Let’s talk about Ariana Grande’s body She represents an ideal of adulthood

The content creators justified this on the grounds that they were doing their women readers a favour by undoing the mystique of celebrity perfection. “Don’t get us wrong, we love celebrities, but we don’t put them on a pedestal,” said Heat’s editor Mark Frith in 2004. As the cult of size zero grew, celebrity body shaming grew to encompass the “scary skinny” girls such as the Olsen twins and Nicole Ritchie, whose skeletal frames became a matter of prurient concern. The sincerity of that concern can be judged from the fact that it was routinely expressed in the phrase: “She needs a sandwich.”

The ultimate body-shaming concern troll came in 2014, when the ostensibly feminist website Jezebel offered a $10,000 bounty for the unretouched originals of a Lena Dunham shoot for Vogue. “Dunham embraces her appearance as that of a real woman; she’s as body positive as they come,” explained Jezebel. “But that’s not really Vogue’s thing, is it? … It doesn’t matter if any woman, including Lena, thinks she’s fine the way she is. Vogue will find something to fix.” In other words, Jezebel was performing a public service by rooting out photographs of Lena Dunham looking imperfect.

But the language it used was only a sidestep away from the oldest excuse in the book when it came to violating famous women’s boundaries. She wants to be looked at, ergo we have a right to look at everything. It’s just that, in this case, it came veiled in the rising language of “body positivity”: Dunham owed this to her audience. It seemed obvious, though, that Jezebel’s true interest in the originals was the hope that Dunham would look terrible, and that a lot of people would click through to see the full horror.

Jezebel had miscalculated. Dunham accused them of making “a monumental error in their approach to feminism… It felt gross.” And the public mood was more with her than it was with snarky upstart posters. When the pictures proved to have been only lightly edited, the whole thing fizzled out in a haze of disapproval. Magazines and websites pivoted to celebrating bodies rather than judging them. Glamour put the model Tess Holliday (UK size 26) on its cover in 2018; Cosmopolitan featured plus-size yoga instructor Jessamyn Stanley in 2021, with the tagline “This is healthy”.

The turn against body shaming was politically coded: as reactionaries like Jordan Peterson were calling plus-size models “not beautiful”, so the imperative for feminism was to take the body-positive side. That meant, in practice, a taboo on commentary about bodies entirely within feminist-inflected media. As most women know, there’s little more grinding than other people giving you their unsolicited verdict on your figure, and any conversation that takes place on the internet is effectively within earshot of the subject. That went for the thin as well as the fat: “Why is skinny-shaming OK, if fat-shaming is not?” asked recovering anorexic Emma Woolf in 2013.

“There should be no implicit or explicit assessment of any kind,” said the feminist philosopher Kate Manne earlier this year, while promoting her book Unshrinking: How to Fight Fatphobia. For her, even the term “body positivity” didn’t go far enough, and she instead proposed a concept that she called “body reflexivity”. “My own mantra became, ‘My body is for me, your body is for you.’ Our bodies are not there for comparison or correction or consumption. One’s own perspective on one’s body is the only one that matters.”

Put like that, this seems a clear-cut point of principle. It is also an impossible, unachievable ideal that supposes perfect individual subjectivity. But humans are not like that. Even Kate Manne is not like that. In her book, she writes about the fat influencers whose work she finds particularly encouraging or impressive. Clearly, she has an emotional reaction to their bodies which is inspired by identification with them. She experiences their bodies, in part, as something for her.

In any case, the placing bodies beyond discussion has never been a universal feminist aim. Other intellectual strands have sought different ways of talking about the body instead, trying to move beyond objectification and towards an understanding of the body as a political entity. In Susan Bordo’s 1993 book, Unbearable Weight, for example, she attempts to understand disordered eating in women not as an individual pathology, but as “a ‘crystallisation’ of particular currents, some historical and some contemporary, within Western culture”. This is a long way from Jezebel’s fishing expedition for kompromat on Dunham; but it’s equally remote from the belief that bodies are only ever “for themselves”.

Even when body positivity was at its height, it was an imperfect revolution. Concepts such as “wellness” allowed the dread “diet culture” a covert return; then the rise of semaglutide as a weight-loss treatment placed bodies firmly back in the realm of legitimate topics. How could we not talk about the fact that famous people were changing shape so rapidly and dramatically? But Grande is not a case where anyone would suspect her of medical intervention. She’s been in the public eye since she was 15; she was thin then, and she’s thin now.

The difference is that now, she is alarmingly thin. For this to be addressed publicly is undoubtedly not easy for Grande. “It’s a knife when they dissect your body on the front page,” she sings on Sympathy is Like a Knife with Charli XCX, and there is no way to have this conversation that isn’t painful to the person being talked about. But to not address it would be perverse, and the duty of care here is not only to Grande’s feelings. It is also to the young women and girls (many of them pre-adolescent) for Grande represents an ideal of adulthood.

Eating disorders are socially contagious and competitive. Grande insists that her current physique is healthy, but she does not look healthy, and anyone attempting to replicate her waifishness is unlikely to end up healthy. That needs to be acknowledged — not as a judgement on Grande, and not with goading comments about sandwiches, but as fact. To pretend otherwise, creates a situation where young women and girls can self-starve and no one is able to acknowledge it happening. That cannot be the correct outcome.

Talking about bodies is a precarious business. Grande is right that we should be “gentler”. Bodies deserve care, and there is no care in the engagement-baiting judgement of the click mill. There is equally no care in the phoney belief that Grande’s body affects no one but her. And even if that were true — can the only acceptable response to watching a young woman fade be to chide anyone who notices it happening? Let’s talk about Ariana Grande’s body. Gently. Let’s hope she’s OK.

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Sarah Ditum is a columnist, critic and feature writer.

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