If you spend any amount of time online, you’ve probably noticed it. The bodies being praised look smaller again. Not overtly starving, not early-2000s tabloid thin, but controlled. Flat stomachs and clean grocery hauls. Pilates studios with pale wood floors and mirrors angled just right. You could barely call it dieting anymore. It’s “anti-inflammatory”. It’s “gut health”. It’s “what works for me”.
At the initial glance, it seems like just another trend cycle, but it doesn’t behave like one. There’s something heavier sitting underneath the return of “skinny,” something moralized and quietly political. Thinness today isn’t just about beauty. It’s about discipline, purity, control, and increasingly about class.
What we’re witnessing isn’t simply a body type returning to fashion. It’s thinness being rebranded as a virtue.
In today’s wellness culture, the body is treated like a personal object. You’re meant to optimise it, manage it, keep it “clean.” Health stops being shared as a social condition and becomes an individual responsibility. If you’re doing well, it’s because you’re disciplined. If you’re not, the implication is that you’ve failed, not because of stress, long hours, money, or access, but because you didn’t try hard enough.
This way of thinking fits neatly with neoliberal logic: everything is a choice, and every outcome is your own fault or success. Structural inequality fades into the background. So “skinny,” in this context, isn’t accidental; it’s proof that you’re doing life correctly.
What’s especially striking about the current ideal is how much it values restraint—minimal eating, appetite, and indulgence. Clean foods, lines, and routines. There’s a covert admiration for needing less, and the concept of restriction itself becomes aesthetic.
This matters because it mirrors the politics of austerity almost perfectly. Less consumption, but higher quality. Self-denial, framed as a virtue, makes scarcity tasteful. At a time when food insecurity is rising and people are genuinely struggling to afford groceries, “looking underfed” has somehow become aspirational. That contradiction should make us uncomfortable.
Of course, this is all wrapped in the language of empowerment. Pilates is sold as self-care, and diets are reframed as wellness journeys. Thinness is explained away as “just what works for my body.” And to be fair, many women promoting these lifestyles genuinely believe that. But this framing does something sneaky: it strips the politics out of the picture. If everything is a personal choice, then no one is responsible for the harm these ideals create.
This is where the conversation gets tricky. Are women who promote these standards victims of patriarchy? Yes, absolutely. Patriarchal beauty norms still reward youth, smallness, and compliance. Thinness is linked to desirability, safety, and social approval, meaning women who deviate from the ideal are punished socially and often professionally.
But that isn’t the entire story.
Because the ability to perform this idea is not evenly distributed.
Pilates, especially the kind being aestheticized online, requires time, money, stable schedules, and usually living somewhere urban enough to access studios. “Anti-inflammatory” or “clean” eating” asks for fresh ingredients, knowledge about nutrition trends, time to cook, and the flexibility to absorb higher food costs. These aren’t universal conditions. They’re privileges.
Meanwhile, many working-class women are dealing with food deserts, long shifts, exhaustion, stress, and cheaper ultra-processed foods that are designed to be affordable and filling. When someone says “just eat whole foods,” they often forget that cooking requires more than good intentions; it also requires time, energy, and money.
So thinness starts to mean something else. It becomes a visible marker of freedom from precarity; not necessarily health nor happiness, but the absence of constant economic pressure.
This is where the “victim or perpetrator” question lands. Women who embody and promote these ideals are shaped by patriarchal standards, but they also benefit from, monetizing, and universalizing an image that most women can’t realistically access. Structural victimhood doesn’t cancel out structural power. A system can harm you and still help reproduce it.
There’s also a quieter message being sent by the kind of bodies being celebrated. Today’s ideal doesn’t just prefer slimness, it prefers smallness. Small appetites, small presence, small needs. It rewards bodies that look controlled, contained, and non-threatening. Strength, by contrast, is still often treated as unfeminine or excessive. Appetite becomes something to apologize for.
That isn’t accidental. It reflects long-standing patriarchal preferences dressed up as wellness.
To be clear: this isn’t an argument that thin women cause hunger, or that wellness influencers are directly responsible for food scarcity. The link is symbolic, not causal. But symbols matter. When restriction is glamorised, deprivation becomes easier to ignore. When thinness is framed as virtue, hunger becomes invisible, recast as a personal failure rather than a political problem.
So when people say, “it’s just a trend,” it is worth pushing back, as trends don’t exist in a vacuum. They tell us what culture values and who it’s willing to leave behind.
The return of skinny isn’t neutral. It’s telling us something about how femininity, discipline, and worth are being reshaped under late-stage capitalism. And if that makes people defensive, especially those who benefit from wellness culture while seeing themselves as progressive, that’s probably a sign the critique is doing its job.
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