The performances of Irish athletes at the recent European Championships were so impressive as to be hard to summarise.
The team competing in Birmingham won four medals, but these felt like the crests of waves in high water. Alongside Mark English’s 800m gold, Kate O’Connor’s heptathlon gold, Rhasidat Adeleke’s 200m silver and Andrew Coscoran’s 1,500m bronze were a set of further excellent performances. Exciting top five finishes from Sarah Healy (fifth 1500m) and Nicola Tuthill (fifth, hammer throw) and recognition that injured stars like Sharlene Mawdsley could have made a big impact mean exciting days ahead for Irish sports fans.
The same week, we sent a huge swim team to Paris. Two women won five medals. Mona McSharry medalled in all breaststroke distances (200m, bronze; 100m, silver; 50m, bronze). Ellen Walshe took golds in the 200m and 400m iterations of the unimaginably demanding individual medley event. Both played their parts in breaking the Irish medley relay record with Lottie Cullen and Grace Davison. As a swimming fan, it was thrilling to see how many line-ups had an Irish competitor or two in them.
At the same time, different imagery was emerging from the pop-cultural world. Particularly following the video release of the lead single from Ariana Grande’s new album Petal, the discourse announces that super-thin is back. More broadly, catwalks and press tours highlight a slew of increasingly slender bodies as an ongoing spectacle. Hip bones and clavicles have returned, and the proliferation of semaglutide promises that our own osseous protrusions may be just around the corner.
READ MORE
For millennials, it’s familiar terrain. In the distant landscape of ‘90s and ‘00s TV and magazine culture, similar messaging dominated. America’s Next Top Model’s judges offered diatribes equating thinness with beauty and programming like Supersize vs Superskinny normalised a shocking body-commentary culture. In 1999, Chris Evans publicly weighed Spice Girls Victoria Beckham and Geri Halliwell shortly after giving birth to see if they had returned to their pre-baby proportions.
Today’s media is different. It is worse. While my generation of youngsters may have performed sit-ups obsessively in bedrooms after reading the latest Heat magazine, consumers nowadays have a constant feed of this content running directly into their hands. Images of the latest extremely thin starlets are posted as aspirational alongside insidious messaging styled as self-help: “Your stomach isn’t rumbling, it’s applauding.” Algorithmic targeting coaxes curious onlookers further into the maelstrom.
The return of this familiar silhouette, especially after the brief interlude of a different “thicker” body ideal, has been described as part of a backlash against “Woke 1” – the proliferation of a politically and sociologically sensitive lens that became a big cultural language of the mid-2010s. Body positivity, the idea that people should be unabashed and loving towards bodies that weren’t “ideals”, was important.
People discuss the current return to skinny as a rejection of “woke”, but a pernicious mixture remains. The empowered language of body positivity is now marshalled to claim any efforts to critique dangerous trends for thinness are abusive and antifeminist. On SkinnyTok, the subsection of TikTok devoted to “thinspiration”, one finds people claiming extreme caloric restriction is the new mindfulness.
Communicating about such bodies is hazardous. We shouldn’t confuse critiquing dangerous trends with cruel commentary on individual bodies. Equally, we risk stigmatising people with naturally thin physiques as irresponsible ideologues. However, it’s also inappropriate to ignore the messaging being transmitted and how it normalises medically dangerous behaviour. Many newly super-thin celebrities claim to be in the best health of their lives. For such media-savvy individuals to fail to appreciate the danger that rhetoric poses for young fans suggests to me that many such people are not, in fact, in good health.
In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf wrote about thinness as a particularly dangerous element of beauty standards used to keep people (usually women) distracted and disengaged. These unattainable ideals encourage spending vast sums of money on achieving an unachievable appearance – this now includes expensive medications with no end date and popular procedures like buccal fat removal (mining fat from the cheeks) and blepharoplasty (eyelids). Glorifying excessive thinness encourages literal disempowerment via practised long-form self-deprivation. It subdues and exhausts.
I wonder if one approach to this issue is a kind of replacement strategy. Many of us have a hard-to-control fixation around bodies, our own and those of others. When, instead of social media, we spend time watching a range of people using their bodies to run faster than ever before, combine all strokes in one glorious burst of swimming or throw heavy stuff as far as humanly possible, it influences us to conceive of our bodies as our connections to the world of activity, as capacities for doing things, not just a temporary clothes-size or shrinking project.
Of course sporting bodies are often normative too, but the attention athletic performances draw towards our physical capacities is very different from the reflection that follows scrolling through morbid images praising highly-visible scapulas. At least, this “demonstration effect”, if coupled with appropriate supports for participation, could encourage people to reimagine some of the context around bodies that this fraught media landscape invites.
As onlookers commented, the Birmingham stadium was frequently pretty empty. Better promotion and support for attending these performances could help challenge the current fashion for frailty. Further, in its championing of the strength and partnership men and women athletes share, sports might equally counter the tradwife and manosphere issues in which government has recently shown interest.
- Clare Moriarty is a Research Ireland Enterprise Fellow working at University College Dublin and the National Library of Ireland
