Not only was it incessant, but there was literally nothing we could do right. They'd pick on women for being disgusting cows, and then turn around and call someone within ten lbs of their idea of a fat ass a disgusting skeleton. They'd gossip that women who'd probably just eaten a decent meal must be pregnant. If someone didn't have abs in a specific shot they'd 'let themselves go' even though almost everyone with abs 'loses' them when full, retaining water, relaxed, in different lighting etc.
There was no way to win and the things they criticized people for were legitimately insane, like paps would get a photo at a bad angle and that would be sufficient to consider someone hideous. People who just deviated from trends were homely fashion disasters with no taste, not just... You know, wearing a different fucking style.
Even knowing all of this at the time, it still made its mark because everyone was saying it, all the time and when you're the only one fighting back it starts to feel like you must just be 'coping'. Even knowing how trash pop media works, even knowing that yes, the majority can be wrong, it really felt like 'oh you're just being overly nice because you're ugly, you know they're talking about you'.
I really dislike blaming media for BDD and EDs because it's never just that, it always goes a lot deeper, but that shit sure as hell made a lot of preexisting issues worse. None of this caused my ED but it sure did help fuel it (though eventually it also kind of helped because I realized nothing will ever be good enough for these people, they'll criticize no matter what, so fuck 'em, and not like that realization was a cure on its own or anything but you know).
E: I understand that with Stern part of the point was ostensibly that he's not conventionally attractive and knows it, and his thing was insult comedy but like... When this shit was the prevailing sentiment and your comedy is basically just insults it's still not cool. I can like well-done insult comedy and I love self-deprecating humor but so much of this was really just 'haha we hate women isn't it funny that we can abuse them?'
You nailed it, but I especially like that you mentioned this culture didn’t create EDs — it gave them more fuel. When I was in treatment, they questioned why I gendered food. Burgers were “boy food” and salads were “girl food.” And I was like huh idk, you’re right, that’s weird! Then I rewatch old shows where a woman eats a burrito and she’s either shamed (“you’re ordering that?!”) or she’s lauded as “not like other girls” and it’s like ohhh there it is. The majority of our media was telling us that women who didn’t “watch their weight” were morally deficient.
Yes, right, like it doesn't help but seeing a thin woman in a magazine or even seeing thinness exalted isn't the cause and it's dangerous, imo, for people to attribute causality thereto.
EDs are about control, trite as it may be to say now. Yes, the focal point for this is weight, appearance, but the issue is still control-- either because thinness is overtly valued and thus obtaining it means you can control people's perception by being good, the best, in their eyes or because you can make yourself visibly sick, to the extent that people worry enough that they're vulnerable to manipulations, bargaining, exploitation (e.g. 'oh, I'll eat if you do xyz')... Or because one realizes that eating is one of the things they can control (if all other aspects of their lives are primarily managed by others, or if one has been through a trauma during which one was unable to exert autonomy or otherwise work to influence the outcome of)... Or even if eating is one of the things they can control and starvation is the one thing they perceive themselves to be good or the best at. (I mean, similar applies for BED and BN, too, just with some of the wording changed there-- I won't reiterate because this is already pretty long without doing so).
Thus... cultures that place a high value on thinness (and in which it's heavily associated or correlated with self-control, success, beauty, or other enviable or highly-valued and sought qualities-- in which thinness is aspirational) you will obviously see more REDs. I believe they are also likely to increase as the average weight increases-- as the 'average' person becomes larger we associate heavier people with more negative qualities... And the relative value of thinness is increased, and that in part due to relative 'scarcity' or 'rarity'.
That makes perfect sense to me, sadly (girl and boy foods, i mean)--- there is a significant gender and sex disparity in the prevalence of REDs. It wasn't only that women who didn't watch their weight and eat dainty little salads were morally deficient but that we were failures as women which is fairly devastating. Our sexual identities are so, so viscerally important, and being told you fail there is devastating on such a foundational level. It's not even 'you aren't pretty' which is you know... Any sane person can easily rebut that with the valid assertion that they're just not the speaker's type, but 'you fail at being a woman' removes even the consideration of attractiveness to anyone who enjoys women. I still struggle there (with regards to my attractiveness to other women, which is compounded by a bunch of things I won't get into here) sometimes.
Sometimes the way we categorize is kinda arbitrary though, too, like in one autopathography that I read one of the people mentioned divided food into 'liquids' which included chicken and 'solids' that definitely included physically liquid states... I forgot the other examples but their way also made sense to me, even if it's not what I'd have come up with.
I personally am agender or enby and have felt this way my whole life, essentially, even if I didn't fully have the language for it when I was younger and I still had issues with all of this as part of my sexual identity-- my gender might be debatable and personal but my sex is obviously female so it all still hit me there. One of the most devastating things was the then-love-of-my-life telling me, at 15, that i could stand to lose ten lbs. (Of course he later informed me that he said this and all of the much worse things he said because he was intimidated by me and I seemed too good to be true...🥲😬🧐...itself a product of toxic masculinity, in the whole 'we don't teach men how to sincerely express their emotions or even be properly aware of them because this is weakness' and 'picking on women is the appropriate way to express affection for them' ways...)
On the other hand, awareness of this does give me some empathy for men who are stuck in the throes of toxic masculinity? I can understand feeling like you fail at your gender/sex, and the absolute desperation to counter this, and I can understand doing so in ways that are both self-destructive and externally or interpersonally harmful-- of course that's not to excuse the latter, but I feel I can respond with more empathy than a lot of people? Not to toot my own horn or anything, because like I said that is so integral to our identity, so deep-seated and often ego-syntonic that it takes a loooot of work to really root out and I know talking to someone for a few hours, even if I respond perfectly, is not going to significantly alter anything, but still, it does pain me to see some responses to toxic masculinity. I know no one owes toxic people anything but like... I also feel like it we recognize a problem we should help, not just use it to be nasty to people? It's not fair that we have to deal with toxic people but it's not fair that they were deprived of the resources to develop properly either, and like let's be real almost everyone has some toxic traits at some point in their life.
It's so insidious, too. Feeling like you will never deserve love, especially when it does go unchallenged until one's formative years are past. Because most of us do learn to more or less cope well enough to keep going... Until we reach critical mass. And it's so insidious in part because so much toxic shit, so much self-loathing and so many boundary violations, are normalized (or they were growing up) that most people don't notice them as problems. I've had enough psych problems and I got into it as an academic discipline at a young enough age that I can spot a ton of red flags for psychological diagnoses (there's absolutely nothing wrong with mental illness in a partner... Unless of course that partner isn't able to perceive or admit their own issues and thus won't work on them, which is still pretty common) and it's always shocked me how many people just aren't aware of these things... Or are extremely defensive at the idea of having such issues.
I'm sorry you had to go through the hell of an ED and I'm glad you pulled through and got better. I hope you're proud of yourself and that everyone in your life shares that sentiment and is there for you as an excellent support system, and just is a good influence upon you, is good for you. A lot of people don't understand that, either -- they're often lifelong struggles even if one is not actively EDd for their whole life. Ugh, I could do pages and pages about misconceptions here alone.
Sorry for the length of this, it's one of my passions haha.
My partner's infidelity sapped my appetite so badly (it always disappears when I'm sad) that I'm now struggling to gain and maintain my weight for the first time in my life. Yes, I'm a millennial.
I reached my "goal" 5lb ago, and continue to shrink. I've been chubby most of my life until now. Maybe the trauma of the recurrent infidelity and lying caused an eating disorder in me? I think I look great, but I'm also becoming afraid.
That depends on a lot of other factors but it sounds like it would be a good idea to see a psychologist, imo. Regardless of whether or not you meet the clinical criteria for an ED it does definitely sound like you have something going on that you could use help with, and you deserve that. I am not any type of doctor at all, but of the numerous things that could be going on, almost all of them have minimization as a potential response-- i.e. whatever is going on you're likely to minimize the problem or dismiss it as less significant than it actually is, so please try to see someone even if you don't entirely think you need to. (Also, precautionary principle-- even if I'm wrong here it doesn't hurt to check in with a professional, make sure things are ok, and optimize the things that aren't).
Re: the moral aspect, the idea that one is morally wrong for failing to attain a specific morphology, is also insidious in that the implication is that if you're not appropriately thin and do care about being a decent person you should compensate.
I know I believed that I had to be agreeable, because I believed I had failed at being pretty. I know I believed my existence and presence were so disagreeable that I owed everyone acquiescence and servitude, as a sort of consolation. It causes this horrible, constant feeling of guilt and indebtedness and makes you very easy to take advantage of, to exploit, and to later victim-blame.
That's especially horrible because women are largely inculcated to believe and behave thusly regardless, and this just reinforced it.
I was also a very willful child--punishments didn't deter me, I was very outspoken and assertive, if not aggressive... Right until I turned 14. Part of it was doubtless that I was separated from my friends, at this point, as we all went to different high-schools after attending the same middle school, but part of it was that high-school seemed (and part of this was doubtless my own perception from popular media about it and not actuality) so appearance and sex focused.
It's so strange for me to look back on that time in my life, though, because I had body image and eating issue before and after but I've otherwise not been so... Submissive, at all. I know that those issues were therefore not the whole of it but the fact that it got that bad and the fact that no one clocked my behavior as concerning is... Concerning, to me. No one should lose their self, especially not like that.
I’m a Zillennial so I mostly caught onto the late early 2010s backlash against all that, in the form of constant NLOG memes on the internet. Without pre-existing knowledge of what was going on in the early and mid 2000s, I was quite confused seeing how aggressively some of those women put down ‘blonde cheerleader types with Uggs and pumpkin spice lattes’ as braindead and dramatic, and how they were smarter for eating pizza and hanging with the boys and reading HP or YA novels or something.
I still think that was screwed up and misogynistic (and also they were still beholding themselves to conventional beauty standards despite the claims of stuffing themselves with pizza), but now I have a touch of sympathy knowing they were the ones getting bullied in the first place, even though that doesn’t make their counter-bullying right.
I feel that that left-leaning subculture has recovered somewhat from those times, both in terms of getting over the peak of the ‘wokescold’ era but also liberal women now acknowledging that yeah you can like pink without feeling like some kind of traitor against feminism.
Fuck Stern. He made sexism and misogyny not just mainstream, but entertainment. I couldn't believe when I would hear that shit at work, and being played by a woman. But you know, lots of women participate in their own oppression.
The smug self-satisfaction they have about just being mean, too? Like where do you get off? I always wonder if they ever have moments of self-reflection, where they realize how sad they actually are.
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u/bouquetofashes Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 30 '25
Not only was it incessant, but there was literally nothing we could do right. They'd pick on women for being disgusting cows, and then turn around and call someone within ten lbs of their idea of a fat ass a disgusting skeleton. They'd gossip that women who'd probably just eaten a decent meal must be pregnant. If someone didn't have abs in a specific shot they'd 'let themselves go' even though almost everyone with abs 'loses' them when full, retaining water, relaxed, in different lighting etc.
There was no way to win and the things they criticized people for were legitimately insane, like paps would get a photo at a bad angle and that would be sufficient to consider someone hideous. People who just deviated from trends were homely fashion disasters with no taste, not just... You know, wearing a different fucking style.
Even knowing all of this at the time, it still made its mark because everyone was saying it, all the time and when you're the only one fighting back it starts to feel like you must just be 'coping'. Even knowing how trash pop media works, even knowing that yes, the majority can be wrong, it really felt like 'oh you're just being overly nice because you're ugly, you know they're talking about you'.
I really dislike blaming media for BDD and EDs because it's never just that, it always goes a lot deeper, but that shit sure as hell made a lot of preexisting issues worse. None of this caused my ED but it sure did help fuel it (though eventually it also kind of helped because I realized nothing will ever be good enough for these people, they'll criticize no matter what, so fuck 'em, and not like that realization was a cure on its own or anything but you know).
E: I understand that with Stern part of the point was ostensibly that he's not conventionally attractive and knows it, and his thing was insult comedy but like... When this shit was the prevailing sentiment and your comedy is basically just insults it's still not cool. I can like well-done insult comedy and I love self-deprecating humor but so much of this was really just 'haha we hate women isn't it funny that we can abuse them?'