With all the mystery around Ozempic in pop culture, old-school anorexia seems strangely simple. Perhaps this explains the internet’s fixation with both Ariana Grande and Bella Hadid, the singer and model who have become the unintended public faces of pernicious (alleged) eating disorders in recent years. Grande has become noticeably less grande since the pandemic; she shocked observers with her rail-thin frame during the promotional junket for the film Wicked, and in the past few weeks has appeared on stage, incredibly thin, during live shows. “She literally looks emaciated,” said one fan on X; others accused her of having “choreographed sitting” into her dance routine, presumably to avoid lightheadedness.

Hadid, for her part, has been posting again about her Lyme disease diagnosis. The supermodel was diagnosed in 2012 at the age of 16, along with her mother and brother. Intermittently since then, she has shared pictures of herself stripped to the waist in a hospital bed, covered in electrodes or on a drip. One fan says it’s really because she “doesn’t eat”. Others scour the contents of her fridge, finding only “juice, yogurt and berries”. “It’s heartbreaking to see her battling with an ED [eating disorder] and Yolanda is all to blame,” reads one comment, with reference to Hadid’s former-model mother who is known for encouraging her other daughter Gigi only to “have a couple of almonds” when the then-teenager complained of feeling faint and hungry. Bella Hadid may well be debilitated by Lyme disease, but her physical frailty is hard to ignore. As with Grande, her disappearing body is viral catnip.

Why is skinny “back” in celebrity culture? We must not forget the specific glamour of anorexia, glamour which is most intoxicating to teen girls. The literary critic Elaine Showalter memorably described melancholia in the Romantic period as a “prestigious disorder of upper-class and intellectual men”. You can see why it was thought of in this way: plumbing one’s own misery required both depth and leisure. Happiness is for oiks. Of course, this perception had no bearing on real incidence, save for the crazy-making nature of idleness which may have brought the black dog unto a few sad squires. Sighing was probably just as common in the scullery as in the library. Nevertheless many illnesses have their mythologies, and if male depression was conferred an elite status in the past then the female cognate today is without doubt anorexia and bulimia.

The virtuous connotations of female eating disorders are that sufferers are meticulous, intelligent, disciplined and detached — coolly incorporeal, pensive and stylishly sad. The prototype of the chic contemporary anorexic is Marya Hornbacher, whose 1997 memoir Wasted, published when she was just 23, detailed her teen years in recovery wards, culminating in a brush with death when she weighed just 52 pounds. In the book, Hornbacher describes her illness with borderline cinematic sumptuousness: “I brought a stack of books and a notebook, packs of cigarettes, and sat coiled in a chair in the corner, rubbing my eyes… swallowing coffee… reading Bertrand Russell and John Stuart Mill and Marx.”

Here is this sophisticated teenager, swapping food (lame) for philosophy (rad!) while going through coffee and cigs like a Parisian poseur. Are we meant to interpret her starvation as cool or awful? The ambiguity is deliberate. While Wasted won huge acclaim and became the archetypal anorexia memoir, Hornbacher’s barely restrained sense of her own emaciated glamor compromised its function as a “warning” for sufferers and their families. Instead, it spurned imitation. Another eating-disorder memoirist, Nicole Johns, author of bulimia tome Purge, says fellow patients would try to “smuggle” copies of Wasted into treatment facilities, treating it as a manual. Hornbacher’s tendency to brag, and her undisguised nostalgia for the allure of her illness — as well as the instructional nature of the account, much of which is in the second person (“you will lift the toilet seat, carefully slide your fingers inside your mouth and down your throat, and puke until you see orange”) — made it premium reading material for the aspiring anorexic.

Today, this mechanism has become part of the very wiring of social media. Since the early days of blogging sites — Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram — eating-disorder pages have been as depressingly constant as pornography. “Pro-ana” (anorexia) posters compete with one another for the lowest BMIs; TikTok content creators get around guardrails by pretending that the calorie-counts which accompany images of their meals are “prices”. Bloggers share “thinspo” (thin inspiration) — pictures of themselves or celebrities; they “body check”, meaning that they show off hollow stomachs or wrist-thin thighs for other girls to use as motivation. Because they are famished, they also post obsessively about food. In this they resemble the subjects of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment in the Forties, in which healthy men were put on extreme diets. Over 24 weeks, the men were found to hoard and obsessively read cookbooks. Had these men been given access to Instagram, they too would surely have gorged on images of food.

Celebrities are also part of the eating-disorder internet. Many super-thin stars, most notably Ariana Grande, have asked people not to comment on their bodies — Grande called speculation about the looks and health of others “dangerous”. But asking fans — the source of your income — to pay attention to only the “comfortable” facets of your persona breaks the contract of fame: celebrity means sacrificing privacy, and exposure is part of the bargain. Commenters diagnosing stars from a distance — or even “concern trolling” (posting skeletal pictures of women they’re “worried about”) — may be distasteful, but it is inevitable. These celebrities are, after all, the ultimate beneficiaries of the attention economy and stand to gain even when this attention is negative; Grande’s secrecy around her alleged condition has in fact only increased the intrigue and therefore the coverage.

I have little doubt that Grande’s thinness is, to some vulnerable fans, aspirational. And there is no denying that pictures of these celebrities are being used as “thinspo”. Grande posting body-checking pictures of herself fitting inside a guitar case means an X user called “Skinny B4 Death” will inevitably add her to their starvation moodboard. Hadid, for her part, has often posed in a way which emphasizes a starved ribcage; this could well lead to users glamorizing emaciation, in a grisly echo of Nineties “heroin chic”. To those quick to dismiss this as a feminist fuss over nothing, use your imagination: you may not give a sod about seeing one too many jutting bones, but then you may not be a teenage girl. For them, such images can alter the course of a life.

The public spectacle of Grande’s and Hadid’s emaciation is functioning, in the age of the internet, like a virtual eating-disorder ward: hypercompetitive and dishonest, bragging and furtive. Particularly since their fans are primarily those most vulnerable to eating-disorder content: namely, girls. The result of all this blog-worthy boniness is that the troubled years of these stick-thin celebrities may end up just like copies of Wasted: tucked under inpatients’ pillows, bookmarked at the bad bits, treasured as a guide for how to disappear.

Today, 18 months on, there is more discussion of Grande’s body than ever before, driven by her appearance in the movie Wicked (she plays Galinda) and the associated press junket with her and co-star Cynthia Erivo (who plays Elphaba). She appears to be tinier than ever. The Mail called her “fragile”; the Standard called her (and Ervio) “scarily thin”. A friend took her seven-year-old daughter to see the film. “Mummy,” whispered the girl mid-screening in a tone of awe and amazement. “You can see all the bones in her chest!”

But the sport of publicly commenting on women’s figures was supposed to have died along with all the other vicious excesses of the Noughties media. What we now call body shaming used to be a staple of celebrity journalism — not just the bitchy bloggers, but also in newspapers, supermarket tabloids and glossy magazines. “Cellulite”, “muffin tops”, “cankles” and “thunder thighs” were all among the sins that could place a famous woman in Mail Online’s “sidebar of shame” or Heat magazine’s “hoop of horror” (a red circle with which the magazine highlighted supposed physical flaws).

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.”

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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.

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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.