There are certain scenes from mainstream pop culture that live (problematically) rent-free in my mind.

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1. Episode 14 of Gilmore Girls: That Damn Donna Reed. Lorelai and Rory are sitting on the couch watching TV as Dean (Rory’s boyfriend) comes through the door holding two boxes of pizza and a salad. After the Gilmores shame Dean for having a salad, they proceed to (to my teenage eyes) devour the pizzas.

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2. Andy Anderson from How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days in her office, having lunch with her two friends Michelle and Jeannie, both of which are eating a salad, as Andy (the slimmest of them all) crams down what looks like a kebab or a burger. Her friends (jokingly) ask out loud how she can eat like that and look the way she does.

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It’s important to note that throughout the 7 seasons of Gilmore Girls the scene that I just described happens repeatedly with only slight variations to them: they might be shaming someone for exercising or for eating vegetables, they might be sitting in front of what seems to be Chinese takeaway that could feed around 10 people or having Pop Tarts for breakfast 4 days in a row. A core element to their personalities is how much black coffee they drink; always black, always by the jug, regardless of the time or place or food that it’s accompanied by.

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Now, bear in mind that I was around 13 when I first watched the cult-classic TV show, which means that I was in my most vulnerable and influenceable years, feeling deeply insecure about anything and everything about myself. It was around this time when my eating disorders and unhealthy relationship with food started, too, but that’s another story that I won’t bore you with now. It’s not surprising that so many girls and young women’s brains started tricking themselves as the content that we were consuming was feeding us a complete contradiction: ingest as much food as you’re bodily able to and stay slender and thin. All whilst not showing any effort to stay “healthy”.

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As the feminist theorist, Susan Bordo, analyses in detail in her book Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body: the construction of female bodies under this contradiction is bound to result in eating disorders. Our female bodies are literally being constructed by culture and its paradoxical contradiction of “instant gratification of desire coupled up with the demand for control, slenderness and a taut body” (Bordo).

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Let’s go back to one of our “cool-girl” OGs: Andy Anderson. Before getting into this movie any deeper, I have to state that I’m a HUGE fan of it, it’s one of my go-tos for anything (i.e. when feeling down, when feeling tired, when feeling overwhelmed, when feeling anxious, you name it: How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is my cure). Having said that, there are multiple problematic angles from which you could analyse this movie, but we won’t because 1. We’re only focusing on its relationship to food and the female body and 2. Not everything needs to be highly scrutinised to the point of losing its entire reason of existence.

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Just off the top of my head I can think of 7 (8 if you count the “My boyfriend thinks I’m fat” scene as double because she’s eating her vegan bowl at the table with Ben, but also a huge burrito in the kitchen at the back) different scenes of Kate Hudson stuffing her face (and I chose this word very carefully as she’s always literally devouring her food in a very “unlady-like” manner). We not once see her exercise or mention anything about working out, yet only someone who does could look like that in that legendary yellow dress. So we, once again, encounter the contradiction that surrounds the construction of the modern female body: eat without evident care, but keep control of your slender body; don’t make the effort apparent because consuming is being shoved down our throats (almost too literally), but you’re required to keep control of yourself and your desires.

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Culture is literally screaming at us “Eat! But not too much! Eat more! But don’t lose control of your body and the modern expectations of beauty and health”. How sad and messed up is that?! We literally grew up being pulled between the extreme consumerism and extreme starvation, our brains and bodies were bound to crack. No wonder one in five young women experience some degree of eating disorders in their lives and keep it so secret and private. From the moment that someone is born a woman, we’re expected to both consume and be consumed to comply with the capitalistic assumptions of the system that we live in.

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In other words: women are first expected to be the main consumers in society, but then to be consumed by society; first as consumers in the capitalist system, second as objects in the patriarchal system. Sorry for getting heavy here, but I really can’t stress enough how complicated and problematic the situation around the female body is, as you can see. Women drive 70-80% of all consumer purchasing!! Then the female body is consumed by everyone that surrounds us because society has been led by misogyny. So there’s a very complex tension between the expectations of consumerism and of the female body.

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Let’s not forget that these two specific examples are from the early noughties, which is also the time when mainstream pop culture really exploded, hand in hand with the booming of celebrity culture and the roaring of the supermodels. Today everything is different (except for the expectations of female’s bodies): pop culture happens mostly online, celebrities are now influencers (or content creators) and supermodels are, well… two things haven't changed. But digital platforms like Tiktok have blurred all the lines and all three categories are pretty much dependent on one another and informing one another all the time, only to intensify our content consumption and the narratives that we are exposed to.

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So what used to be film and TV characters having a big impact on young girls has transformed into smartphones and social media having an even bigger knock because we’re just exposed to it basically 24/7 at an arm's length. Today, my Tiktok discovery page is full of tiny waists “eating” all of London or, for the summer edition, all of Italy. The amount of content on food-tok is so overwhelming that sometimes after a big scrolling day I literally catch myself thinking about food every second of every waking hour. And it’s quite devastating because, for a fraction of a second, we thought things were starting to change into a more inclusive, less toxic pop culture. After a couple steps forward, social media took us thousand steps back in very different ways.

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The way that this is different is mostly the “realness” behind this content, as opposed to the (kind of) clearly fake worlds that make Hollywood. Tiktok and Instagram are meant to be actual, genuine content platforms -everyone knows this is a total scam now and it’s as (if not more than) fake as Hollywood- that blurs the lines of authentic and fraud. My mind goes immediately to Bella Hadid, who has (somewhat) tricked us all into her eating habits, particularly her facade about how much pizza she eats.

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Hadid, who won model of the year awards from both the British Fashion Council and Models.com in 2022, is effectively the face of the industry at the moment and claimed at an i_D interview to eat pizza “at least once a day” (very, very hesitantly). After getting some backlash from that she decided it was important to defend herself and, to do so, she posted not one, but TWO screenshots of her camera roll that featured only pictures of pizza in multiple formats and situations. And look, I’m not here to come after Bella! But I do think it’s problematic of her (and many many other models) to just throw around those statements while looking the way they look and being completely oblivious to the effect that this might be having on women -particularly on younger women and some girls.

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Nevertheless, this case is quite similar to Hollywood movies and cult-like TV shows, as we all know, to some extent, that everything they say has to be received with a pinch of salt. But the problem keeps growing with accounts like @babydumpling whose entire content revolves around the amount of food that she, supposedly, consumes in one go. She literally buys what would normally feed 5 people (i.e. 3 chicken burgers, 3 BigMacs, 2 big fries, 2 apple pies, 1 cinnamon roll, a huge Sprite) and records “the process of her eating” and she’s as slim as a size 0. Being trained in recognising stuff like this when it comes to women and food I immediately appreciate that she doesn’t swallow ANY of the bites that she records. Nor do we know her lifestyle or what goes on before/after she “eats” all of this food. I really, really don’t want to make any false assumptions about her, because even if her claims of a crazy fast metabolism is true, she should know better and consider the pain and hurt she could be inflicting by not being even if just a little bit more honest. It’s just sad and painful to see how we keep reinforcing this narrative and enabling the development of eating disorders and body dysmorphia.

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I am very much aware that eating disorders are WAY more complicated than what I’ve just described them as, much more nuanced and with multiple layers to them other than the cultural construction of the female body. But I think it’s very important to have these conversations and to acknowledge these topics that are unfolding right in front of our precious eyes. Unfortunately, I don’t have the solution for this as it is way bigger than me and even Susan Bordo, Bella Hadid and Hollywood writers. But I like to think that if we talk about it more openly and we realise that we’re not alone in our feelings and experiences we might be able to push back on this contradiction. Being more informed, but also being more open about our own demons will allow us to reject and let go, even if slowly, of these patriarchal and capitalist expectations that the world holds against us for the simple fact of being a woman. Women of the world: let us push back, let us take back control of our bodies by denying what is expected of us, let us reject content that doesn’t serve us, or let us at least be strong enough to understand their limits and restraints.

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I’m here for everyone and anyone who wants to explore their own trials and tribulations, learn more about this or simply exchange a real and honest conversation about the world that surrounds us.

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Resources:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbGBWIyfUGMSusan Bordo.

- Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993

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