stop your performative concern!
Ariana Grande is currently in the spotlight for her extreme thinness and I think it needs to stop. Fans are “concerned” and wish the healthy Ariana back. When her music video for her title track petals dropped, her health was all that was discussed in the YouTube comment section, not her music. “Discussed” is giving a lot more credit to the “discourse” than it deserves because all anyone voices is either their “concern” for her health or an edited picture that exaggerates her emaciation. Both of which don’t help her overcome her eating disorder or anyone else suffering from one. With this post I would like to discuss the various claims levied against this manufactured scandal and why it isn’t conducive to a positive outcome.
Eating disorders are still not fully understood and I won’t claim any expertise whatsoever on the topic, but what I could gather from my limited research™️ is that the reaction to Grande’s is not pursuant of her recovery—or anyone suffering from an ED for that matter. Central to them is the matter of control over one’s own body and life. They can be a reaction to a loss or lack of control over certain aspects of life that prompt the afflicted person to control their looks as a last resort. Body image issues can also prompt someone to have a disordered relationship to food. If someone is starving themselves to look thinner and people notice they’re thinner, that motivates them to keep going, according to the many recovering anorexics I found online that were against this craze around her body. The worry itself, however genuine, can be validating and drive them to double down on their self-harm. This is a sensitive condition that needs professional care and, most importantly, the patient must see and recognize the necessity of their recovery for the care to work. Bullying someone online is not going to make them see that and would only contribute to a worsened mental state—the ignored harms to others suffering from an ED notwithstanding.
If someone is as famous as Ariana Grande, they learn to ignore what the public says about them. What they learn of public opinion is usually filtered through their PR team, so they rely on the people around them to hold them accountable and be honest with them about their failings. Even if Ariana Grande was accessing the internet herself to see what people are saying about her, why would she heed people’s warnings—coming from those she neither knows nor whose word she trusts—when she’d been trained from a young age to distrust all the chatter about her? If the people around her don’t see anything wrong with her and can’t convince her that she’s sick, nobody of the strangers online will convince her to.
And let me be crystal clear: What she’s doing in her music video or public performances where she intentionally shows the bones while claiming to be healthy is not right, but is completely inline with what someone with an eating disorder would do. I see her primarily as a victim and secondarily as a perpetrator. She is part of an industry that glamorizes unrealistic beauty standards for everyone and so I don’t see how going after a prominent face would address the systems that drive many of us into disordered eating.
There are two reasons for this craze around a woman’s body: First, we as a society see a woman’s body as a commons that we all rightfully have a say on, and secondly, people fear imitation from her young, impressionable (female) fans. Both reasons remind me a lot of what the public and media did to Britney Spears. Her behavior as well as how she used her body was deemed harmful—and we have a right to dictate how she uses her body because we enforce that a woman’s body is a commons—and there was a panic around young girls imitating her as well. The only difference here is that if Ariana Grande died today, the borderline promotion of anorexia in media would continue. And like Britney Spears said, these celebrities are not your kids’ parents. You are. And if you think you can’t counter what an entire industry is coercing your kid to do through soft power—and you can’t—, then maybe your enemy isn’t this one woman, but what she is a part of. In that case you must go after the industry to address the system and not this one woman, because, as I said, if Ariana Grande went away today, the problem would persist.
Feigning concern for someone’s body is as old as the distinction between the public and private spheres. I implore you to remember how we talk about fat people’s bodies and how we feign the same concern and bully them the same way to “get better.” This is no different and it is equally none of your business whether someone flaunts their fatness or thinness. How unhealthy that is for them is between them and their doctors to decide. Keep your opinions about people’s bodies to yourself because they’re none of your business. And that doesn’t magically change because someone is famous.
Our society loves to go after a scapegoat because scapegoating doesn’t require one to interrogate the hegemony that made the scapegoat in the first place. We do this in every facet of life without fail. If a child is troubled, we go after them instead of their troubles. If someone is poor and suffering, we blame them for their poverty and misery instead of the robbery that makes them poor. If a woman is sexually assaulted, we blame it on what she was wearing, not the patriarchy that made her body a public common. If the economy goes bad, we blame it on the newcomers who are robbing us, not the entrenched oligarchy with the real and heavily used power to rob us. We like it easy and we like it comfortable. Don’t be a useful idiot like that. If you have a bone to pick, aim your gun higher.