Just as women are attracted to men with particular body types, Anya knows that she won’t be to every man’s taste. A single mother, she recently had what she describes as a horrible experience with a chef she met on a dating app.
‘On our second date, he took me to a restaurant and, as a chef, took charge of placing the orders. When I went to bed, he said he was relieved because he thought I was the type who didn’t eat anything and was probably anorexic. He was relieved, but I was furious.
Being thin and coming of age in the late 1960s was a golden time for girls like me. But, despite being thin enough by normal standards, there was always a lot to do. So I tried the fad diets of the day, from the grapefruit diet to the Atkins and Scarsdale diets, and at one particularly naïve moment I started drinking harmful teas as purgatives. I had started working at Cosmopolitan magazine and my behavior was more or less the norm.
It is unacceptable that thin people are now victims of free-for-all shaming
Linda Kelsey suspects that SJP, like many lean beans, is reconsidering the joys of being super skinny
Every month we published a column called Dieter’s Notebook. No one questioned that models should be anything other than thin, and that continued for several decades.
Even when we promoted Susie Orbach’s Fat Is A Feminist issue in 1978 and eliminated the diet features, we still believed that thin, but breasted, women were better when it came to modeling. And even when we started promoting the 1980s fitness craze and Jane Fonda-style workouts, thinness was still the gold standard.
I feel somewhat embarrassed now that I subscribed to the thin aesthetic, and barely questioned it until the body positive movement really took shape in the early 2000s.
However, while I believe the movement has gone too far, because it rarely recognizes obesity as a major health threat, it is now universally accepted that women of different shapes and sizes are not only worth seeing and celebrating, but also beautiful.
What is unacceptable is that thin people are now victims of free-for-all shaming. If we are thin then we must be bulimic, anorexic, body dysmorphic or mentally deranged. When, in reality, everything comes naturally.
It even seems that in some sectors thin models are discriminated against. A young, successful model recently told me that she hardly gets work in the UK anymore because everyone wants different body types to the one she naturally has. So she goes to Paris, where thinness still rules.
One thing I didn’t expect was that the issue of being skinny would become more of a problem, rather than less, as I got older. At 72, although I can still fit into the same size jeans I wore when I was 22, my thinness means my wrinkles are much more noticeable than on my chubbier-faced friends. My bum has almost disappeared and I’m thinking about trying M&S’s recently launched bum fillets.
We now know that getting thinner as we age is not good for our bones as it increases the risk of fractures. Even Anya was surprised when she couldn’t donate blood because she weighed too little and that could put too much strain on her heart.
Replacing fat shaming with thin shaming is neither justice nor deserved retribution.
And while I suspect SJP was more in thrall to her thinness in her Sex And The City days than she lets on, like many lean beans, at 59, she’s reconsidering the joys of being super skinny.
Replacing fat shaming with thin shaming is neither justice nor deserved retribution. It’s not recognizing that, like being big, being naturally thin is just a part of being human.
