3 August 2026 - 6:30pm
Ariana Grande has spent years asking people to stop talking about her body. Now she is stepping away so they finally will. After her Eternal Sunshine tour ends next month, the 33-year-old singer says she will take a break from public life, with her representative blaming “endless, ongoing public scrutiny”. The apparent tipping point was the video for her new single “Petal,” in which she looked alarmingly thin and many observers said so loudly.
These days, the entire body positivity movement that dominated the late 2010s and early 2020s is looking gaunt. A decade ago this would have been an open-and-shut case: a famous woman is hounded about her weight and the dominant culture rallies on her behalf. Cue the thinkpieces about how magazines, modelling agencies, and the male gaze conspire to make women hate themselves. The body positivity movement told us — to a bewildering extreme — that people should feel good about their bodies no matter what form they take.
Now in 2026, the loudest voice speaking against Grande isn’t a conservative but Jameela Jamil, the famously super-woke actress and body-positivity campaigner, who said Grande was “possibly dying in front of us”. Jamil added that she had an obligation to criticise the singer’s appearance: “If we don’t comment on her body, we run the risk of normalising that image to hundreds of millions of teenage girls, kids and even impressionable adults, consuming her content.”
Back in the Nineties era of “heroin chic”, feminists generally treated the emaciated model or actress as evidence in a case against the culture and media around her. Feminist Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight, published in 1993, read anorexia as a social pathology and blamed fashion editors, advertisers and Hollywood executives for manufacturing an impossible ideal. The dangerously thin woman might embody the problem, but she was understood principally as its victim: society did this, the media did this, and capitalism did this.
The body-positivity era promised to weaken the old thin ideal. Paradoxically, it also helped transfer responsibility from institutions to individuals. Celebrities no longer merely appear in magazines controlled by somebody else; they are publishers, brands and publicists of the self. Every outfit, photograph and Instagram post is presumed to have been selected, filtered and distributed with intent. Jamil’s choice of words is revealing: Grande is not simply thin; she’s delivering an “aesthetic”. In other words, her body has become a form of speech, and therefore something the audience feels entitled to police.
Meanwhile, the border between the body we inherit and the body we choose has never appeared thinner. GLP-1 drugs, fillers, cosmetic surgery, gender transition, looksmaxxing and the longevity industry are very different phenomena, but they share the concept that anatomy isn’t destiny; it’s raw material to sculpt as we see fit. When nearly everything is imagined to be alterable, a specific appearance starts to look like a decision — and a decision can be judged. Body acceptance may be giving way to a compulsory body-accountability culture.
Which lands us in a genuinely weird place on mental illness. The reigning liberal cultural rule is that a diagnosis absolves the individual of responsibility: depression, anxiety, ADHD, trauma — name the condition and the social debt is forgiven, the behaviour reframed as a symptom. Anorexia appears to be the lone exception: the one disorder you’re doing on purpose.
Maybe the Nineties feminists were on to something. While Grande retreats from public life due to widespread criticism, the male versions of something like anorexia are treated very differently. Braden Peters, the looksmaxxing influencer known as Clavicular, recently told the Miami New Times that he had eaten only 300 calories that day and skipped a burger after looking at his face in the mirror. Yet his bodily extremism is packaged as “ascension”, while longevity guru Bryan Johnson calls his own regimen “calorie restriction”. Male deprivation is more easily understood as discipline, biohacking, or a grotesque experiment. A very thin famous woman is treated as an advertisement that could infect other women.
Body positivity, then, has not exactly died. Its language of harm has merged with an age of total self-curation. The old rule was that another person’s body was none of our business. The new rule is that your body is your brand and therefore everybody’s business.
