is politically unacceptable. We live in a culture in which the very definition of ‘woman’ is being emptied of femaleness to be filled with glossy, pornified femininity, and we expect girls to both accept this and to consent to be substandard women – or not women at all. You can’t excel at femininity – at least not if you’re female – because that would make you insane. Just accept that whatever you do or are, it’s never good enough.

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Hello and welcome to another contribution to ‘kicking millennial feminism when it’s down’. Yes, I know all that was meant to have stopped about a week ago. After a good fifteen years of self-styled ‘progressive’, right-side-of-history feminism kicking every other feminist alive – for such terrible crimes such as thinking female humans exist – it seems we’re only allowed a short burst off “well, that was a bit of a wrong turn, wasn’t it?” (and even then, only in response to Lindy West’s latest memoir, as opposed to any general remorse about said kickings). Then we’re straight into well, we did our best and could you have done any better? and actually, we achieved quite a lot. And yes, I can half-see that point.

There is a cycle within feminism of each new generation trashing and misrepresenting the one that went before. I wrote about this in Hags. Nonetheless, I don’t think this sums up what’s happening now in its entirety. There have been plenty of feminists doing brilliant work over the past two decades. But there was also an anti-feminist turn that was being pushed in the name of feminism, one which led to the bullying, smearing and exclusion of women not because of minor differences, but because they held on to the most fundamental feminist principles: that women exist as a definable group and they matter. I find this not only quite hard to write off (having been the kind of feminist whom it was considered okay to kick), but too important to characterise as ‘feminism can’t get everything right’. Feminism should at the very least be feminist.

So, anyways, I’m not going to apologise for remaining critical (not until I’ve got my apologies first). What I want to focus on in this piece are body positivity and size acceptance, things which have been claimed as quintessentially ‘millennial feminist’ concerns. In her recent Slate article ‘In Defense of Millennial Feminism’, Jill Filipovic (I know, her again) declared that despite the “overreach” – that’s one way of putting it – “from today’s vantage point, it seems obvious that the movement changed society for the far better”:

“The diet culture of the ’90s was never totally vanquished, and Ozempic has complicated narratives about body size, health, and self-love, to put it mildly. But insisting that women have a right to feel happy in our own skin? That skinniness is not the only way to be sexy? That health is more complicated than a number on a scale? These are hugely positive innovations.”

The word “innovations” is interesting, to say the least. Is Filipovic seriously suggesting feminists weren’t saying this before? That critiques of the beauty industry and the way in which it alienates women from their own bodies weren’t a fundamental part of the second-wave feminism that protested Miss World and marched the streets of London ironically playing ‘Keep Young and Beautiful’? That no one was pointing out fat was a feminist issue in books with titles such as Fat Is A Feminist Issue? ‘Heroin chic’ and ‘the cult of size zero’ were 90s and early 00s talking points precisely because women were already noting how crap these things were. If “skinniness is not the only way to be sexy” wasn’t heard that much, maybe it’s because being sexy wasn’t – and shouldn’t be – the most urgent feminist priority.

Yes, the use of social media to challenge dominant images of beauty was new – and also very up against it, given how this same media is used to reinforce narrow ideas of how bodies should be. And perhaps one thing that could be said is that too many earlier feminists who said these sorts of things were not fat themselves. Nonetheless, the suggestion that earlier feminists were all ‘fatphobic’, or merely ignorant of or uninterested in size discrimination, simply doesn’t hold. I think they approached it differently though, and in many ways their approach was more meaningful.

Namely, just as recognising female humans exist is a prerequisite for promoting feminist causes, I think liking bodies more than you like the porn and beauty industries is a prerequisite for promoting body positivity. A certain type of feminism – hamstrung by its refusal to criticise queer theory and pro-sex industry narratives – couldn’t achieve this. On the contrary – and in spite of the preferences of some to pretentiously use the word “bodies” when they just meant “people” (“minoritised bodies”, “feminised bodies” etc.) – I think many body positivity advocates became wedded to a ‘progressive’ politics that didn’t actually like bodies.

How can you achieve anything with that?

**

I’ve always been interested in challenges to what one might call ‘body normativity’ because as a child I was fat. I was mocked for this both at home (my dad used to announce my arrival in the room as the start of ‘the fat and ugly show’) and at school (‘Victoria Plump’, a reference to the fairy Victoria Plum, was one of the milder insults). I wanted very much to be thin, then eventually I was (becoming just ‘the ugly show’). Later, in my early twenties, for a year or so after my recovery from anorexia, I became fat again. I don’t mean ‘not meeting ridiculous size zero norms’. I mean actually obese.

Then again, I was never the kind of fat that some of the most prominent size acceptance advocates of recent years would consider meaningful. In her 2024 book Unshrinking, Kate Manne notes that there are different definitions of fatness “adopted both in fat activist circles and in the narrower but highly overlapping domain of fat studies” These include small fat, mid fat, large fat, superfat and infinifat. Those who are fattest must “be centred and prioritized in a viable politics of anti-fatphobia”. This makes some sense to me. I think I probably only ever counted as small or at most mid fat, and was never so large as to feel totally excluded from particular spaces or resources. Today I am what would be considered a ‘healthy’ weight. People my current size are often described as “skinny” or “thin” within this kind of discourse (if I wanted to, I guess I could claim to find the exaggeration triggering, as I associate “thin” with being ill. But it doesn’t bother me personally – I just find it a bit much).

A few years ago, I tried following some body positivity influencers on Instagram. I chose women who also had histories of anorexia but had since gained significant amounts of weight. This was because my post-anorexia fat years had been so desperately unhappy. I thought about my body all the time. People who’d known me when I was ill would tell me how “well” I looked, but people who hadn’t were less polite, which confirmed in my mind that even if people said you looked okay, they were lying. Back then – this was the mid-late nineties – I’d tried reading Susie Orbach’s Fat Is A Feminist Issue, but it hadn’t made any sense to me. “Compulsive eating,” wrote Orbach, “is linked to a desire to get fat. Now this point is not very obvious and can be difficult to understand.” Too bloody right it was “difficult to understand”. I didn’t get it at all. As Nancy Tucker, who describes going through a similar experience at the end of her anorexia memoir The Time In Between, put it, I saw myself as “an anorexic, but trapped in a fat suit”.

Years later, I wanted to know how these other, younger women had achieved something I never did. Yet the accounts never seemed to explain very much. There was a lot of posing in bikinis and, despite the positive slogans, a lot of grasping at one’s own flesh that looked uncomfortable – even evocative of self-disgust – to me. Then again, maybe I was projecting. It was the kind of thing I could imagine myself having done in the depths of my unhappiness – I remember insisting to people I “loved my curves” and wearing the most revealing things I could – just to show the fuckers, even though I never believed it. I wondered if these Instagram accounts would have helped me. They might have made me feel less alone, but I’m not sure they’d have done anything for my yearning not to be an object at all – to have some version of the ‘removal from the marketplace’ I’d had while anorexic, only without the ‘starving yourself to death’ bit.

I think I get Orbach more now. In her 2017 memoir Hunger, Roxane Gay writes of responding to sexual assault by wanting “to be big, to be ignored by men, to be safe. During the four years of high school, I probably gained 120 pounds”. In retrospect I find it bizarre to think of how quickly I went from underweight to overweight. My weight has fluctuated by about a stone in recent decades, but during the first six months of 1996, it doubled and stayed there, higher than it ever reached even at the end of my pregnancies, for over a year. How much was I eating? Where did I find the time in the day to consume so much? How strange that I thought constantly of being thin again yet somehow seemed fully committed to remaining the opposite. I think there was a rage to it, the same rage that drove anorexia, only flipped on its head, the same this is what you want? Well, I will show you, the same fury that whatever I did to my body made me seem both more and less of a person. When you are in the middle of this, it can be very hard to relate it to the politics that is making an object of you.

When you are not at home in your body, you can believe that modifying the body must come before any analysis of what’s making you feel this way (it’s my body, stupid!). Or you can attempt to recategorise it in ways which pay no heed to where it is situated in relation to others – certainly not in a way that challenges them. But neither of these things are enough. Neither are honest about the body, what it is, why it matters. You will always feel inferior if you think you have to lie.

**

I recently read a 2023 article called The Tina Fey Problem. The author, Cecilia Barron, alleges that mid-2010s feminism failed because “the growing visibility of trans issues complicated the feminism which relied so heavily on corporeal signification”:

“… The vapidly grotesque feminism of [Lena] Dunham and [Amy] Schumer now faced a major challenge. By continuing to proceed as normal, they risked aligning themselves with the growing trans-exclusive radical feminist (TERF) movement that seemed to champion vaginas over everything else.”

Urgh, vaginas! How vapidly grotesque!

I have to say my first thought was that if “trans issues” are making it harder for feminism to be grounded in issues related to female-bodied people, maybe what you’re dealing with isn’t the new frontier for civil rights but bog-standard anti-feminism. Barron does not agree, instead quoting trans activist writer Andrea Long Chu’s supposed “alternative for our vapid culture”:

“As [Chu] writes in response to cis women who might question her gender envy: I don’t want what you have, I want the way in which you don’t have it. I don’t envy your plenitude; I envy your void. Now I’ve got the hole to prove it. I would give anything to hate myself the way you do, assuming it’s different from the way I hate myself — which, who knows.”

There’s something about clearly intelligent female writers quoting Andrea Long Chu (see also: Amia Srinivasan, Emmeline Clein) that provokes in me the same response literally everyone has about Lindy West and her husband. FFS! Can’t you see what he’s doing here? It’s literally what it looks like! Stop trying to polish that turd! In this particular case, what do you think Chu means by “void”? Women are walking holes, hur hur, their anatomy matched to their passivity and their empty, bimbo minds. How can you believe this is better than a feminism that relies “so heavily on corporeal signification”, that is, dares to think female bodies matter because women are human, too? That sees female bodies as positive entitles as opposed to receptacles for male fantasy?

There is a raging distaste for bodies at the heard of the most ‘progressive’ millennial feminism, the kind that sought to destroy the likes of Schumer and Dunham until they toed the line. Bodies are conservative, restrictive, regressive, essentialist. Bodies fix you in place. Yuck, bodies! The less of them the better! Within this framework, the worst bodies of all are female ones. Patriarchy has long taken the view that whereas men have things which are sort-of attached to the male body – strength, power, virility – they don’t have beast-of-the-field-type bodies in the way that women do. They’re too busy having minds! “The body,” wrote Adrienne Rich in 1976, “has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.” Instead of challenging this, the most ‘woke’ feminism of recent years has tried its hardest to enable the shrugging off.

‘Millennial feminism’ – or that which considers itself the purest, most evolved iteration – sought to incorporate trans activism, the sex trade and commercial surrogacy (the leftist ‘woman as public rather than private property’, as Andrea Dworkin would put it). This necessitated an alienation from the female body – a denial of feeling, or even that the body is inseparable from the self. It’s the kind of self-alienation I used to seek in self-imposed starvation, or later in bingeing. It’s sold to women as freedom from the dreaded ‘essentialism’, but what it actually does is facilitate the exploitation of female bodies by making it unnameable.

The impact of this on feminist opposition to bodyism is clear when you see how self-styled ‘progressive’ feminists try to square the circle of opposing weight-loss surgery while supporting ‘gender medicine’. In Unshrinking, Manne gets excised about the “gatekeeping that trans people face in trying to get the humane, gender-affirming healthcare to which they are entitled”. At the same time she notes that “there is currently no known reliable, safe, and ethical way to make fat people thin, at either an individual or a population level” (what about making female people male?) and that “there is evidence that adults are likely to be heavier when they experienced childhood trauma—including physical abuse, bullying, and sexual assault” (how do such things impact gender dysphoria – or is no one allowed to say?). Criticism of cosmetic surgery industry is muted because one of the ways in which trans activists defend ‘gender medicine’ is by claiming that boob jobs and facelifts are ‘gender affirming’. We forget that feminists have not been in favour of those things, either. If one is okay – and the ‘gender-affirming’ care has to be – the other is, too.

Old things are not progressive, and ageing female bodies are the least progressive things of all. The more artificial a body – protect the dolls! – the better. This is reducing female bodies to nothing more than external appearance. It is total regression. Of course, you then find – as writers such as Manne and Lindy West have acknowledged – that you cannot change how the entire world responds to your appearance just on your say so. So you settle for less, perhaps in trying not to value your body at all. Still, your body is you.

**

“What, then, is fat?” asked Naomi Wolf in 1990’s The Beauty Myth:

“Fat is portrayed in the literature of the myth as expendable female filth; virtually cancerous matter, an inert or treacherous infiltration into the body of nauseating bulk waste. The demonic characterizations of a simple body substance do not arise from its physical properties but from old-fashioned misogyny, for above all fat is female; it is the medium and regulator of female sexual characteristics.”

Reading that now, I think there is an enormous overlap between how fat was perceived then and how femaleness itself is perceived now, certainly within circles seeking to shut down all talk of why sex matters. Pipe down about your biologically female bodies, ladies, lest everyone notice how inferior you are.

It does get to me. If I see too many people justifying breast-binding, puberty blockers, ‘top surgery’, it does bring on a resurgence of those old feelings of shame, as if the shape I am now makes me less my true self – less valuable, less imbued with an interior life – than when I was very thin or even very fat. As if just by existing in my female body as it is now tells on me.

By contrast, the things that make me feel genuinely positive about my body are the things it has done – all the more so as I age and foresee my own capabilities waning. I am proud of having children, which of course, you’re not meant to be proud of. Take pride in the fact that only female humans give birth, and that this is an amazing thing, and you’re a nasty pro-natalist, wanting to force all women to become walking wombs. I’m also proud of smaller things – my half-marathon running, which is only impressive on my own terms. Of course, one is not supposed to be proud of female athleticism in any sense. We must pretend that female bodies are as strong and fast as male ones, as if to admit otherwise is to admit to some overall inferiority (given that whatever we can do that male bodies can’t doesn’t count – or even adds to our lower status).

It is not feminist to lie about the female body, as if that can be the only way in which female humans get to count. You can’t make other people find you sexy. You can approve of women feeling happy in their own skin, but how do you actually make that happen? Not by repackaging objectification as sex positivity and female body hatred as anti-essentialism. You will only end up hating yourself more.

I don’t think you can be body positive unless you like bodies. Even female ones. Even old ones. Even ones you can’t reshape and use in the way you want to use them. Until you’ve understood that, nothing is going to change.

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Why do I remember this crap from almost forty years ago, when I can barely remember the plot of a novel I read last week? Because I was obsessed with it. I first watched Neighbours – and later the video for ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ – in the sitting room of Ladyfield East, a now-defunct adolescent psychiatric unit where I was being treated for anorexia myself. I write ‘treated’, though to be honest, I’m not sure it’s the right word. ‘Treatment’ involved signing a ‘contract’ which awarded ‘privileges’ (getting reading matter, letters, phone calls, visits, eventually a few hours out of bed) on the basis of weight gain. It wasn’t great, but it was better than the previous place, where there’d been forced tube feeding and no privileges. When I first arrived at Ladyfield, I spent days on end staring at one wall for a few hours, then another, measuring time through sips of Complan. Being in a room watching Neighbours, alongside adolescent boys who thought the TV was sending them secret messages, was a privilege indeed – except in order to achieve it, I’d had to become one pound heavier than Charlene (or at least what the Daily Record claimed Charlene/Minogue to weigh). To put it mildly, this did not seem fair.

Why was I ill – so ill, apparently, that ‘potential withdrawal of privileges’ still hung over my head  – when Minogue was busy launching a worldwide music career? Why wasn’t anyone withdrawing her far more substantial ‘privileges’? Why were none of the Ladyfield staff so much as commenting on this (on the contrary, I’d even overheard one describe Kylie as “bonny”)? Why was everyone such a fucking hypocrite?

It's funny how easily this rage all comes flooding back to me. Throughout the time I was being ‘treated’ for anorexia I felt I was being lied to all the time. “No one cares what size you are.” “No one ever thought you were fat.” “Everyone eats full-fat yoghurt.” “No one will say anything bad if you gain weight.” Total bollocks, the lot of it. As if I’d imagined years of being told I was fat and ugly, as if I hadn’t felt the shame of developing breasts at ten, as if I hadn’t always known the difference between me and the dainty, ‘naturally’ skinny girls whose status was never to be appropriated by the likes of me. As if a world of TV adverts, slogans repeated in the playground – Crunch ‘n’ Slim, the Scarsdale Diet, the Cambridge Diet, Lean Cuisine, “somebody isn’t using Marvel”, “if you can pinch more than an inch” – had all been in my head. As if, when I’d sensed losing those breasts might have some kind of protective function against sexual harassment, I hadn’t been entirely correct. All of this gaslighting, and now this. Now I’m meant to pretend that I am ill and Charlene the mechanic in Neighbours – who is my exact height, several years older and weighs less than me – is totally fine. Apart from when the tabloids insist that she’s not.

To be absolutely clear: I am in no way suggesting that eating disorders are down to celebrity and diet culture (or even that Kylie Minogue cannot be naturally thin). What I will say– and I’m hardly the first – is that some narratives and cultural trends don’t exactly help. If you reach the stage of being so underweight that you are hospitalised and set a target weight, the chances are that reaching weight will make you heavier and curvier than many a woman you see in magazines, on billboards and in TV series – a woman playing a role in which she’s just going about her everyday life, in which no one says “fuck me, Charlene, shouldn’t you be sectioned?” It messes with your head. It makes the world feel even more untrustworthy. It wasn’t that I particularly wanted to look like Kylie. I was obsessed with her thinness, but then I was also obsessed with the thinness of Nancy Reagan. I was obsessed with the thinness of any woman who, so it seemed to me, was allowed to roam the world freely in the kind of body that, if I were to have it, would lead to threats and feeding tubes and isolation. Why them and not me? The minute I was deemed ‘healthy’ (heavy) enough to have access to Smash Hits and Just Seventeen, the sight of these women made me outraged, at everyone, but most of all myself.  

I felt I should have been more like them, only I didn’t know how. ‘Recovery’ always felt like a compromise, selling out, putting what – watching Neighbours? – ahead of having a body that would most represent who I need to be. That I could be ‘bought’ by ‘privileges’ – books, phone calls, getting dressed for the day – felt like confirmation of what I’d always feared about myself: that I was just some slag, exactly the type who’d get that type of body before all the other girls, and then delude herself into thinking she could pull it all back, undoing all the things that body had done. Other women could navigate ultra-thinness, but not me. Never me.

The truth is, I still feel this sometimes. I feel it most of all when I see very thin women in the public eye – actresses, models, singers – especially the ones who are shrinking in plain sight. The sight of them still gets to me. But whose fault is that?

**

When I was diagnosed with anorexia, Karen Carpenter was not long dead, while Lena Zavaroni was dying, very slowly, in plain sight. People were not kind about either woman. Morbidly curious, but not kind. I watched Terry Wogan interview Zavaroni in the mid-eighties. It felt as though she was publicly apologising (the question “what brought on that slimmer’s disease?” – which she answers insightfully – is responded to with a clunking “we like to see you back to your chunky self”). When Zavaroni later appeared on the panel on Blankety Blank, members of my family discussed how “her head looks too big for her body” (the term “lollipop ladies” was not yet in vogue as a way of disparaging famous women who looked thus). What Zavaroni attracted was not so much compassion as fascinated disgust, not only at the sight of her but at the moral choice she was presumed to have made. How stupid, how vain, how selfish, to do that to yourself. As for Karen Carpenter – great voice, but what a cautionary tale (there’s a horrendous Nationwide interview from 1981 in which an obviously sick Carpenter is pressured to ‘confess’. There’s no warmth extended towards her at all.)

Attitudes towards anorexia sufferers have improved greatly since those days, although undercurrents of hostility remain. My third hospitalisation, in the mid-nineties, was vastly better than the previous two, and I rarely heard staff describe the illness in terms of selfishness or vanity (even if some of them still thought of it in that way). What I also noticed during that time, however, was a different sort of panic about very thin women in the public eye. If you had to be nice about anorexia sufferers – or superficially nice, anyways – you didn’t have to be nice about Kate Moss, Calista Flockhart or Jodie Kidd. What mattered was not so much whether those women were ill themselves, but whether they were causing illness in others, now that ‘the anorexic’ was no longer such an oddity.

If you are someone who first became aware of media panic over ‘the too-thin female celebrity’ in the nineties (see: heroin chic, the ‘waif’ and the entire female cast of Ally McBeal) or the noughties (‘starve wars’, pro-ana and the ‘cult’ of size zero), you may find it odd for me to have started by mentioning Kylie Minogue. By the nineties, she’d dropped off the radar as far as this discussion was concerned. This may have been partly to do with a brief career dip but also, I suspect, the fact that however small she was, she wasn’t getting any smaller, and where’s the excitement in that? Other women, thinner women, those getting ever thinner, were being vilified instead. In this new eating disorder-literate era, this vilification was being done in the name of saving other, non-famous women and girls. I often think the term ‘concern trolling’ is misused – sometimes it’s just ‘concern’ – but here, it seems apt. The way some female celebrities were treated for the ‘crime’ of becoming too thin was appalling.

A 1999 Guardian article on Flockhart and other ‘too thin’ stars (including Victoria Beckham, Liz Hurley and Coutney Cox) described Flockhart’s body, viewed in recent holiday shots, as looking as though it is “constructed out of flesh-covered pipe-cleaners”. The journalist deems it “ironic that these new photos of Flockhart appear just days after the death of Lena Zavaroni” and quotes an eating disorders centre director declaring Flockhart and her skinny peers “irresponsible” and “deceitful” for claiming to eat healthily. That period of particular cruelty towards the female celebrity – documented so well in Sarah Ditum’s Toxic – turned bullying the most emaciated stars into a sport. It was the heyday of Heat and Closer, with covers offering regular close-ups of xylophone breastbones, thigh gaps and jutting hipbones, expressing mock horror at images the editors must have known would be used as thinspiration by anyone who was genuinely ill. A 2005 photo of Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie – look at how thin they are! Isn’t it awful! Aren’t you horrified! – became the go-to image to illustrate the ‘size zero’ crisis. When it turned out that some women (Mary-Kate Olsen, Portia de Rossi) really were in treatment for anorexia, the attacks on them were muted, but this never seemed to prompt restraint when it came to anyone else. In a Times article from this year, Flockhart recalls that period as one in which “I felt like I was on trial for something”.

For me, performative thin-woman panic reached its peak with an utterly ludicrous 2007 documentary in which Louise Redknapp promised to reveal ‘The Truth about Size Zero’. She did this by giving herself 30 days in which to starve herself down from a UK size 8 to a size 4, on the basis that no one could have worked out for themselves that self-imposed starvation makes you miserable and ruins your health. The show was, predictably, mined for diet tips by members of pro-ana forums. In case this does not sound mad enough, this was only one of several ‘watch a previously healthy woman starve herself to show you just how crazy starving yourself is’ programmes from that time (at least when men prove the bleeding obvious, they get to do it while eating McDonald’s). There was ‘SuperSlim Me’ with Dawn O’Porter and ‘Super Skinny Me: The Race to Size Double Zero’ with Kate Spicer and Louise Burke (again, why do I remember this crap? Because of course I do).

So those were our choices: watch one group of women being hated on for being too thin, or watch another group of women become like the first group of women, but only to show you how stupid being a member of the first group was. Meanwhile, any woman who wasn’t in either group was, by definition, too fat. Let’s not pretend there was any space in between (as Britney Spears sang in ‘Piece of Me’, “I’m Mrs She’s too big now she’s too thin”). Reality TV talent show winners would routinely start off a ‘normal’ size (that is, normal-thin) only to become smaller and smaller (see: the girls of Hear’Say or all members of Girls Aloud). They would be judged for getting thinner, but also judged if they failed to do so. Going back to Kylie, I remember reading a review of her sister Dannii’s first single, ‘Love and Kisses’, which mentioned, apropos of nothing whatsoever, that Dannii “weighs more than Kylie” (it was never clear to me which sister was being disapproved of here – it may have been both at once). By the time Dannii had become an X-Factor judge in the noughties, she, too, was ultra-thin, and who could blame her? (She has recently discussed the pain of feeling portrayed as “the fat, ugly sister of Kylie”.)

In Flockhart’s recent Times interview, the interviewer (Hadley Freeman) comments that “it’s strange to accuse female celebrities of maliciously influencing young women, when they themselves are under an enormous amount of pressure and possibly losing weight because of that”. They are meant to be thin – their livelihoods require them to be somewhat malnourished all the time – yet they are not supposed to embarrass anyone by taking it too far. Instead they are supposed to exist on the edge of not-thin-enough, which is always only one breath away. There are times when I think the weird messaging of anorexia – the extreme over-conformity, the tiny, silent body that becomes so loud and disruptive – comes from a kind of rage (at least in some cases, certainly mine). It becomes an endless pushing – “you want me to be smaller? This enough? How about this?” There is an aggression there, and a kind of mockery. I find myself increasingly thinking this about female celebrities – not Flockhart in particular, who seems relatively stable – who get thinner and thinner and thinner. I wonder whether it’s not necessarily anorexia (or not in the usual sense), but a kind of desperate “fuck you”. Your career depends on you being sick, to a degree. Fuck them. Why not go all out? Why not show them just how much this hurts? Why not become shamefully, mortifyingly tiny? Why not completely ruin yourself, wreck the body entirely? If you can’t win – and you absolutely can’t – why not write ‘loser’ on yourself in great big capital letters?

Then again, I may be projecting. I get so absorbed, I find it very hard to tell.

**

When I saw the trailer for Wicked, I was immediately struck by the thinness of Galinda (Ariana Grande). I’d been planning to see the film but then I wondered if I could bear it (I’ve never watched beyond the first episode of Stranger Things because of the thinness of one actress – and if you have watched it, you will know which one I mean). I really wanted to see Wicked, though, so I told myself, maybe it’s some kind of CGI trickery where they’re deliberately making her look more ethereal and angular. Maybe it’s because Glinda has to be “an almost translucent figure of gauzy delicacy”. Maybe Grande isn’t actually that thin in real life.

Well, seems I was wrong about that. Is it acceptable to comment on it, though? Or does that make me no better than those who bullied and shamed ‘size zero’ women two decades ago? Would I now be guilty of the sin of ‘thin-shaming’?

According to Elle magazine, ‘Ariana Grande’s weight should not be up for discussion’: 

“She’s a two-time Grammy winner, a bestselling artist, beauty mogul, and now, a big screen actor – but Wicked’s press tour discourse is dominated by her appearance. When will we learn?”

I understand the point being made. Nonetheless, I’m uncomfortable about the “we” here. I rather think glossy magazines such as Elle have done far more to reduce women to bones and body fat percentages than I, or indeed most people, have. I don’t want to be lectured on what is and isn’t up for discussion as though the only purpose could ever be to detract from Grande’s commercial and artistic achievements, or to force her to ‘confess’ or apologise for some non-existent crime, or to blame her for the illnesses of others. I don’t want to scrutinise Grande’s body, or make the kind of comparisons the Guardian did back in 1999. But there’s also something wrong about responding to this – by which I mean not Grande as an individual, but this absurd degree of thinness in so many female celebrities – as though we cannot see it at all.

I’m sure it doesn’t help ultra-thin celebrities to tell them they are too thin. I think of the way in which, even if you are a ‘normal’, non-famous ultra-thin woman, being labelled and scrutinised can be entirely counter-productive. With the ‘anorexic’ label comes a loss of credibility. Who are you to decide what goes into your body? Who are you to decide what size you should be? When I became ‘an anorexic’ in the eyes of others, I became precisely what I’d been trying not to be: other people’s property, flesh to be invaded and manipulated on the basis that I was no longer fit to manage it myself. How might this presumption of ownership feel if you are world famous? Grotesque and terrifying, I should imagine. It sure as hell wouldn’t make me want to gain weight. It would make me want to insist I was healthy (fuck you, haters!), thereby making it even more difficult to admit otherwise, or to find a way back. It would also make me aware that if I ever did gain weight, the entire world would be waiting to note each pound gained, possibly with headlines declaring me ‘the picture of health’ (if you understand why anorexia sufferers hate being called ‘pretty’ or ‘well’, you can understand how devastating such headlines would be). All this is an argument for saying nothing when famous women are disappearing in plain sight. I’d like to think, however, that it’s a more complex argument than ‘talking about a female celebrity’s weight is body-shaming’’. I just don’t think that’s enough. 

Then again, none of it is enough, because here is the problem: the bones are still visible, and the thinness of some celebrities is far more Zavaroni/Carpenter-esque than the extreme slimness of late eighties Kylie Minogue. We should not be shaming women, but we should be shaming the culture that creates this, and how can we do so without naming the problem? Why is a decision being made – again and again – to normalise talented, once-healthy women looking so ill?

When I watch a film or TV programme featuring a very thin actress, especially one whom I recall being bigger, it can feel to me as though I’m watching a scene in which someone has just had their arm chopped off, blood spurting everywhere, while everyone else is pretending not to notice. I’m not thinking ‘god, what a terrible person that actress is’. I’m thinking ‘this looks totally bizarre’ and ‘why doesn’t anyone else give a shit?’ I find myself distracted by thoughts of how weird it is that, according to the storyline, this ultra-thin person can just go about her life, same as everyone else, despite looking just like the women I remember from group therapy. I wonder why the character doesn’t have any strange food or exercise rituals, or why, if some incident disrupts the flow of her day, there’s no distress at this ‘messing with’ meal plans (though I accept that this may not always apply in the age of Ozempic). I wonder why these characters care so much about what’s going on around them and aren’t in some sense removed because they’re so fucking hungry and cold all the time. If the plot requires them to have a pregnancy scare – or even to be pregnant – I find it ridiculous. As if that character has enough body fat to menstruate! As if they experience sexual desire! I don’t expect everyone – or even most people – to think these things. I am viewing this through a very particular lens, but even so, I cannot switch off from the fact that I am watching someone whose real body is being hurt by something – a culture, a system, an expectation - and no one else seems to care. And if I say nothing – on the basis that I’m not one of the ‘shamers’ – then it feels like complicity. It feels like saying “go ahead, suffer, as long as you don’t die – as long as it doesn’t get in the way of our fun”.

One example of progress in the way we talk about eating disorders is that it is no longer believed that you can tell by looking that someone doesn’t have an ED. You can be anorexic or bulimic without being underweight. Sometimes this flips over into the claim that you can’t tell by looking that someone does have an ED. I am less convinced by this. True, you can’t always tell. There can be other reasons for an individual looking the way they do, but when that type of thinness is that widespread in a particular cultural environment, you can make a good guess about what’s happening with most people. I don’t want to not care about this. I think everyone should, yet I don’t know a way to discuss it which won’t, in some way, make it worse for someone.

There has to be a better way than what went before. I don’t think that better way is silence. Not when we can still see what’s right in front of us.