Is the era of body positivity over? How a new generation became obsessed with thinness

Light, who wrote the Sunday Times bestseller You Are Not A Before Picture, is a staunch activist for women’s bodies of all shapes and sizes and regularly posts tabloid clippings to her Instagram profile from the nineties and noughties, a time when women’s bodies were routinely shamed on the front cover, to show how far we’ve come. Phrases like “fat thighs”, and “porky pins”, leap from the webpage as I enter her profile to check the ‘Fashion Victim of the Week’ she’s posted. This time, a 20-something-year-old Mariah Carey. (The story that followed? One of 15-year-old Charlotte Church, under the headline: ‘She’s a big girl now’.)

To look in the face of it, considerations like these boast layers of horror. They feel anachronistic, ancient, and Victorian. But as I glance around in March 2025, I feel the weathervanes of the social-media beauty standard spinning in a new direction. With the benefit of hindsight, I see similar vice-like grips on young women today; slim, rake-like women boast the top rungs of the social ladder; women who were lauded for their fuller figures — Adele, Lizzo, Barbie Ferreira — turn up noticeably smaller to events; conversations in the media are discussing women’s bodies again, and rates of eating disorders have been consistently on the rise since the pandemic. 

The international conversation too — at least, in the West, where considerations about choice, fat, and food tend towards the aesthetic — has centred around weight loss, as the greatest superpowers in the world grasp with morbidly obese populations. 

It speaks volumes that a suite of pharmaceutical products which combat the genetic tendencies, environmental forces, and behaviours that determine weight gain, have been swept up by those who don’t need it, but need instead to target a craving for thinness, one which has persistently eaten away at the mind like a social parasite of womanhood.

“Everyone is suddenly showing up 25 pounds lighter,” Andy Cohen, the TV producer behind the Real Housewives franchise tweeted in September 2022. “What happens when they stop taking #Ozempic?????” 

Ozempic is part of an expanding class of drugs called GLP-1 receptor agonists, which have dramatically altered the treatment of diabetes and obesity. It is approved by the Food and Drug Administration only for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes — a condition that accounts for some 90% of all diabetes cases — and has been available since 2017. 

Its name is now shorthand for the entire category of weight-loss injections — Wegovy, Mounjaro — many of which have cropped up as regular conversation starters among showbiz reporters. This system has allowed consumers of popular content to gamify celebrity events with comments like “I bet she is on it,” or “there’s no way they could look like that without it” and enter an era where we consider weight all of the time. 

Much of this, as with everything in these past few years, can be traced back to covid, a worldwide ordeal that many claimed would be the great equaliser, yet resulted in those with the fewest suffering the most. As a result, health — the kind that can be measured in facts and figures — suddenly became propelled as a beacon of status. 

This snowballed into a supercharging of one’s food and exercise habits, allowing us to maintain total control over our bodies following a period of none. Almost as if we’re saying: “If we track our steps, sleep, protein, calories, vitamins, minerals, water, and hormones, we can’t get sick… right?” 

In a section of the world where food is plentiful, accessible, and affordable, the abstinence of it proves a higher set of needs, one that points towards self-actualisation. It also correlates with the one central consideration of health that persists despite near-constant retaliation: That thinness equals health and weight is proof of moral choices. 

The cultural fear of fat plays a hugely significant role when it comes to these considerations; doctors regularly misdiagnose those who are overweight and employers frequently don’t hire them. More overtly, as celebrities and catwalk models get smaller — Vogue Business released a new size-inclusivity report in October which said, “We are facing a worrying return to using extremely thin models” — the average consumer believes by reinforced ideas that they, too, should be slimmer.

Worryingly, this chimes with the current right-wing swing, a new world order which is seeing gains for the Conservative Right and losses for young women and girls. 

Politics and fashion have always been closely linked, but perhaps never more egregiously than now. 

A new wave of conservative beauty and fashion trends one might think more suited to a 1950s housewife than a 2025 preteen have taken hold, like trad wives, tattoo removal, long hair, dissolving filler, coquette beauty, blush, quiet luxury, old money, cottage-core, no makeup, and Utah curls. Notably, each of these trends centres around a slim, white physique, something that is being pushed at every opportunity on young, impressionable social media-using women. 

As progressive laws are rescinded and pejorative language we thought we’d moved past returns to daily vernacular, this is perhaps the most disappointing factor of the recurring ‘thin is in’ era.

From the Renaissance right up until the Reformation, the female body ideal in the West was defined by fleshy proportionality: Thick, plush chests and literature-inspiring curvatures. Then, as the Industrial Revolution produced increasingly sedentary lifestyles and easier access to food, a new industry roared to life, one which saw self-actualisation found in reduced body sizes. 

This ideal continued well into the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the Gibson Girl — the personification of the feminine ideal of physical attractiveness as portrayed by the illustrations of artist Charles Dana Gibson — came into fashion, and thereafter when mass-produced clothing became commonplace.

A subsequent push against fat stigma has persisted since the late 1960s when 500 people met in New York’s Central Park to protest against anti-fat bias by “sitting in” and burning diet books. Unfortunately, the desire to obtain thinness by new and faddish means has persisted much longer and louder since then, with weight obsession existing as almost a central tenet of female socialisation.

As a teenager, I agonised over weight gained and lost, pivoting from cabbage soup diets to bowls of Special K to pro-anorexia content to maintain some semblance of control. It was around this time that the thin-by-any-means-necessary movement gained more up-to-date slogans, like “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”, one regularly attributed to Kate Moss, or workout routines, like the 750 sit-ups per day once associated with Britney Spears. 

To venture back into that mindset, while also considering the role the supervision of women’s bodies has played, one can draw a straight line between trends involving women’s bodies and the limited freedoms that framed them. 

As women have gained ground politically and socially, hampering restrictions like the cursed motto of ‘thin is in’ aim to push back on progress and maintain the status quo; corsets were popularised as women entered the workforce and an emphasis on thinness as standard arose as genuine equality looked possible. Recent decades have seen a considerable rise in women’s social power, so it’s unsurprising, albeit, disappointing, to see women feel the need to physically and emotionally shrink themselves to fit into goalposts that were never really open to them anyway.

Alas, the purpose of a body is not to be thin. It is to be meaty, moving, forward-thinking and full of health. It is to spring, jump and walk forward instead of skulking or slipping back. Most eminently, it is not to die, which people who get caught up in this way of thinking can do prematurely. 

The sad thing, this time around, is that we think we’re doing it for ourselves, our brands and our social media presence. In fact, we’re doing it for 1950s ideals. This time, there’s just a TikTok trend to go along with it.