Skinny girl summer is back

It's rough out here

Everyone knew it was coming when low-waisted jeans were back in trend after a fifteen-year hiatus. The girls on social media are tinier, pilates is “in” while weight lifting is “out,” and Ozempic is all the rage. Skinny girl summer is back, but have we ever left? 

Our fatphobia is society’s worst-kept secret. It is well established that a thinner frame is a major tenet of our beauty standards. Overweight people are discriminated against in the workplace, in healthcare, and in our interpersonal relations and perceptions. It has been proven that women are monetarily affected by their weight, with a negative linear relationship existing between women’s increase in weight and their pay. For women, starving yourself is lucrative, as in that study “Very thin” women earned approximately $22,000 more than their average-weight counterparts.

Strides were made in the mid-2010s with the body positivity movement. It finally became mainstream for people to accept how they look and feel confident in their bodies regardless of external standards. Big-name brands such as Aerie were celebrated for including women above a size two in their advertising. These sentiments put Victoria’s Secret, the pinnacle of unrealistic beauty standards with its iconic fashion show, on the decline with almost 300 stores closing since 2020. In my experience, in these years it became somewhat of a faux pas to comment on someone’s weight or even call yourself “fat.” Enlightened people never glorified skinniness, at least outwardly. 

Along with the body positivity movement came a Kardashian-esque beauty standard, one which glorified a larger behind and fuller hips. The look was crafted by heavy weight-lifting or a BBL procedure. This beauty standard was appropriated from black women, finally “acceptable” by society’s standards when those features were flaunted on white bodies. The pressure to meet the beauty standard was still ever-present, of course, but that beauty standard was a tad more realistic and allowed for more wiggle room. 

While pockets of fat or muscle in specific places may oscillate in and out of trend, from early 2000s Playboy boobs to the BBL era, it goes unsaid that these features must always be accompanied by thinness to remain the beauty standard. It was good to have a big butt and wide hips as long as you also had a tiny waist, remaining “slim thick” instead of just “thick.” 

The body positivity movement helped to build better values toward self-acceptance, yet only true believers could completely abandon society’s oppressing beauty ideals. For the general public, body positivity was a bit of a facade, a marketable band-aid on the massive problem of beauty standards generated by patriarchy. In the past few years, the facade has diminished and pop culture is back to idealizing dangerously thin bodies. 

This standard is being pushed on people both implicitly and explicitly. As I scroll on my TikTok, all of the most beautiful girls are so very thin. Most of the major influencers have slimmed down, many being accused of taking a GLP-1 drug. The message I passively take in as I scroll through supermodels cosplaying regular girls is that these outfits look so flattering because they are on such a small frame. 

More explicitly, TikTok users are bombarded with up-and-coming influencers yelling at us to be skinny. The most prominent of these influencers is @kingkrabbypatty. To give you a taste of her content, most videos go something like this one: “Yes I’m fucking walking back and forth in my fucking apartment because you are not going to catch me putting on any fucking weight.” Besides the excessive use of the F-bomb in every video, her content is so aggressive and practically pushes a fatphobic mentality on unassuming viewers who happen to see her on their FYP. 

Another example of this type of pro-skinny influencer is @livsschmidt, who posts titles such as “What I eat in a day at the office (to stay skinny as someone who works a 9am-5pm).” Five years ago, Schmidt likely would have posted this video of her two-solid-meal day minus the parenthetical, with her minuscule calories serving as a dog whistle for viewers looking for pro-Ana content. Yet, today these influencers scream from the rooftops their intentions to be extremely thin, and it is totally normalized. This type of content creator believes that their honesty is refreshing for women sick of watching celebrities claim that they stay skinny from hot lemon water. However, they are still vocally pushing toxic beauty standards to impressionable TikTok viewers, which could lead people to unhealthy eating habits and mental disorders. 

So, taboo videos that would have been hidden in a corner of the Internet a few years ago are now perfectly socially acceptable, and even promoted by followers desperate to lose weight. Skinniness is back with a vengeance, determined to get all of us in its weight-loss grasp regardless of the detriment to our mental and physical health. 

This shift in the beauty standard is not something that is just reserved for celebrities and influencers. As a member of Gen Z, I have witnessed how the yo-yo body ideals have affected me and all my friends in our daily lives. I have had conversations with my friends, even my most progressive ones, about the desire to be thinner. We talk more about workouts and eating than we used to. In the past, I was not into cardio, content with heavy weight lifting at the gym. Yet this year, I always made sure to hop on the treadmill every time I exercised. I stare at my stomach from a side angle way more than I should, and I know I am not alone in doing that.  

Despite knowing the noxious effects of unrealistic beauty standards pushed on social media, everyone continues feeding into them. We are the ones who demanded for the Victoria’s Secret fashion show to come back in the fall, all while knowing the insecurities it gave to young girls in the past. We are the ones who give these pro-skinny influencers attention and catapult them to fame. I am the one who perpetuates this mentality in my own head. 

I guess we do this for the same reason all people continue to do things that are bad for them – it gives us some sense of pleasure or payout. For most women, that payout stems from being desirable to men. When we live in a world in which so much of our worth is based on our appearance, we cannot blame anyone for trying to succeed based on rules that were not set by them. 

As TikTok has enabled an uber-fast trend cycle, I hope that heroin chic thinness goes out of style soon. Not that body types should be trends, but I wouldn’t mind if all of this skinny content vanished from my feed. To stay grounded, we all need to try to tune out some of this noise. Rather than body positivity, which prescribes the notion of always loving your body, I much prefer the philosophy of body neutrality. Body neutrality means exactly what it is called, to be neutral toward your body rather than place pressure on yourself to love it or hate it. You just appreciate your body as a vessel that allows you to live life. 

If you feel yourself going down an unhealthy rabbit hole, I would recommend staying off of social media. It can seriously do wondrous things for your mind, and I promise you won’t miss much. Unfortunately, I get all my article ideas from TikTok, so please pray for my mental health. It's rough out here.