A Silent Response – Gamma Revista

The air smells of the 90s, and it is tainted by the same backlash that minorities got decades ago after pushing the debate on their agenda.

On November 2, 2022, the online edition of the New York Post published an article titled Goodbye Booty: Heroin Chic Is Back, something like “the end of the big butt era and the return of the attractive heroine body”. Yep, in case you didn’t know, the heroin chic aesthetic was fashionable in the ’90s and determined the “perfect” body of that decade: as thin as a heroin user, surprisingly. Going back to the New York Post’s text, she described the new wave of slimming influencers and models in recent appearances at the world’s fashion weeks and at the cultural industry’s great awards. The central photo was of Kim Kardashian, in a before-and-after style montage. Write that symbol there.

The fashion weeks for the first half of 2023 took place from January to March and presented 9,184 looks across 219 shows between New York, Milan, London and Paris. Only 17 shows featured a plus size look. That is, since we started counting down to the inclusion of diversity of bodies in international weeks, which was 2016, the year 2023 marks the failure of progress over the years discussing free body movements like #bodypositive. hold it there. Oh, not to mention that many haute couture shows have casually brought back the corset, which is another sign of the times.

But it doesn’t stop here. There are filters on social networks that sharpen your nose, brighten your face and erase your lines; Bichectomy has become a trend on TikTok, with thousands of videos showing celebrities who have had the surgery; The slimming drug of the moment is Ozempic, which made the cover of New York Magazine; And in any advertisement in any store, or in magazines, or on television, or in the cinema, there is always a thin, white and young female body. Everything is preferably corrected in Photoshop, but without telling you so that you believe it is possible. It’s just an attempt. Just follow the recipe of a nutrition coach who has never studied the subject but has millions of followers.

Yes, thinness is back and now is the time to pursue the heroin user aesthetic, just as it did in the 90s and 2000s, sparking a wave of eating disorders among 15-19 year old girls. Today, there are surveys showing a rise in cases of eating disorders as a childhood epidemic, affecting one in three girls. In addition to cases of body dysmorphia, which are not even diagnosed.

But no one will tell you that you need to stay skinny to gain social and emotional capital. Now, as the men say in a scene from the movie “Barbie”: “It’s the patriarchy, only we can hide it better”. Any “Slimming Down!” Not going to shout, as women’s magazines did in the 1980s, but will increasingly use images of thinner women to exemplify success with before-and-after photos. These taut bodies would also be used to exaggerate luxury and there are rumors that models are not participating in international fashion shows because they have to be a US size zero, a size 34 in Brazil.

To prove that thinness (for women) is social capital, The Economist did a great report on the relationship between the female body and job opportunities and wages. Call confirms what the numbers suggest: “It’s economically rational for ambitious women to try their best to be slim”.

We already knew that job opportunities for women differ by social class, skin color, age, and even between mothers and non-mothers. Now it is clear that your chances of getting ahead in your career are also related to the size of pants you wear. Controlling our body shape serves as a counter-attack strategy to beauty, as Susan Faludi wrote in her classic 1991 book “Backlash.” There, she presented examples of image building of fashion and beauty, which created a “counter-attack” that forced women to focus on controlling their bodies without realizing that they were in a larger trap. Did. What you consider to be a personal issue – “Oh my body is this or that” – is, in fact, something that affects all of us to a greater or lesser extent, because it is social and political. So, here’s this excerpt from the book I used to write an article on the subject for a fashion conference, but got an opinion that Suzanne’s publication was “too short” to use as a main bibliographic reference. old” was:

“The reaction against women’s rights is successful only as long as it does not assume any political colouring, as long as it appears to be anything but a struggle. It is all the more powerful the more it manages to make itself a private affair, to enter a woman’s mind and turn her gaze inward, until she imagines that the pressure is on her head. is in, until she begins to apply the reaction rule to herself. ,

It comes as no surprise to the opinion I got, feminist publications will always be less read, less recognized and less relevant in a world where our worth can only be limited to the body. How much (low) we weigh, it is worth to us.

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