When you hear the word ‘Hollywood,’ you might think of alluring fame, of riches, of ‘lights, camera, action.’ However, for many celebrities, Hollywood is a nightmare of trying to change yourself, particularly your body, to stay ‘hot’ and continue getting jobs.. Historically, these unreasonable standards have impacted women at a much higher rate than men.
In Hollywood and other industries such as music and dance, everybody is expected to be model-pretty. For women especially this means dieting, often to extreme degrees. This dieting often snowballs into an eating disorder known as anorexia.
Anorexia is an eating disorder where a person fears gaining weight and in turn will refuse food or count calories to an extreme and unhealthy degree. This can lead to fainting, malnutrition, potential death and other physical health problems, as well as mental health concerns, all while being a mental health problem itself.
Many famous people have struggled with eating disorders and openly shared their story, such as Demi Lovato and Taylor Swift. However, many more haven’t come forward, and a lot of speculation occurs as people discuss who may or may not have anorexia.
Two popular recent subjects of this speculation are Cynthia Erivo, the leading actress of the movie franchise “Wicked,” and Ariana Grande, pop singer and supporting actress in the movies. They currently both appear a lot skinnier than they did before joining the cast of “Wicked.”
Grande has discussed her dislike for this public speculation. Grande has been in the spotlight since she was a teenager and had her body criticized ever since reaching fame. Grande has also stated that her current body is healthy and that people are too comfortable scrutinizing other peoples’ appearances.
Not only does this scrutiny have a bad effect on the celebrities, it badly affects those who hear this criticism about them. Girls in their childhood and teenage years are especially susceptible to this criticism, as they grow up internalizing that they can’t be ‘too fat’ but they also can’t be ‘too thin,’ placing them in a place of criticism over their own bodies from a very young age.
Taylor Swift, who also reached stardom as a teenager, opened up about her eating disorder and the struggles of the industry as well as the impossible beauty standards forced upon people in her 2020 Netflix documentary entitled “Miss Americana.”
“There’s always some standard of beauty you’re not meeting,” Swift said. “[Because] if you’re thin enough, then you don’t have that [butt] that everybody wants. But if you have enough weight on you to have a [butt], then your stomach isn’t flat enough.”
Swift went on to talk about her eating disorder and what triggers it.
“I’ve learned over the years, it’s not good for me to see pictures of myself every day, [because] I have a tendency to, and it’s only happened a few times and I’m not in any way proud of it, but I tend to get triggered by something, whether it’s a picture of me where I feel like I looked like my tummy was to big, or someone said that I looked pregnant or something, and that’ll just trigger to just starve a little bit, just stop eating,” Swift said.
It’s become more and more apparent in recent years that criticism of people’s appearances, especially women’s, has become much more open and rampant. This openness of criticism dehumanizes people and promises hazardous consequences.
