SkinnyTok & The Misdirected Desire for Control
Wellness vs PubMed, Vol 4: How the current political climate of confusion connects to the internet's renewed desire for body control.
It is spring time, and as always, there is a yearly push to remember that Summer is only 4 months or 100 days or 67 days away! This trend has been a yearly occurrence that I can remember happening even on the non- Pro-Ana (ie, Anorexia) side of Tumblr, to Pinterest, to TikTok in the last few years. This year has emerged under the label of #SkinnyTok, with new and old leaders emerging to reiterate the self-criticizing and self-barraging voices many women already have towards their bodies.
*Content Note: Discussion of mental health conditions, suicide, eating disorders, and specific fat-phobic language. As always, please be kind to yourself in what you consume. This is not medical or psychological advice, and I always recommend reaching out to your local support or care team for personalized information.
Tik Tok has both been and not been a thin-body-centered app. There are norms that are implicitly propagated via what kinds of bodies are allowed to become influential (see: white, thin, conventional, etc), but there has also been a more open discourse of influencers speaking against prior periods of their own lives in which they were impacted by body propaganda. This spring, it seems stronger and more direct than it has even been on TikTok, and it’s auspicious that it happens in a time in the US when the political and economic environment is more chaotic and unpredictable than ever before.
In this article, we will explore the known connection between internalization vs externalization in female populations vs male populations, and how this relates to body image, restrictive eating, and self-perception as a form of power. Finally, we will tie together my hypothesis that the current rise in #SkinnyTok pulls these factors and our current political climate together.
On Self-Objectification in Girls and Women
Let us begin with a quote that is familiar to many of us swimming in the waters of feminism:
“The first feminist gesture is to say: “OK, they’re looking at me. But I’m looking at them.” The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, but how I see them.”
Agnès Varda in Filming Desire
Self-objectification is not something that solely happens to girls and women, but the intensity and socialization of self-objectification has been stronger in those raised as girls. Self-objectification can be thought of as looking at oneself, rather than living in oneself. It has ties to religious history and dualism, ie the idea that the body/flesh is the seat of sin and badness, and the mind and soul is “pure”. For girls, it is often the socialized hyper-awareness of how one appears to others, and this way of experiencing day to day life becomes so centered that the idea of living in one’s own sensation becomes an abstract concept.
In their book, More Than A Body, Dr.’s Lindsay and Lexie Kite describe the socialization factor of self-objectification well, as follows:
“Girls learn the most important thing about them is how they look. Boys learn the most important thing about girls is how they look. Girls look at themselves. Boys look at girls. Girls are held responsible for boys looking at them. Girls change how they look. Boys keep looking. The problem isn’t how girls look. The problem is how everyone looks at girls.”
This is the starting point. Before we can address anything about the nuances and complexities of wanting to conform to a beauty or body standard, we have to a priori acknowledge the history of socialization of women, and how beauty has been taught to us as a proxy for safety, security, belonging, love, power. Anecdotally, what I’ve noticed is many people only become interested in the depth of these social dynamics once the way of operating by the current Beauty Laws has failed them or kicked them out—whether because they have developed a clinical level eating disorder, have had the awful privilege of aging past 25 years old, or they were someone who the Beauty Standard never had space for. At some point, the pain makes people seek answers to why this way of being feels so awful. Until then, or if the system is rewarding and safe-keeping them, then the conversation ends through the death knell, “It’s not that deep.”
I was once 16 and wanting to know how to feel about myself, my future, and what love and belonging could be secured by contorting my own body and beauty. I also believe that we don’t have to hold girls and women to a new set of rigid ideals and have them forsake all desire to gain power or acceptance, or avoid serious mistreatment, by pretending that Beauty Standards don’t impact how we get to be in the world at all. I say that to say I understand the desire to not explore this road, and I don’t find it useful to spend my time judging others for that. However, as body ideals continue to sprout more and more heads each time we think we have vanquished it, it’s important to understand these basics so we can understand what powerful emotional undercurrent #SkinnyTok is currently grabbing onto.
On Coping with Emotion and Uncertainty
In research on development and mental health conditions in girls and boys, it is commonly cited that girls are more likely to experience what are referred to as “internalizing” symptoms than boys, who in early puberty are more likely to experience “externalizing” symptoms (though that gap in externalizing may close later on).1
A twin study from 2019 from Sweden looked at these trends in boys and girls, and explains these concepts well, as follows2:
“Mental health problems in youth are commonly divided into externalizing (e.g., impaired self-regulation, antisocial behavior) and internalizing (e.g., depression, anxiety, hypersensitivity, worry) problems. Internalizing symptoms are associated with a range of difficulties negatively affecting health and everyday life for youths (e.g., impaired self-worth, lack of joy, disrupted appetite and sleep patterns), including increased risk of self-harm and suicide. A relatively common finding is that internalizing symptoms are more prevalent in girls than in boys, particularly during adolescence.”
One way I think about this from a psychosocial perspective is how boy versus girl children may be taught to understand and express their own emotional states. Girls may be taught in culture or religious norms that it is expected that they be “seen and not heard” or that rage, anger, jealousy, or desire is not “ladylike.” Internalizing emotional experiences and making sense of the world then becomes an inside job. There is certainly much lost in the socialization of boys—such as in the recognition of emotion and ability to express it in a broad range of words or behaviors. In all of this, there can also be an impact developmentally of the hormonal changes and timeline boys and girls go through that push them down these pathways. Likely, as always, it is both nature and nurture impacting the same end result.
Internalizing disorders are often discussed in the anxiety and depression literature. The idea of self-punishment, self-blame, self-harm, or self-control are ways that people may interact with or respond to negative emotional or situational experiences. In the world of eating disorders and body image, a common conversation we have is about how the restriction of calories or compulsive exercise helps someone cope with the world around them—whether that be in their family dynamics, their schooling or work, or in response to anxiety, depressed feelings, or grief. Though certainly not for everyone, a fear of being “out of control” is something that can come up, and a way of feeling more secure can be through the body.
How #SkinnyTok May Play On Our Emotions
All of the above has been true for many years, and if you read anything vaguely feminist from the last two centuries, you can see it play out in different cultures and eras. In our current day, we have a political climate and culture shift that both encourages a sense of a certain type of body being “right” and “traditional” for women, and an upheaval in certainty about what our world might look like a month, a year, a decade from now.
Let’s make this experiential. Imagine yourself in the following situation:
It is 2:30 pm on a Sunday afternoon. You are sitting on your couch, slightly bored, slightly anxious for the work week to begin. You decide to scroll on TikTok for a bit of a distraction, and the fourth video you see says Breaking News, We have a breaking story stating that federal agency XYZ, regarding the health, education, and employment of XYZ group, will be disbanded in two weeks. More on this soon. After you try to find an actual article on this and fail, you go back to TikTok, unsettled and uncertain, searching for either more information or stronger distraction. After a couple cute cat videos, you see a video of a mom out walking, fully done up, voice severe and demanding that you acknowledge that if you are a Stay at Home Mom, the least your husband deserves for providing is coming home to a Hot Wife. The next video, as you scroll away, is a video responding to a clip of a 20 something girl screaming at you that it is Ridiculous that you expect accomodations. You are just FAT, FAT, FAT, okay? Love you, bye. The next video is about an investigation that seems unlawful by someone who is not even an elected official. Then it’s an 18 year old talking about how she used a stone massage to get her jaw snatched, and that people are just jealous who don’t want to follow her 21 step skincare routine, sponsored by that face massager manufacturer.
Wow, I think I made myself anxious just writing that. Let’s pause for a second, and breathe.
How many emotions did that paragraph bring out, or jog a memory of something that is terrifying to you? Even if we consume this junk and don’t agree with it, there is something about the permanence of practiced images that sticks with us. If I don’t ever know the term for the next body insecurity Tik Tok has invented, then it never takes us space in my life. If I do witness it, then it’s there, and even the videos arguing against it somewhat legitimize that the concern MAY be valid in some way.
When our world is uncertain, and the safety and belonging of ourselves and those we love is up in the air, it is very human to want to find a way, any way, towards security and safety. When you have been raised as a girl or woman to think that the way to deal with emotions, even emotions triggered by TikTok, is to internalize, you may find yourself more anxious, more frozen, more depressed, more overwhelmed, and with your motivation and sense of your own agency at an all time low.
When the world around us is so unclear or seemingly out of our impact, then we may start to want to spend our time on anything we MIGHT be able to impact. When we are taught as girls and women that our proximity to power and ability to control things is through our appearance, then it makes sense that these videos the algorithm serves us up may hit squarely in the chest, and strike us as a realistic way to start feeling better about ourselves, and therefore our world.
Remember: Our time and attention is our own. We do not have to consume this content. In this current anxiety-inducing time, it’s more important than even to be thoughtful with what you take into your brain and into your life. The point is not to be disconnected, but rather to recognize our human limits on information consumption, and whether the information we are taking in is making us stronger, kinder, more connected people in the world, or at least makes us laugh.
If it isn’t fortifying you, please take this as the only diet advice I will ever give you: through the junk content out, and let that which nourishes you in.
As always, thanks for your time and attention. I leave you with my favorite quote that has been like a compass to me for over a decade now.
“Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you're 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written, or you didn't go swimming in those warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It's going to break your heart. Don't let this happen.”
Anne Lamott
Sincerely,
Margaret of Bad Art Every Day
Herpertz-Dahlmann B, Bühren K, Remschmidt H. Growing up is hard: mental disorders in adolescence. Dtsch Arztebl Int. 2013 Jun;110(25):432-9; quiz 440. doi: 10.3238/arztebl.2013.0432. Epub 2013 Jun 21. PMID: 23840288; PMCID: PMC3705204.
Durbeej, N., Sörman, K., Norén Selinus, E. et al. Trends in childhood and adolescent internalizing symptoms: results from Swedish population based twin cohorts. BMC Psychol 7, 50 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-019-0326-8
this is so beautifully and thoughtfully written!
wow. thank you for writing about this so insightfully. thoroughly enjoyed this read.