Speaker 1: I want to start this episode with a sentence that
Speaker 1: hit me in the chest the first time I read it.
Speaker 1: A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession
Speaker 1: about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. That's
Speaker 1: from Naomi Wolf, chapter six, page one eighty seven of
Speaker 1: The Beauty Myth. And the reason that line lingers is because,
Speaker 1: deep down, I think a lot of us already know
Speaker 1: it's true. Because women are not just taught to be beautiful.
Speaker 1: We are taught to be controlled, to be smaller, quieter, lighter, less, hungry,
Speaker 1: less visible, less much. And that pressure does not begin
Speaker 1: and end with fashion magazines or red carpet culture, or
Speaker 1: some influencer telling you to drink chlorophyll and do pilates
Speaker 1: at five a m. This goes much deeper than that,
Speaker 1: because the ideal of female thinness is not just about sexism.
Speaker 1: It's also about racism, about colonialism, about whose body gets
Speaker 1: coated as refined, civilized, moral, and worthy, and whose body
Speaker 1: gets coded as excessive, primitive, vulgar, undisciplined and wrong. So
Speaker 1: today we are digging into the history of thinness as discipline,
Speaker 1: thinness as virtue, thinness as whiteness and thinness as a
Speaker 1: visual performance of obedience, because what if women were never
Speaker 1: just being told how to look? What if we were
Speaker 1: being taught how to behave. Welcome to a brand new
Speaker 1: episode of Beauty Unlocked, the podcast. If you're new to
Speaker 1: Beauty Unlocked, I'm Carissa, host of this circus. Welcome friends.
Speaker 1: If you've been a long time listener, you know all
Speaker 1: about the shenanigans and utter fuckery that is Beauty Unlocked.
Speaker 1: The thing about beauty standards is that they are never
Speaker 1: just beauty standards. They always come carrying something else, a
Speaker 1: social order, a hierarchy, a warning, punishment, a fantasy about
Speaker 1: who deserves to be admired and who deserves to be corrected.
Speaker 1: And few ideals reveal that more clearly than thinness, because
Speaker 1: thinness gets sold to women as health, elegance, self respect, discipline, desirability, status,
Speaker 1: even morality. But when you start pulling at the threads,
Speaker 1: what you find underneath is a much uglier system, one
Speaker 1: where appetite is treated like a problem, softness is treated
Speaker 1: like failure, and taking up space is treated like a
Speaker 1: kind of social crime. And before we go any further,
Speaker 1: I want to make something perfectly clear. This is not
Speaker 1: a dig at women who exercise. This is not a
Speaker 1: dig at wanting to lose weight. This is not me
Speaker 1: pretending we don't all live inside beauty culture, participate in it,
Speaker 1: and sometimes even enjoy parts of it. That's not the point.
Speaker 1: The point is not individual choices. The point is the
Speaker 1: system those choices are happening inside of, because there is
Speaker 1: a difference between choosing something and be condition to believe
Speaker 1: that your worth, your discipline, your desirability, and even your
Speaker 1: morality are tied to how small you can make your body,
Speaker 1: and that distinction matters a lot. This episode is about
Speaker 1: the culture itself, the system, the conditioning, the logic that
Speaker 1: taught generations of women that hunger is feminine only when
Speaker 1: it is denied. So let's get into it. If we
Speaker 1: want to understand why thinness carries so much moral power,
Speaker 1: we have to go back to one of the oldest
Speaker 1: cultural obsessions in the West, the fear of appetite. For centuries,
Speaker 1: gluttony was treated in Christian theology as a moral failure
Speaker 1: one of the deadly sins, and restraint was framed as virtue.
Speaker 1: In late medieval Christianity. Extreme fasting among religious women was
Speaker 1: not rare historians have shown that women's fasting could be
Speaker 1: admired as piety, purity, discipline, and bodily control. That matters
Speaker 1: because it gave us an enduring template. The good woman
Speaker 1: is the woman who denies herself, not just sexually, not
Speaker 1: just socially physically. Food becomes more than food, It becomes
Speaker 1: a moral test, and this pattern keeps resurfacing. By the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, especially in Victorian culture, femininity was increasingly tied
Speaker 1: to delicacy, restraint, and controlled appetite. Scholars of Victorian literature
Speaker 1: and culture note that women's hunger, consumption, and bodily desire
Speaker 1: were often treated as morally suspect, while ideals like fragility
Speaker 1: and self restraint were elevated. Corsetry itself became part of
Speaker 1: this performance of feminine discipline. And before someone rushes to
Speaker 1: the comments because I can already feel it coming, yes,
Speaker 1: I know. Not every woman was walking around in a corset.
Speaker 1: Not every single person in history was laced into boning
Speaker 1: and suffering for fashion. We get it, But that's not
Speaker 1: the point. The point is not that every woman wore
Speaker 1: a corset. The point is what the corset represented. Because
Speaker 1: even if you weren't physically wearing one. The expectation to
Speaker 1: be contained, controlled and shaped into something smaller was still
Speaker 1: very much there. So when modern culture tells women to
Speaker 1: be disciplined around food, that is not some fresh new
Speaker 1: wellness in sight. That is an old sermon in new packaging.
Speaker 1: Now earlier. I opened this episode with a line that
Speaker 1: probably made a few people pause. A culture fixated on
Speaker 1: female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but
Speaker 1: an obsession about female obedience. And that line comes, like
Speaker 1: I said, from Naomi Wolf, but the full quote is
Speaker 1: even more revealing. She writes, women's dieting has become what
Speaker 1: Yale psychologist Judith Roden calls a normative obsession, a never
Speaker 1: ending passion play. Given international coverage, out of all proportion
Speaker 1: to the health risks associated with obesity, dieting is the
Speaker 1: most potent politic sedative in women's history. A quietly mad
Speaker 1: population is a tractable one. Take a second with that.
Speaker 1: A political sedative that is not language about beauty, that
Speaker 1: is language about control. What she's arguing is uncomfortable because
Speaker 1: it suggests that dieting is not just personal, not just esthetic,
Speaker 1: not even just cultural. It's functional. It keeps women focused, inward, distracted,
Speaker 1: self monitoring, exhausted, and most importantly occupied. Because a woman
Speaker 1: who is constantly thinking about her body is not thinking
Speaker 1: about power in the same way. This is where feminist
Speaker 1: thinkers become essential. Susan Bordeaux in Unbearable Weight argued that
Speaker 1: the female body is shaped by culture and that modern
Speaker 1: body anxieties are not trivial vanity, but deeply political. Her
Speaker 1: work is famous for treating the body as a site
Speaker 1: where social rules get written, enforced, and lived. And when
Speaker 1: you put Bordeaux next to Mi shedvoc things get very dark,
Speaker 1: very fast. Because Foco's broader work on discipline is all
Speaker 1: about how power does not only control people through force,
Speaker 1: It controls them by teaching them to monitor themselves, correct themselves,
Speaker 1: and internalize surveillance. His work on discipline and docile bodies
Speaker 1: helped shape later feminist analysis on dieting, body management, and
Speaker 1: feminine self policing. And honestly, what is calorie counting if
Speaker 1: not self surveillance? What is compulsive body checking if not
Speaker 1: internalized monitoring? What is the fantasy of the good body
Speaker 1: if not the fantasy of a woman who has successfully
Speaker 1: mastered herself. This is why Thinness is so culturally powerful.
Speaker 1: It does not just signal attractiveness, it signals control. A
Speaker 1: thin woman is often read as disciplined, organized, respectable, successful,
Speaker 1: and morally responsible, while larger bodies are still routinely judged
Speaker 1: through the language of failure, laziness, excess, and poor self management.
Speaker 1: Weight stigma research and public health reporting continue to show
Speaker 1: that these stereotypes affect employment, mental health, and daily treatment.
Speaker 1: So when people say thinness is aspirational, we need to
Speaker 1: ask aspirational for what beauty or obedience. Now, let's get
Speaker 1: to the part that beauty culture constantly tries to blur out.
Speaker 1: The modern thin ideal did not just emerge from nowhere.
Speaker 1: It was shaped through racial hierarchy. Sociologists Sabrina Strings in
Speaker 1: Fearing the Black Body traces how fat phobia and the
Speaker 1: preference for slenderness became entangled with anti blackness, colonialism, and
Speaker 1: the rise of race science. Her central argument is blunt,
Speaker 1: the thin ideal is racialized and its history is inseparable
Speaker 1: from racism. Reviews and academic discussions of her work point
Speaker 1: to enlightenment and colonial writing that linked fatness to blackness, savagery, greed, laziness,
Speaker 1: and inferiority, while elevating restraint and slenderness as markers of
Speaker 1: civilization and whiteness. That means the body was never just
Speaker 1: a body. It became a racial symbol. European standards of
Speaker 1: refinement increasingly coated the civilized body as controlled, contained, rational,
Speaker 1: and restrained. Meanwhile, colonized and racialized bodies were stereotyped as excessive, animalistic, lustful, undisciplined,
Speaker 1: and too much. And once you see that, so much
Speaker 1: starts clicking into place. Why thinness came to mean virtue,
Speaker 1: Why fatness came to mean moral failure. Why the body
Speaker 1: became a sight where whiteness could be performed as discipline.
Speaker 1: This is why the so called European beauty ideal did
Speaker 1: not just elevate certain facial features, skin tones, and hair textures.
Speaker 1: It also elevated a body type, a smaller one, a
Speaker 1: supposedly more refined one, a body that could be read
Speaker 1: as evidence of breeding, restraint, and superiority. In other words,
Speaker 1: thinness was not simply fashionable. It was ideological. It helped
Speaker 1: separate the civilized woman from the racialized other, and we
Speaker 1: are still living in the afterlife of that. One of
Speaker 1: the most disturbing things about all of this is that
Speaker 1: the fear of fatness is absolutely real. We are taught
Speaker 1: over and over again that fat is failure. But it's
Speaker 1: not just about fatness. Its female appetite. Because appetite is
Speaker 1: never just about food, it's also about sex, ambition, pleasure, presence, need, demand.
Speaker 1: A woman who is visibly hungry breaks a very old rule.
Speaker 1: She is not supposed to want that much. And that's
Speaker 1: why beauty culture so often romanticizes women who are contained, controlled, curated, tiny, clean, effortless,
Speaker 1: not because they actually are effortless, but because effortlessness is
Speaker 1: the fantasy it hides the labor of self denial. This
Speaker 1: is also why diet culture so easily slides into morality culture.
Speaker 1: You are not just eating clean, you are being good.
Speaker 1: You are not just cutting back, You are proving worth.
Speaker 1: And if you fail, if you binge, gain weight, lose control,
Speaker 1: or simply refuse to perform, shame about your appetite. Culture
Speaker 1: is ready with a script for that too. Lazy, messy, unfeminine, undisciplined,
Speaker 1: out of control, which is fascinating because the social punishment
Speaker 1: is rarely just about health. It is about behavior. That
Speaker 1: is one reason psychologists and advocates describe weight stigma as
Speaker 1: a pervasive form of discrimination, not a neutral concern about wellness.
Speaker 1: A woman who wants more is harder to govern, and
Speaker 1: I think that is the real panic underneath all of this. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, beauty culture got smarter. It learned that openly
Speaker 1: telling women to starve is bad pr so it changed
Speaker 1: the language. Now it is not be thin, it's be healthy,
Speaker 1: be your best self, reset, clean girl, that girl hot,
Speaker 1: pilate's body, gut health, what I eat in a day,
Speaker 1: protein goals, debloat, snatched, low inflammation, summer body discipline. And
Speaker 1: that's what makes modern body control so slippery. It often
Speaker 1: arrives wearing the costume of self care. Recent studies of
Speaker 1: Tik Tok content have found that diet culture remains highly
Speaker 1: visible on the platform, including content that promotes weight loss, thinness,
Speaker 1: calorie counting, body comparison, and eating disorder adjacent behaviors. Research
Speaker 1: on what I Eat in a Day content has also
Speaker 1: found body focused and dietying themes, while newer work on
Speaker 1: that Girl culture points to pressures around self discipline, routine,
Speaker 1: and diet under the banner of aspirational wellness. So the
Speaker 1: message is still the same shrink but make it esthetic
Speaker 1: restrict but call it optimization. Obsess but call it routine.
Speaker 1: Even current reporting on the return of skinny culture points
Speaker 1: to the way social media, celebrity bodies and weight loss
Speaker 1: drugs are intensifying body image pressures. Again, so no, these
Speaker 1: ideas are not gone, they have just become more algorithmically efficient.
Speaker 1: There is also a brutal social reality here. Thinness affects
Speaker 1: how people read your character. We already know from classic
Speaker 1: social psychology that attractiveness produces a halo effect, where beautiful
Speaker 1: people are assumed to possess other positive traits. Weight stigma
Speaker 1: research shows that larger body people are also penalized in
Speaker 1: work and social settings, including being stereotyped as less competent,
Speaker 1: less disciplined, and less employable. So the body becomes a resume.
Speaker 1: Thinness gets translated into competent, composed, self respecting, high value, desirable, safe.
Speaker 1: Larger bodies get forced into the opposite language irresponsible, careless, lazy, unprofessional,
Speaker 1: lacking control, And because women are judged so intensely through
Speaker 1: appearance in the first place, this becomes gendered with extra cruelty.
Speaker 1: Public health and workplace literature keeps finding that women face
Speaker 1: particular forms of weight based stigma and discrimination. So when
Speaker 1: society rewards thin women, it's not just rewarding a shape,
Speaker 1: it's rewarding a performance of obedience, a body that appears
Speaker 1: to say, I regulate myself, I deny myself, I know
Speaker 1: my place, I will not take up too much room.
Speaker 1: The hardest part of all of this is that thinness
Speaker 1: does not only operate as pressure. It also operates as reward, approval, praise, visibility,
Speaker 1: romantic validation, the fantasy of safety, and once girls learned
Speaker 1: that shrinking gets applause, the lesson sinks deep. Naomi Wolf
Speaker 1: argued that dieting became a kind of political sedative, and
Speaker 1: whether or not people agree with every part of her framework,
Speaker 1: that line about female obedience still lands because it identifies
Speaker 1: something culture keeps trying to disguise. Body control is social control,
Speaker 1: and when you add Sabrina String's work to that, the
Speaker 1: picture gets even sharper. Because women were not all being
Speaker 1: asked to become the same thing. They were being ranked
Speaker 1: against a racialized ideal. Thinness was not neutral. It was
Speaker 1: coded white, disciplined, controlled, civilized, which means rejecting that ideal
Speaker 1: is not just personal rebellion. It is also a refusal
Speaker 1: of hierarchy. So the next time beauty culture tries to
Speaker 1: tell you that this is all just about health or
Speaker 1: self improvement or becoming your best self, I want you
Speaker 1: to pause and ask best for whom improved towards what healthy,
Speaker 1: according to whose standards? And why does discipline for women
Speaker 1: so often end up meaning hunger? Because women were never
Speaker 1: only taught to be beautiful. We were taught to be manageable,
Speaker 1: to take up less space, to need less, to want less,
Speaker 1: to carry our obedience on our bodies so the world
Speaker 1: could read it at a glance. And the ugliest part
Speaker 1: is that this ideal was never innocent. It was shaped
Speaker 1: by sexism, yes, but also by racism, by colonial ideas
Speaker 1: of whose body counted as refined and whose body had
Speaker 1: to be shamed, corrected and brought into line. So, if
Speaker 1: you have ever felt like your body was a project,
Speaker 1: a problem, a public referendum on your character, that feeling
Speaker 1: did not come from nowhere. That is history talking. That
Speaker 1: is power talking. That is beauty culture doing what it
Speaker 1: has always done best, taking domination and making it look aspirational.
Speaker 1: So the next time you catch yourself trying to shrink
Speaker 1: your body, or silence your hunger, or convince yourself that
Speaker 1: taking up less space makes you better. Just ask yourself
Speaker 1: one thing. Was this ever really about beauty? Or was
Speaker 1: it about obedience? I hope you enjoyed the episode and
Speaker 1: that it shed new light on the way we've been
Speaker 1: taught to see our bodies and ourselves. If you did,
Speaker 1: pass it along to your family, friends, your group chats,
Speaker 1: your co workers. Until next time, my love buckets, take
Speaker 1: care of yourselves and each other, and stay curious always.
Speaker 1: You'll hear from me again next week. Mm bye Li.
Speaker 2: Kick clap, pick pick, Please take them