Millennial women reflect on the shockingly outdated body standards of the early 2000s
It was a very different world.
Millennial women reflect on body standards of the 2000s
The early 2000s was certainly a time to be alive. At that point in time most Millennials successfully survived Y2K, watched 9/11 unfold in real time and discovered the real Slim Shady. But by the time many were in middle or high school they saw the landscape of how bodies are "supposed" to look change.
It seemed like overnight Christina Aguilera and Paris Hilton's naturally thin youthful frames were now the ideal, while Nicole Richie and Raven Symone were considered "plus sized." Millennial women are looking back on these photos from the late 90s and early 2000s wondering what society was thinking. Nothing about a teenage Raven Symone was plus size, yet somehow an entire generation was convinced if they were built like the then teen, they were fat.
Briana Reyes shared a collection of images of these 2000s "fat" celebrities to Facebook with the caption, "Celebrities that were considered “fat” or “plus sized” in the 90s-early 00s. This is obviously why so many women struggle with body image."
The post has since gone viral with over 12,000 reactions and 9.3K shares on the social media platform. Over the years there has been a movement towards body positivity and body neutrality. While both movements mean slightly different things, the main focus is on learning to accept the body that you're in and treating it well.
The way in which we view our bodies whether positively or negatively can affect the way we speak to ourselves about our bodies. This is something that many moms of young daughters have become acutely aware of as their own children pick up the negative self body talk they hear from their caregivers. But the media consumed also plays a significant role on what bodies are considered "normal," "desirable," or "sexy," which means it also sets the standard for what is the opposite of those things.
In the 2000s, being extremely thin was the standard being set and the fashion was designed to cater to those with thin bodies. Jeans that used to ride well below the hip bones paired with crop tops that stopped mid-ribcage were common staples on thin celebrities. But the actors or singers with curves were outfitted in layers of varying lengths or larger tops to camoflauge the woman had a larger chest.
Some examples in Reyes' post of "plus size" celebrities shows exactly how off base the media was with labeling people as "fat," "plus-size," and "obese." In the post are pictures of Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears who were performing after having recently given birth, yet the focus was on how "large" they were. Looking at the photos from today's lens it's easy to see the unrealistic body standard placed on these celebrities who's bodies simply were no designed to be extremely thin.
Demi Lovato who rose to fame in 2008 after staring in "Camp Rock" admitted to struggling with an eating disorder due to the pressures to be thinner. Commenters under Reyes' post pointed out how the unrealistic standards contributed to their own body issues.
"I used to be smaller than I am now, but I was always bigger than other girls. I look at pictures of myself back then thinking I was so huge and I wasn't. But I was made fun of because I wasn't as skinny as the other girls and now all I see is a disgusting person when I look at myself in the mirror. I've always been considered plus size (I really am now) but I would love to go back to being the size I was way back when....," one person reveals.
"I look back to pictures in the late 90s of myself when I thought I was so fat and I just think about how I probably couldn't be any thinner. I imagine many people have this experience," another says.
"Look at all those healthy beautiful, individual bodies. It’s sad how I and thousands of girls grew up and never appreciated our normal healthy bodies - because the rhetoric that circled around about how healthy and normal wasn’t the desired body type," someone else writes.
While people focus on how the standards of beauty affected them, many of the celebrities people were picking apart were children and young adults. Demi Lovato was just 15 as Raven Symone when the two stars were being told they needed to lose weight. The criticism led to Symone getting a breast reduction twice and liposuction before she turned 18.
One woman sums up the struggle of Millennial women still healing and trying to do better by their own children. "This post sums up my adolescence - the reasons for my unhealthy relationship with the reflection I see in the mirror/the number I see on the scale. It’s so sad because I know better but I can’t unlearn it even after all these years. I just try to teach my daughters the right thing instead - to grow up as healthy women who take great care of their bodies and to truly take the time to get to know and love themselves for who they are and how they treat others."
It's hard to date when you're fat, but not for the reasons you might think.
"You know what I like about you? You’ve got fat pride. I felt that way, too, until I realized I wanted anyone to fuck me ever."
We’d been talking online for weeks — he was funny, erudite, nerdy, kind. He’d told me he’d lost weight in the past. I’d done my due diligence of telling him how fat I was, working hard to avoid repeats of past hurt and disappointment. I’d weeded through dozens of profiles about wanting to meet "healthy," "active" women and several that pointedly instructed that fat women weren’t welcome. Many men had sent graphic, sexual messages, and when I politely declined or didn’t respond, they issued lengthy screeds. "U SHOULD BE GRATEFUL." "I wouldn’t even rape you."
In amongst all of that, I’d found someone who seemed like a gem. And then, on our first real date, this. It was frustrating, isolating, and made me feel so big and so small, all at the same time.
I gently pushed back. "You know you’re saying that about me, too, right?"
"What?"
"When you talk about no one wanting to fuck fat people, you’re talking about me, too."
He shook his head. "Don’t take it personally. It’s not personal."
I got quiet then asked for the check. He said he’d walk me out. When we got outside, he tried to kiss me then asked if I wanted to go back to his place.
Years later, I was falling for a new partner.
We’d been dating for several months, and she was extraordinary: full of life, wildly intelligent, absurdly beautiful. I’d tell her often — maybe too often — how stunning I thought she was. With equal frequency, she’d talk about my body. "You’re so brave to dress the way you do." "I want you to feel empowered."
At first, her responses sounded like reciprocity, but they always seemed to sting. I felt deflated every time she said it. Like that first date, she couldn’t see past my body. She valued me, but she didn’t desire me. When she spoke, she never spoke about my body — only about my relationship to it. She was amazed that I wasn’t sucked into the undertow of self-loathing and isolation that she expected from fat women. Those comments were a reminder of how frequently she thought of my body, not as an object of desire, but as an obstacle to overcome. She was impressed that I could. She could not.
When you and I talk about dating, dear friend, we have a lot of overlapping experiences because dating can be difficult and awkward for anyone.
It’s a strange auditioning process: all artifice to find someone who can respect your uncrossable lines, and failed auditions usually mean those lines get crossed. It’s easy to feel judged, stalled, alone in the process. It can get exhausting, exciting, frustrating, exhilarating.
But dating as a fat person means contending with so many added layers of challenge.
You told me once you imagined it was impossible to date as a fat person. It’s not; it’s just a lot of work. Lots of people are willing to sleep with fat people. Many are willing to date a fat person.
Few are willing to truly embrace a fat person. Almost no one, it seems, really knows what that means.
That first date, dear friend, is such a frequent moment.
My sweet, funny date was abruptly overthrown, overtaken by years of the same anti-fat messages all of us hear. He couldn’t reconcile being fat and being loved. All of that, suddenly, was visited upon me, as it so often is.
I only bring up my feelings about being a fat person after knowing someone for some time. But, with startling regularity, new acquaintances, dates, and strangers offer diet advice, trial gym memberships, and, even once, a recommendation for a surgeon. My life as a fat person is a barrage of weekly, daily, and hourly offers of unsolicited advice. At first, the detailed answers, the constant defense, the explanation of my daily diet and medical history are ineffective — no answer is sufficient. Over time, it becomes burdensome, then exhausting, then frustrating. And it doesn’t seem to cross the minds of most people I meet that I’ve heard what they’ve said before — not just once, but over and over again, in great detail. I have a forced expertise in diets, exercise regimens, miracle pills, and the science of weight loss.
That may not be your experience, dear friend, because people may approach you differently.
You might not know what it’s like to feel your face flush or your heart race when your body so reliably becomes a topic of conversation during dinner parties, work events, first dates. There’s a familiar wave of frustration, hurt, and exhaustion. It’s all the visceral, invisible consequence of unintended harm because few of us — even you, my darling — have unlearned the scripts we’re expected to recite when we see a body like mine.
As a fat woman, I just want what anyone else wants: to be seen, to be loved, to be supported for who I am. To be challenged and adored. To be worth the effort for who I am.
When I meet people whose first response to me is about my fat body, I learn something important about that person. Whether their opening salvo is "Fat bitch" or "I’m concerned about your health" or "Have you tried this diet?" or "I think you’re beautiful," they all send the same message: that I am invisible. Rather than seeing me or getting to know who I am, they can only see my fat body.
It’s true of so many people I meet. They’ve got this deep-seated block: They can’t see fat people as individual people with individual stories because no one expects them to. Nothing in our culture indicates that fat people might have individual experiences, different stories, life experiences as rich and varied as anyone else. Instead, we’re met with diagnosis, prognosis, quarantine: an anthropological impulse to demand to know why we are the way we are and to figure out how to stop us from having the bodies we have. We’re reduced to figures in an equation, a puzzle to solve. But truthfully, we’re so much messier than that. We’re just as contradictory, real, and human as anyone else you know, and loving us is just as complicated.
When we have conversations like this, you often say, "I had no idea."
It’s heartening, dear friend, and it’s also hard to hear. It’s a harsh reminder that even those closest to me are subject to all those same influences and impulses.
There’s so much work in just working up the mettle to date at all. Building your own confidence and battling your own doubt enough to date at all can be difficult, in part because there’s no template. Media representation is seriously lacking for many communities; seeing thriving fat people in media is nearly nonexistent. Being fat means not seeing yourself reflected anywhere as being happy, healthy, or affirmed.
Being fat means taking on the Sisyphean task of creating your own world, one in which you can declare a truce with yourself and learn to feel OK or feel nothing at all about yourself when the entire world seems to be telling you that is not possible.
It means finding whatever you can scavenge to build yourself some makeshift shelter of thatch and driftwood. It’s brittle and dry, and it’s something. You try to build something that can withstand the gale-force winds of seeing an episode of "The Biggest Loser" or hearing a stranger offer unsolicited diet advice that you’re already taking. You build it slowly, painstakingly — testing methods and gathering rare, essential materials over time. It’s precious and fragile, a labor of love and a means of survival.
And finding a partner means opening that hard-fought home to someone else, over and over again, knowing that person might destroy it.
Usually, they do.
You’ve mourned it a hundred times. Your skin has thickened. Sometimes that person burns it to the ground, setting a fire to watch it burn. But more often, they just forget to extinguish their cigarette. Yes, when we look for love, some of us are hurt intentionally, cruelly, because of our bodies and because of overt fatphobia. But usually, we’re hurt without malice, through rote scripts about who we’re allowed to be and an expectation that we’ll devote our lives to meeting those expectations.
Often, when looking for friends and partners, I search for those who will be gentle with the home I’ve built, ramshackle though it is.
What made such an impression on my partner from years ago was that I didn’t stop there: I wanted someone who would help build that home, someone who would protect it, someone who would call it their home, too. Because a lack of harm isn’t love.
I want love. And as a fat person, there’s audacity in that.