Despite rumblings about body positivity that peaked about 10 years ago, for decades the white American beauty standard has been thin. As part of the focus on body positivity in the 2010s, it became unfashionable to talk about skinniness as a goal, so it just got rebranded as wellness, health or self-care, though the pressures to conform remained the same.
In the 1990s and 2000s, thinness had a debauched, libertine air to it; if anything, I guess it was default coded as liberal, but it wasn’t really tied to electoral politics or health. The image that comes to me is of the model Kate Moss at the famously muddy Glastonbury Music Festival in 2005, where her uniform was tiny shorts, Wellington boots, a troubled rock star boyfriend on her arm and a cigarette dangling from her mouth. The subtext was always that the skinniness came from cocaine and dancing all night or simply not eating. Many women of my vintage can quote a relevant line from “The Devil Wears Prada” (2006): “I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight.”
Thinness has never been fully vanquished as the normative feminine ideal, even in moments when other body types gain momentary mainstream acceptability. Because it never goes away fully, the goal of being skinny can pretty easily shift into different ideologies and trends. There have been many times over the past several decades when conservative Christianity and weight control were explicitly linked, according to Kelsey Kramer McGinnis, who is a correspondent for Christianity Today and is working on a book about wellness, diet culture and Christian women. “Evangelical Christians get sold a lot of merchandise, basically by people repackaging mainstream advice as spiritual in some way,” she told me.
When I put out a questionnaire two summers ago asking readers why they moved away from organized religion, a woman in her 60s from Virginia said that the inciting incident for her was when she was in college and “a church told me I was too fat to sing in their choir.” It is impossible to gauge how widespread this kind of anti-fat discrimination was 40 or 50 years ago in church culture. But in the 1970s, students at Oral Roberts University, a private evangelical school, were subject to annual physical exams that included body fat measurements.
According to New York Times coverage of Oral Roberts’s policies from December 1977, if students were determined to be obese, they were “automatically placed on a weight reduction program. They meet with school doctors and sign a contract to lose a pound or two a week until they reach their goal. If a student fails to lose the weight, he or she faces probation and, eventually, suspension.” In 2016, Oral Roberts was back in the news for making its 900 freshmen wear fitness trackers. “Students are required to average 10,000 steps per day and 150 minutes of intense activity (as measured by heart rate) each week.” The data made up a portion of their grades in health and physical education classes, The Washington Post reported.