Millennials are revisiting ‘00s body-shaming, and it’s wild

I took to Instagram to ask my followers if body-shaming from the 00s warped their own self-image, and the answer was a resounding yes. 1000s of women replied in a few hours, with stories echoing one another: “Only 2/11 of my school friends haven’t had disordered eating/an ED at some point”, “Circle of shame? Celeb’s weight in magazines? ED from 16 as a result”, “100%- I was 7 at the start of the millennium and it made me think anything over a UK12 was fat.”

Kate, 26, from Liverpool says she “lived by the rules of ‘what not to wear’ without even realising it for years,” which meant “no horizontal stripes, peplum was only for very thin women, black was your best friend. There was no one saying getting older would mean looking different [from our teenage selves], instead we had Britney Spears being criticised for putting on weight in comparison to her teenage body”

Stephanie tells me how distorted her perception of beauty was “I thought you had to be a size 0 to be beautiful. I thought anyone over a size 8 was obese. It’s ridiculous looking back, that someone like America Ferrera from ‘Ugly Betty’ was seen as being ‘ugly’ and ‘fat’”.

Stephanie’s point highlights an important issue for me, which is that whilst these viral posts are fuelling positive discussions, it’s imperative that we don’t further add to fatphobia by reinforcing the idea that ‘fat’ is a bad word, or a bad thing to be. Women like Jessica Simpson were bullied by the media for being fat, when they weren’t. But fat people did exist in the ‘00s, because they always have and always will, they just were just very rarely allowed to flourish in the public eye.

Generations of women before us faced body shaming, as have the ones since; but that doesn’t mean things won’t ever be better, and that society isn’t evolving. In the ‘00s, I never saw plus-size women in media, now they grace magazine covers and have best selling albums. They are still an exception, though, which is what we collectively need to focus on changing next. I can’t wait for the day when I see a plus-size woman cast in a romcom that makes no mention of her size!

A woman’s body has nothing to do with her worth; this is a hard lesson to learn when we grew up ingesting the rampant diet culture and body-shaming of the ‘00s, but conversations like this are a step in the right direction. Millennial women were taught a whole load of bullshit about bodies, and it affected us, but it does not define us. If you’re now challenging those beliefs, well done. I’m proud of you.