The millennial vernacular of fatphobia

[gumby]

In her latest newsletter, Anne Helen Petersen, author of celebrity thinkpieces who's now transitioned into workplace writing, somewhat goes back to her roots and talks about the body standards that millennials faced during their youth

Comments

[januarysix]

This just makes me miss Sassy Magazine. It was not perfect by any means but they were at least trying to challenge the status quo a little bit.

[cherhorowitz]

Yeah I’ve reread sassy articles and there was stuff that was iffy but it was really great compared to what was in other magazines at the time.

[silverstarry]

I know everyone loves Marie Kondoing the shit out of their stuff, but a few years after college I went through my room at my parents' house and tossed years and years of Sassy magazines into the recycling bin. I still regret it! I should have followed my teenage hoarding instincts and kept them all.

[januarysix]

or at least ebayed them!! they were going for like 30 or 40 bucks a pop there years ago! nostalgia is a hell of a drug

[thatcovergirl]

I agree with pieces of this article. I can't relate to a lot of it but...yeah.

YM, Teen, and my fave Seventeen Magazine had such huge influences on me. Especially when they put a fave of mine or two on the cover.

[mary_pickforded]

Fuck, I wish my "fat" looked like the girl on that issue of Seventeen. Even when my bones poke out everywhere, my stomach is never as flat as hers.

[anna_drenxavier]

I have never ever had a flat stomach, not even when I was a 115 pound teen. It has always stuck out a little. (I read that the uterus might be to blame, that it can just be bulgy.)

[altheablue]

The uterus thing is a misconception (started as a tumblr post iirc) it's just that female body fat patterns mean that many women won't have a flat stomach unless they'll drop their to a dangerously low weight, and even then there's really no guarantee because everyone's body is different. They could starve for months and still have a pouch. One-size-fits-all beauty standards are dangerous but this especially insidious because it's perceived as attainable but it's just not.

[dolcefire]

I'm the same, I've always wondered if its because I've got narrow hips and hence my stomach just has no where to go but forward (this probably sounds really stupid!)

[maryjanewatson]

god, growing up in the late 90s/early 00s was so brutal to my self image. i was maybe a size 6-8 that whole time and was treated and made to believe my body was literally deformed. i remember crying looking at britney’s stomach in i’m a slave 4 u.

[artlover2788]

I remember hearing on mtv from her trainer that she did 1000 crunches a day and so 13 year old me tried to do 1000 crunches a day

[mzgrottesca]

same but I was like 8 lmao

[easemybones]

Same. I was ten and did 1000 crunches before going to bed. I didn't get the flat stomach even though I really stuck to the routine for a long time.

[melispurple]

"-Says that when millennial women shudder at the possible return of low-rise jeans, it's "not being old, or boring, or basic ... It was about the jeans on our bodies. We are attempting to reject a cultural moment that made so many of us feel undesirable, incomplete, and alienated from whatever fragile confidence we’d managed to accumulate."

I recently talked about this on here, don't remember which post. Early 2000's was such a shitty time for the image of women in the media. Sure it's not that much better now, but I hope it will be in the coming years!

I'm only now coming to understand my own eating disorders and it's more complicated than just saying it was all media stuff (I have a lot of stuff happening in my youth for example).