Would an 'Unsexiest Woman Alive' list be published today? Maybe not - but body-shaming is definitely back

The Guardian

a day ago

Were you a young woman in the 90s or 00s? If so, you (and me!) really ought to be entitled to compensation. We may not have had to deal with social media influencers giving their Labubus butt implants (this is a thing now), but it was a toxic time to be a woman. British tabloids were full of topless Page 3 girls, and we were fed a steady diet of body-shaming magazines, heroin-chic fashion and the idea that Bridget Jones, who weighed only 62kg (9st 10lb), was disgustingly fat.
If you've forgotten how awful things were, just look online: reminders keep going viral. Last week, for example, clips of shock jock Howard Stern's infamous 2000s 'Buttaface Competition' started circulating on social media. This was a contest to find the 'best' body and 'ugliest' face, which involved women parading around in bikinis with paper bags on their heads. In one clip the crowd starts mock retching as a very conventionally attractive woman takes the bag off her head. I don't know where that woman is now, but I hope she is living her best life.
Another recently viral memento from the bad old days: an 18-year-old article from the lad mag Maxim, listing the 'Unsexiest Women Alive'. Sarah Jessica Parker, labelled a 'Barbaro-faced broad', was described as the 'least sexy woman in a group of very unsexy women' by the 2007 list. Parker was quite understandably upset by this, later saying: 'It's condemnation, it's insane. What can I do?'
The Maxim piece, which has been scrubbed from the internet, also took aim at Britney Spears, saying she had 'lost the ability to perform, but gained … about 23 pounds of Funyun pudge'. While cruel, that sort of commentary was not unusual: it's really no wonder that Spears, sexualised and picked apart her entire life, had a breakdown in 2008. In a memoir that came out in 2023, Spears wrote that shaving her head in 2007 and acting out were her ways of 'pushing back'.
Spears isn't the only star who has spoken out about the way she was treated by journalists back in the day. Last year, Kate Winslet broke down during a TV interview when she discussed being body-shamed as a 22-year-old actor during the Titanic era. Winslet was bullied relentlessly: the Titanic director James Cameron reportedly nicknamed the actor 'Kate Weighs-a-Lot' and the late comedian Joan Rivers, a real piece of work, joked: 'If Kate Winslet had dropped a few pounds, the Titanic would never have sunk.' Rivers had form on the body-shaming front: she also once wagged her finger at Oprah Winfrey and instructed her to lose 15 pounds.
Now it seems Victoria Beckham is to speak out about the scrutiny of her body during her Spice Girls era in an upcoming Netflix docuseries. 'When you look back in hindsight at the media environment in the 90s, it was super hard,' an industry insider told Page Six of the series, which comes out next month. Sources also told the outlet that the documentary 'looks back on archival footage including when TV presenter Chris Evans pushed [Victoria] to be weighed live on air in 1999 – just two months after she gave birth to Brooklyn'. (His verdict after she got on the scales: 'Not bad at all.')
'Can you imagine doing that nowadays?' Beckham asked Vogue Australia in 2022, about that televised post-partum weigh-in. Not really, no. A quarter of a century after that Evans stunt, there isn't as much overt body shaming on mainstream media as there used to be. But that doesn't mean that things have drastically changed for the better. Nor does it mean, as Beckham said in 2022 to Grazia, that being thin is 'old-fashioned'.
On the contrary, while we had about a decade of body positivity in the 2010s, it feels as though we're now regressing. Plastic surgery has become scarily normalised, with young women getting their buccal fat removed for a more gaunt look. We're also, of course, in the age of Ozempic. The boom in GLP-1s is helping to bring extreme thinness back in vogue and has ushered in what one Guardian writer recently described as 'shrinking girl summer'. Except this time around, what's aspirational isn't the heroin chic figures of the 90s, it's a thin but perfectly toned 'pilates princess' body. It doesn't matter what the trend is – policing women's bodies never seems to go out of fashion.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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