I’m sitting at my desk consuming questionable amounts of colourful Korean corn puffs while scrolling on TikTok to procrastinate even further on the things I have to do. As I’m sorting through the bag to skip through the bland yellow puffs, the next video blasts in my ear with some of the harshest words one could come across: “Don’t reward yourself with food. You are not a dog.” Like okay, rude. I continued to eat my corn puffs in peace while I scrolled. 

These quotes have circulated on social media with so many people regurgitating them, spreading harmful rhetorics to more impressionable women. It feels like we are regressing back to the early 2000s. While it was the era of colourful clothing (with some questionable choices), extreme low rise, and arguably the last era of economic confidence, it was also the era of extremely harmful body ‘trends,’ where objectively thin women were plastered on tabloids for being ‘fat’ and dehumanised for daring to have the little bit of a pooch that everyone has. 

Thankfully, there was a shift in the mid-2010s with the body positivity movement with curves being embraced. However, this era of body-fashion trends was heavily influenced by the Kardashians, who were credited with driving up the amount of Brazilian butt lift (BBL) procedures. Then suddenly, came the extreme diet to try to fit into Marilyn Monroe’s dress for the Met Gala in 2022. Following that, came the rest of the Kardashians and Jenners partaking in dangerous diets to obtain a certain physique. Because of their influence on fashion, thin was now back in. 

But what ideologies are synonymous with this extreme thinness? 

Fashion and political ideologies are cyclical, and there are multiple trends going on, the two most notable being: the cooler, colourful elements of the early-2000s Y2K aesthetic (no, not the JNCO jeans) that feel like performative liberalism with the recycling of toxic thinness promotions, and the trad-wife aesthetic straight from the 1950s that upholds modesty and traditionalist values above all else. 

According to Open Democracy, the far-right has had heavy influence in promoting the dangerous trends of extreme, unattainable thinness. Fascist ideologies tend to paint an idealised version of the human body, particularly women’s bodies as ‘vessels’ for producing the next generation of ‘pure’ and strong children. As far-right movements rise across the Western world, there is also a return of narrow-minded beauty ideals and thinness is viewed as a moral imperative; one that shows dominance over the body and aligns with European beauty standards. 

Before TikTok’s dominance in the social media world, it was rather easy to avoid this rhetoric by simply not interacting with them. You had to go out of your way to find the community, rather than having it come to you. But with TikTok’s algorithm showing you content that you might like, it’s a lot harder to avoid now more than ever. Even when clicking ‘not interested’ a multitude of times, the far-right thinness propaganda will still surface with many coded words, or hashtags like #SkinnyTok. There is now unavoidable pressure to be thin 24/7 through the radicalisation of the far-right. 

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons