How should we talk about ultra-thin women?

After decades of celebrity thin-shaming, should we all now shut up?

Around 1987/88, certain sectors of the British press began accusing Kylie Minogue – then best known for playing Charlene in Neighbours – of suffering from anorexia. Reports routinely mentioned Minogue’s height (5’1”, same as mine) and weight (not mentioning it, but god knows, I remember it). They’d also repeat a claim she’d made, at some point or other, to “survive on prawns, fruit and water”. Obviously denials were issued, with Smash Hits insisting that Kylie was “just slim” (this was somewhat undermined by an interview in the Smash Hits offices in which she “quipped” that a carton of chocolate soya milk was “lunch”). Whatever the truth of it, any much-anticipated Karen Carpenter/Lena Zavaroni-style crash never happened.

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.