how to take up less space

on the thinning of ideals.

If there’s one defining spirit of the 2020s, it’s emaciated adults in first world countries.

Pointed collarbones, gaunt smiles, hollow clavicles and shapeless torsos are the look de jour, enabled by peptides, unregulated GLP-1 usage and poorly-wielded influence.

The internet provides the perfect journal to document the thinning of society, from the twinkle in a cosmetic giant’s eye to the way each red carpet now presents the latest skeletal figures to us, vaguely resembling the people we once recognised on our screens and in our own bodies.

A decade on from the All About That Bass era, no celebrity seems unscathed by this teeny tiny image of beauty. Ergo, none of us are, either.

From the top down, we have been able to chronologise the thin to thinner pipeline the way we chronologise political downfalls. We have an extensive and 24/7 archive of the ready-made thinness that currently sweeps our feeds and our impressionable, dysmorphic views.

At every metaphorical shelf of this suffocating library, there are purchasable fixes to non-issues. We know that when you create a problem, you can sell the solution, but when physical nips and tucks become so accessible that they can be experimental, we’ve reached a new low.

Body positivity in its earliest iteration didn’t have the black market access that we do now. On the flipside, body neutrality will never exist for as long as profit can be made from the way we look at our mirrors.

So, when we look good, we feel good, but to look ‘good’, we must feel clinically unhealthy at the hands of unmedical intervention. Neutrality at any stage of the above would be nice, albeit impossible.

The broader agenda might be the figurative shrinking of women, where to be frail is to be conformant; to be weak is to be soft and pliant to the ways of patriarchy. We’re told that no woman is more woman the one who obeys, never mind the lack of curves, cushioning and visible organs that truly symptomise a woman.

The ability to be confrontational, to fight and be fought are afforded by a base level of functioning. When women are weak, they are meek, too emotionally spent to change the course of oppression. When the goal is to be patriarchally sanctioned as a woman, we have lost.

The more obvious agenda is the worldwide palate for children. Hairless skin and countable ribs are signs of youth, a brittle social income. It’s only with age that we understand the girlishness of a ribcage is less a shield against social ostracism and more a reminder of rampant paedophilia.

This is no indictment on those who feel the pressure, for to live in a fatphobic society in a fat body is not for the weak. The pressure is profitable; the pressure is pervasive.

But when the strongest resistance is simply existing, where’s the turning point?