YouTube, TikTok, Instagram—so many of our For You Pages (FYPs) are crowded with thinkpieces on skinny-tok, model culture, and fascism.
Yet, the concerns they raise extend far deeper than political ideologies alone. Drinking two liters of water per day, dedicating two hours for pilates, then cautiously counting the calories eaten and limiting one’s sugar intake may be considered a ‘clean-girl’ routine. However, this choreographed ‘care’ for body optimization is part of a system known as body politics– the practices and policies through which powers of society regulate the human body. This relentless scrutiny of intake shows little concern for well-being. Appearance alone takes center stage.
Bodies are viewed as primary indicators of self-control and self-discipline. Indeed, people often feel entitled to comment on someone else’s body– the thinner one is, the merrier one is assumed to be, as exemplified by the Ozempic intake trend. Even in 2006, sociologist Spencer warned about a drastic change in women’s weight, due to the rise of model culture, which in turn instigated diet culture. Models, whose jobs are to embody ideal body figures, were becoming slimmer than most women. As a result, women began to reshape themselves to resemble them, commodifying skeletal thinness.
Sociologists warn about the cultural internalization of necropolitics, a concept defined by Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe as a form of political power that operates through the social and literal deaths of individuals and populations. In its commercial form, necropolitics can be understood as the extreme control over and potentially deadly neglect of one’s body to conform to cultural beauty standards. Indeed, lifeless, frozen, perfect bodies surround us in pictures, ads, snaps, and stories. The media never fails to remind us of the materiality of our bodies– framing the human as bound above all by flesh and appearance. Furthermore, the number of people suffering from body dysmorphic disorder—a mental health condition in which one cannot stop thinking about one or more perceived defects or flaws in appearance—has never been so high.
Bodies have become projects, where every change is intentional—weight loss, tattoos, surgery, muscle building, and so on. Through this notion of the body-project, bodies now lie at the core of identity, as sociologist Chris Shilling explains. In High modernity, which is inseparable from the rise of capitalism, individualism, and consumerism, images of perceived legitimacy replace social class realities.
What in our current culture leads us to hate our bodies so much? Why do we want to control them so obsessively?
The crux of this lies in how politics has bled into culture: widening class divides, glorifying elites, and turning bodies into shortcuts for social climbing. Video essays point out how the rise of model-cleansed bodies echoes the rise of populism in modern politics– here silent racism often remains, since the preferred elite body stays a non-racialized, ‘modernized’ one. Even if they claim to stand far from each other on the political chessboard, both the extreme right and extreme left represent the interests of ordinary people against what is framed as the elite.
However, altering one’s body became a means of copying and thus passing as one of the elite– a social class elevator, and one of the main ways to attain social advantages. So you might not have noticed, but your body in itself is an ideological tool– subtler, and perhaps stronger, than protest. Politics leak into our identities, even when we resist its messages – rendering our bodies simply means to reproduce the status quo.