Exactly how it feels when strangers discuss your body online

This is a paid for article BUT the top section sits before the paywall, and amounts to one complete article which you can read for free. OBVS I’d love you to upgrade to paid, but appreciate these are expensive times.

I am staunchly opposed to the online discussion of Ariana Grande’s body; the one which, most recently, has reduced her (no pun intended) to pulling out of a West End revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday In The Park.

Grande has asked, explicitly, several times over, once in the form of song, that people not comment on her body; still, they did, they have, they do. The clamour only grew louder this week, in response to the release of the video for her new single Petal. After which, on Monday, a representative for the actress and singer told People magazine that Grande “will be taking a step back from visibility” when her current Eternal Sunshine tour ends, next month, and that she’ll be doing this because of “endless, ongoing public scrutiny”.

I totally accept that some of the commentary on her looks is grounded in desperate concern. For her, for the culture she influences. I just don’t think that makes it any more useful, than the commentary grounded in bitching and bad feeling and careless, broader intentions.

To Grande, it’ll all amount to the same thing, endless, unasked for dissecting of her physical self by strangers. The reduction, of everything she is, and everything she’s ever done, and might do, to that.

How she looks. How unacceptable it is.

To the young girls and women observing it: it’ll amount to the same thing too. Just more talk about what women look like, at the expense of who they are.

It really doesn’t matter how noble you believe your motivation. When you’re subject to this kind of internet intervention, believe me: you do not feel loved, or cared for, or supported, or as if all these strangers only want the best for you.

You feel only attacked, degraded, reduced.

I know this for a fact, because it has happened to me. To an infinitely lesser degree, of course; me being a person of truly minuscule profile, compared to - well anyone - but certainly Grande’s international stardom.

But, if in a much, much smaller way, nonetheless - it happened. A lot of strangers discussed my body - my weight, my size - critically, online, to my absolute detriment, personal, and professional, and for a very long time.

Arguably, I asked for it.

I’m the one who mentioned it first – in a column about how I liked being very slim, published 23 years ago, my God!, in The Observer… And all hell broke lose when it ran.

I was knocked sideways by the extent of the response, which was, in flavour, overwhelmingly incensed.

How dare I? How dare I be so outrageous as to even acknowledge I have a body, let alone, a thin one? How dare I rejoice in it? How dare I be such a bad role model, to younger women? How dare I “monetise my eating disorder” (actual quote)? How dare I be so vacuous and superficial and stupid in a broadsheet newspaper?

How dare I? HOW DARE I?

And so forth.

I took the initial onslaught on the chin. Ish. It was weird, don’t get me wrong. It all happened around about the dawn of online newspaper comment sections, none of us newly online journalists knew what we were in for, where all this was concerned. If the culture of things like trolling and internet pile-ons and cancellation had yet to fully emerge - it was still quite the unpleasant, foul leap, for those of us on the receiving end. You go pretty much overnight, from getting the very occasional hand written green ink through-the-mail expression of some random reader’s madness (my fave ever, came in rhyming couplets), to: being barraged by hundreds, thousands, of anonymous statements of casual, throwaway online condemnation.

It was a lot.

But yeah, I survived that.

What I didn’t expect, was that it would be all anyone talked about, with respect to me, for a decade afterwards. If I’d raised the subject of my body that one time, I didn’t return to it again - not until I started this SubStack. I absolutely didn’t dare poke that vipers’ nest! Never mind that I was also thoroughly intrigued by how incredibly potent it seemed to be. Never mind that if left me with this question: Was it all about me being thin - or was it just about me committing the ultimate crime, as a woman, of actually (GASP) liking my body?

Inconclusive.

But even though I didn’t write about my body again, for years and years and years and years - that was all I was, according to strangers on the internet. That stupid, scrawny, skinny bitch, who was also mean and dangerous and probably ill.

In that time, I wrote about hundreds, probably thousands, of other things, interviewed hundreds of other people… Yet still, I was simply not allowed to be anything other than that woman with the too-skinny body. Any words I wrote were ignored, in favour of dissecting the byline picture that appeared next to it. Or if they were read: they’d be instantly discredited, I would be instantly discredited, because I was thin, so what the f**k did I know about it? About anything at all?

My perspectives were all meaningless. My ideas. My experience. All of ‘em. Totally irrelevant, because I was just some stupid, THIN, woman.

Nothing I wrote changed this, for years. Even if readers agreed with me on something, they’d get really angry about that - as if I’d poisoned the purity of their ideology, by briefly aligning with it. They were incapable of believing I was ever intentionally funny about anything – ME! I’ve won bloody awards for being funny! – because: how could a thin woman, also be a funny one?

This feels like sh*t. Like you should apologise for yourself, or explain yourself, constantly. Like you have to work overtime to prove to people, the first time you meet them, and several times after that, that you’re not a completely awful person. Or a completely stupid one.

As if every article I wrote, had to be couched in a similar vibe. As if I was one of those dogs who instantly rolls over on its back, so you know it’s not a threat.

So that was exhausting.

Fighting with constant assumptions of / assertions of my stupidity, was also exhausting. Having thinness thrown in my face, over and over, as the defining idea of me, personally and professionally; having it make everything else I was, thought, did or wrote, immaterial.

Having people document following me round my local Sainsbury’s to see what I put in my basket, or, observe me - “skinny, but in an ugly, old way” – in the big Urban Outfitters on Oxford Circus, where they then tweeted fantasising about pushing me down the stairs.

For quite a long time, I was allowed to be nothing, NOTHING AT ALL, but thin.

Imagine what that does to your sense of your self? Imagine what that does, to the women looking on, watching, seeing how you’re treated?

It makes you feel smaller than your dress size, I’ll tell you that.

It’s pretty humiliating.

Had I had an eating disorder, which I didn’t, but… Had I: that chatter would have helped me in no way at all. That faintly obsessive focus: I mean, how could it, possibly?

I watched the latest season of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives (judge me, I don’t care); within it, one of the regular cast members, Layla, talked about the recurrence of her eating disorder, and how she had been abusing GLP-1s because of it. It was pretty heartbreaking, but one of the things which really struck me, was her talking about the hit of validation she felt, every time an online commenter said something like:

“You’re too thin!

Or
“Eat something!”

Her behaviour was, she said, hugely reinforced by it. Because imagine being her, with that mindset, if commenters starting saying things like:

“Good to see you putting on weight!”

Seriously?

So, while I’m absolutely convinced some of the commentary around my body, was posted from a sense of concern – just as some of the commentary around Ariana Grande’s body, is – it would have been highly detrimental to me, had it been accurate in its assessment of my mental health.

Which it wasn’t.

On which, and to return to Ariana Grande: we have no idea what is going on with her, her health and her body. We really don’t.

I know we think we do. I know we’re quite sure of it, but…

OK, remember when we were equally sure we knew what was going on with the Princess of Wales, that time? When we’d watched her body avidly, and monitored her schedule, and come up with all kinds of very specific diagnoses, about her overall health, and her mental health? Then it turned out we were wrong; she’d got cancer, actually, which we found out because all that conjecture forced her to make a statement she might otherwise, not have done. Not then, or in that way, at least.

And then we were all really embarrassed and chastened and sorrowful and swore we’d do better, next time?

Guys!

I think this is next time.

As I said, it was only on starting this SubStack that I got the nerve to talk about my body again, for the first time in over 20 years.

I was so tentative and scared at first, but… as it turns out, it’s been bloody brilliant to do that.

You have been bloody brilliant.

Far from making it the Only Thing About Me, you’ve allowed this to become a space where I can be truly honest about it, more, than I ever have, without ever feeling reduced to it.

It’s also become a space where some of you, at least, have felt able to be honest about yours.

This has felt like, and continues to feel, like a massive privilege.

Honest discussion of your own body, is infinitely more helpful, useful and powerful, than loaded discussion of other women’s bodies, I’m sure of that.

And I can be honest about how proud I am of mine. I took these pics today cos I liked my outfit (the shorts are new season Aligne- (affiliate link - I love how they’re half Bermuda, half boxer going into the ring) and because I encourage all those who wish to get their damn abs out in public, to get their damn abs out in public.

My bod is certainly no longer the kind of skinny which makes strangers tell me I’m probably sick (and definitely not funny) online. Instead, it’s the kind of body which makes strangers on Instagram say things like OH MY GOD YOU LOVE YOURSELF SO MUCH IT’S QUITE BORING ACTUALLY then, unfollow me - which, is infinitely preferable.

Because guess what?
I DO QUITE LOVE MYSELF!

Shocking, I know.

Here’s what I’m currently doing, to maintain and further develop the kind of body which makes people think (accurately) that I love myself, then unfollow me on Instagram.

After the paywall, my exact training schedule, my diet, the apps that are REALLY helping me, the supplements I wouldn’t go without, and the things I don’t rate at all.