Is There a ‘Skinny Apocalypse’ in Hollywood?

I saw grace’s rec a few weeks ago and was like … this is something I’m going to have a LOT of feelings about. (Big content warning for eating disorders/discussion of fatphobia). I finally listened to it over the last two days (after seeing YET ANOTHER Diabolical Lies recommendation in Rayne Fisher-Quann’s excellent substack essay on “the perpetual present tense”), and I am feeling SO intellectually inspired (or, in other words, insufferably talkative). I think it’s really handled with so much thoughtfulness and nuance, and I really appreciated the depth of the research (they even included anorexia’s comorbidity with OCD, which is important to me for reasons that may be easy to guess, and they also dove into the history of anorexia, which is so fascinating to me — like OCD, it was often recorded in a  religious context). I think the whole “(how) do we talk about celebrity women’s bodies?” question is kind of unanswerable, but I really admired the way the hosts approached it and the clear feminist underpinnings of the conversation. I will say that I do think that some of the episode’s analysis depends on what I think is a fairly neuroessentialist understanding of anorexia — as much as they talked about the bio-psycho-social components, I think Caro understated the social element (which maybe means I think the psychologists and clinicians she talked to understated the social element, which is maybe not something I am qualified to say lol, but if I do nothing else I will eternally assert my right as a patient to talk about my own perspective and distrust some clinicians). It also just brought me back to one of my other big unanswerable questions, which is (how) do I write about anorexia (I think it’s a fraught topic to write about, for approximately one million reasons). But all of this made me think I might have some luck approaching it more academically — I really love the intersection of the personal and the academic, and this particular topic could really work for that. So anyway, loved the episode, had some thoughts, emailed my old psychology professor, WILL be talking to my nutritionist.