–Content warning: this article will discuss fatphobia and fat shaming.–
Every few years, a new app finds itself the focus of teens and young adults across the world. In my time, it was Tumblr and Vine. For others, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook. For kids these days, it is decidedly TikTok. I admit that I was hesitant about the app at first, but in an attempt to keep up with the times and keep myself sane during the COVID-19 lockdown, I gave in and made an account.
A few things to note: yes, Tiktok knows everything about me. I don’t care, I’ve had Facebook since I was too young to have it. My whole identity is online. If you follow me on Tumblr, you can find the darkest secrets that I posted as an angsty teen.
Lately, I’ve seen a lot of people online comparing the two platforms. I can understand why. Tumblr is a microblogging platform where you can go to cultivate a blog of niche interests and connect with people who share those views and interests. TikTok’s algorithm is so clever that you don’t need to do any cultivating: it starts with your location and figures the rest of you out within a few days.
Something else the two platforms have in common: young user bases that gave them popularity. Tumblr was formative for me as the first online space I joined that was unsupervised. It taught me a lot, and I have fond memories of the app. But it was also dangerous. The site allowed for total anonymity, the spread of misinformation, and the creation of spaces where struggling teens could enable bad habits and dangerous behaviours (a lot of this involving the romanticization of mental illness.)
TikTok is a similar place, minus the anonymity. There are a lot of ways that TikTok has allowed teens to connect, organize around social issues, and educate each other. It’s a lot of fun! But these kids are out here with their full names and images on display. And lately, I’ve seen trends cropping up that promote unhealthy and dangerous body image ideals.
These video trends are often based on ideas like a filter showing you what your most defining feature is (usually people then being upset because their nose is highlighted) or create all-new insecurities with trends like the “back profile” challenge. One that has made me the most uncomfortable features a snippet of Jessie J., Nicki Minaj, and Ariana Grande’s “Bang Bang”. The trend is this: while the lyrics “She got a body like an hourglass / But I can give it to you all the time” play, you pull your shirt tight around your waist to see if you have a body like an hourglass.
Which, sure. The lyrics mention an hourglass body figure. If you got it, flaunt it, right? But most of the girls participating in this trend are very young, and despite all being beautiful as they are, they often look disappointed or embarrassed with the result of their video. Even worse, the comments sections treat these videos as “thinspo,” or complain that the video made them feel insecure, or will have people essentially gaslighting commenters who feel like the trend is toxic by telling them they’re being anti-body positivity for being upset.
And in my opinion, this trend is not body positivity. I really am happy for the girls that get a confidence boost from the trend. But when the whole point is to see who has a body that is shaped a certain way, nobody wins. Not the girls who feel wrong for looking a certain way, and not the girls being praised for their bodies by their peers and by people much older than them.
I think that I had hoped, because of how prominent messages of self-love have become in our society as a response to online bullying and low-self esteem issues created by magazines and Instagram, that today’s very socially aware youth might escape some of the self-loathing inflicted upon past generations. No such luck.
Instead, I’m seeing new insecurities crop up. I don’t know what the solution is. I spent my adolescence with the same garbage being thrown at me in different types of media. I still struggle with a lot of insecurity because of that, I probably always will. It makes me immensely sad to see today’s teens dealing with the same thing.
Let me be clear: there is no ideal body size or shape. Fat is beautiful, thin is beautiful, bodies are beautiful. They just are! I know that saying it isn’t enough. We’ve been saying for years that we should love ourselves as we are. Just saying it doesn’t work, because the people who are given platforms and celebrity are usually people who meet society’s beauty standards.
Today’s youth are a lot savvier about these topics than I was as a teen: as a whole, they’re doing better at uplifting each other and fighting back against the glorification of unhealthy lifestyles. There are trends on TikTok that are actually body positive. But knowing you shouldn’t be ashamed of your body doesn’t make you immune to insecurity.
You can tell people to love themselves all you want, but that won’t matter until we as a society dismantle our biases and systemic fatphobia, normalize diverse body representation in media and actually practice what we preach. So I know it doesn’t mean much when I write this, but every body is beautiful. Just because not everyone feels that way, doesn’t make it less of a fact.