EP -120- Thinness Is Not Beauty — It’s Obedience

We are taught to be controlled, to be smaller, quieter, lighter, less, hungry, less visible, less much. And that pressure does not begin and end with fashion magazines or red carpet culture, or some influencer telling you to drink chlorophyll and do pilates at five a m. This goes much deeper than that, because the ideal of female thinness is not just about sexism. It's also about racism, about colonialism, about whose body gets coated as refined, civilized, moral, and worthy, and whose body

gets coded as excessive, primitive, vulgar, undisciplined and wrong. So today we are digging into the history of thinness as discipline, thinness as virtue, thinness as whiteness and thinness as a visual performance of obedience, because what if women were never just being told how to look? What if we were being taught how to behave. Welcome to a brand new episode of Beauty Unlocked, the podcast. If you're new to Beauty Unlocked, I'm Carissa, host of this circus. Welcome friends.

If you've been a long time listener, you know all about the shenanigans and utter fuckery that is Beauty Unlocked. The thing about beauty standards is that they are never just beauty standards. They always come carrying something else, a social order, a hierarchy, a warning, punishment, a fantasy about who deserves to be admired and who deserves to be corrected.

And few ideals reveal that more clearly than thinness, because thinness gets sold to women as health, elegance, self respect, discipline, desirability, status, even morality. But when you start pulling at the threads, what you find underneath is a much uglier system, one where appetite is treated like a problem, softness is treated like failure, and taking up space is treated like a kind of social crime. And before we go any further, I want to make something perfectly clear. This is not

a dig at women who exercise. This is not a dig at wanting to lose weight. This is not me pretending we don't all live inside beauty culture, participate in it, and sometimes even enjoy parts of it. That's not the point.

The point is not individual choices. The point is the system those choices are happening inside of, because there is a difference between choosing something and be condition to believe that your worth, your discipline, your desirability, and even your morality are tied to how small you can make your body, and that distinction matters a lot. This episode is about the culture itself, the system, the conditioning, the logic that taught generations of women that hunger is feminine only when

it is denied. So let's get into it. If we want to understand why thinness carries so much moral power, we have to go back to one of the oldest cultural obsessions in the West, the fear of appetite. For centuries, gluttony was treated in Christian theology as a moral failure one of the deadly sins, and restraint was framed as virtue. In late medieval Christianity. Extreme fasting among religious women was not rare historians have shown that women's fasting could be

admired as piety, purity, discipline, and bodily control. That matters because it gave us an enduring template. The good woman is the woman who denies herself, not just sexually, not just socially physically. Food becomes more than food, It becomes a moral test, and this pattern keeps resurfacing. By the nineteenth century, especially in Victorian culture, femininity was increasingly tied

to delicacy, restraint, and controlled appetite. Scholars of Victorian literature and culture note that women's hunger, consumption, and bodily desire were often treated as morally suspect, while ideals like fragility and self restraint were elevated. Corsetry itself became part of this performance of feminine discipline. And before someone rushes to the comments because I can already feel it coming, yes, I know. Not every woman was walking around in a corset.

Not every single person in history was laced into boning and suffering for fashion. We get it, But that's not the point. The point is not that every woman wore a corset. The point is what the corset represented. Because even if you weren't physically wearing one. The expectation to be contained, controlled and shaped into something smaller was still very much there. So when modern culture tells women to be disciplined around food, that is not some fresh new

wellness in sight. That is an old sermon in new packaging. Now earlier. I opened this episode with a line that probably made a few people pause. A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. And that line comes, like I said, from Naomi Wolf, but the full quote is even more revealing. She writes, women's dieting has become what Yale psychologist Judith Roden calls a normative obsession, a never

ending passion play. Given international coverage, out of all proportion to the health risks associated with obesity, dieting is the most potent politic sedative in women's history. A quietly mad population is a tractable one. Take a second with that. A political sedative that is not language about beauty, that is language about control. What she's arguing is uncomfortable because it suggests that dieting is not just personal, not just esthetic,

not even just cultural. It's functional. It keeps women focused, inward, distracted, self monitoring, exhausted, and most importantly occupied. Because a woman who is constantly thinking about her body is not thinking about power in the same way. This is where feminist thinkers become essential. Susan Bordeaux in Unbearable Weight argued that the female body is shaped by culture and that modern

body anxieties are not trivial vanity, but deeply political. Her work is famous for treating the body as a site where social rules get written, enforced, and lived. And when you put Bordeaux next to Mi shedvoc things get very dark, very fast. Because Foco's broader work on discipline is all about how power does not only control people through force, It controls them by teaching them to monitor themselves, correct themselves,

and internalize surveillance. His work on discipline and docile bodies helped shape later feminist analysis on dieting, body management, and feminine self policing. And honestly, what is calorie counting if not self surveillance? What is compulsive body checking if not internalized monitoring? What is the fantasy of the good body if not the fantasy of a woman who has successfully mastered herself. This is why Thinness is so culturally powerful.

It does not just signal attractiveness, it signals control. A thin woman is often read as disciplined, organized, respectable, successful, and morally responsible, while larger bodies are still routinely judged through the language of failure, laziness, excess, and poor self management. Weight stigma research and public health reporting continue to show that these stereotypes affect employment, mental health, and daily treatment. So when people say thinness is aspirational, we need to

ask aspirational for what beauty or obedience. Now, let's get to the part that beauty culture constantly tries to blur out. The modern thin ideal did not just emerge from nowhere. It was shaped through racial hierarchy. Sociologists Sabrina Strings in Fearing the Black Body traces how fat phobia and the preference for slenderness became entangled with anti blackness, colonialism, and

the rise of race science. Her central argument is blunt, the thin ideal is racialized and its history is inseparable from racism. Reviews and academic discussions of her work point to enlightenment and colonial writing that linked fatness to blackness, savagery, greed, laziness, and inferiority, while elevating restraint and slenderness as markers of civilization and whiteness. That means the body was never just

a body. It became a racial symbol. European standards of refinement increasingly coated the civilized body as controlled, contained, rational, and restrained. Meanwhile, colonized and racialized bodies were stereotyped as excessive, animalistic, lustful, undisciplined, and too much. And once you see that, so much starts clicking into place. Why thinness came to mean virtue, Why fatness came to mean moral failure. Why the body became a sight where whiteness could be performed as discipline.

This is why the so called European beauty ideal did not just elevate certain facial features, skin tones, and hair textures. It also elevated a body type, a smaller one, a supposedly more refined one, a body that could be read as evidence of breeding, restraint, and superiority. In other words, thinness was not simply fashionable. It was ideological. It helped separate the civilized woman from the racialized other, and we

are still living in the afterlife of that. One of the most disturbing things about all of this is that the fear of fatness is absolutely real. We are taught over and over again that fat is failure. But it's not just about fatness. Its female appetite. Because appetite is never just about food, it's also about sex, ambition, pleasure, presence, need, demand. A woman who is visibly hungry breaks a very old rule.

She is not supposed to want that much. And that's why beauty culture so often romanticizes women who are contained, controlled, curated, tiny, clean, effortless, not because they actually are effortless, but because effortlessness is the fantasy it hides the labor of self denial. This is also why diet culture so easily slides into morality culture. You are not just eating clean, you are being good. You are not just cutting back, You are proving worth.

And if you fail, if you binge, gain weight, lose control, or simply refuse to perform, shame about your appetite. Culture is ready with a script for that too. Lazy, messy, unfeminine, undisciplined, out of control, which is fascinating because the social punishment is rarely just about health. It is about behavior. That is one reason psychologists and advocates describe weight stigma as a pervasive form of discrimination, not a neutral concern about wellness.

A woman who wants more is harder to govern, and I think that is the real panic underneath all of this. Now, of course, beauty culture got smarter. It learned that openly telling women to starve is bad pr so it changed the language. Now it is not be thin, it's be healthy, be your best self, reset, clean girl, that girl hot, pilate's body, gut health, what I eat in a day, protein goals, debloat, snatched, low inflammation, summer body discipline. And

that's what makes modern body control so slippery. It often arrives wearing the costume of self care. Recent studies of Tik Tok content have found that diet culture remains highly visible on the platform, including content that promotes weight loss, thinness,

calorie counting, body comparison, and eating disorder adjacent behaviors. Research on what I Eat in a Day content has also found body focused and dietying themes, while newer work on that Girl culture points to pressures around self discipline, routine, and diet under the banner of aspirational wellness. So the message is still the same shrink but make it esthetic restrict but call it optimization. Obsess but call it routine.

Even current reporting on the return of skinny culture points to the way social media, celebrity bodies and weight loss drugs are intensifying body image pressures. Again, so no, these ideas are not gone, they have just become more algorithmically efficient. There is also a brutal social reality here. Thinness affects how people read your character. We already know from classic social psychology that attractiveness produces a halo effect, where beautiful

people are assumed to possess other positive traits. Weight stigma research shows that larger body people are also penalized in work and social settings, including being stereotyped as less competent, less disciplined, and less employable. So the body becomes a resume. Thinness gets translated into competent, composed, self respecting, high value, desirable, safe.

Larger bodies get forced into the opposite language irresponsible, careless, lazy, unprofessional, lacking control, And because women are judged so intensely through appearance in the first place, this becomes gendered with extra cruelty. Public health and workplace literature keeps finding that women face

particular forms of weight based stigma and discrimination. So when society rewards thin women, it's not just rewarding a shape, it's rewarding a performance of obedience, a body that appears to say, I regulate myself, I deny myself, I know my place, I will not take up too much room. The hardest part of all of this is that thinness does not only operate as pressure. It also operates as reward, approval, praise, visibility, romantic validation, the fantasy of safety, and once girls learned

that shrinking gets applause, the lesson sinks deep. Naomi Wolf argued that dieting became a kind of political sedative, and whether or not people agree with every part of her framework, that line about female obedience still lands because it identifies something culture keeps trying to disguise. Body control is social control, and when you add Sabrina String's work to that, the picture gets even sharper. Because women were not all being asked to become the same thing. They were being ranked

against a racialized ideal. Thinness was not neutral. It was coded white, disciplined, controlled, civilized, which means rejecting that ideal is not just personal rebellion. It is also a refusal of hierarchy. So the next time beauty culture tries to tell you that this is all just about health or self improvement or becoming your best self, I want you to pause and ask best for whom improved towards what healthy, according to whose standards? And why does discipline for women

so often end up meaning hunger? Because women were never only taught to be beautiful. We were taught to be manageable, to take up less space, to need less, to want less, to carry our obedience on our bodies so the world could read it at a glance. And the ugliest part is that this ideal was never innocent. It was shaped by sexism, yes, but also by racism, by colonial ideas of whose body counted as refined and whose body had

to be shamed, corrected and brought into line. So, if you have ever felt like your body was a project, a problem, a public referendum on your character, that feeling did not come from nowhere. That is history talking. That is power talking. That is beauty culture doing what it has always done best, taking domination and making it look aspirational. So the next time you catch yourself trying to shrink your body, or silence your hunger, or convince yourself that

taking up less space makes you better. Just ask yourself one thing. Was this ever really about beauty? Or was it about obedience? I hope you enjoyed the episode and that it shed new light on the way we've been taught to see our bodies and ourselves. If you did, pass it along to your family, friends, your group chats, your co workers. Until next time, my love buckets, take care of yourselves and each other, and stay curious always. You'll hear from me again next week. Mm bye Li.