A Body We Keep Looking At

It's inarguable that people are more fluent than ever in the vocabulary of mental health, eating disorders, trauma, and body image. Yet that fluency has not made people any better equipped—and, frankly, any more interested—in tolerating the ambiguity those subjects require. With the arrival of therapy language comes a compulsion to diagnose and explain; the impulse is to determine whether what is being observed is illness, thinness, genetics, Hollywood, medication, or recovery.

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The Scrutiny We Call Concern

There is a particular perversity in watching a woman, Ariana Grande, be scrutinized for her body while simultaneously congratulating ourselves for having developed a more psychologically sophisticated reason for scrutinizing it. People say they are "worried," and sometimes they are. But often that concern emerges from a kind of therapeutic surveillance, one that makes speculation a substitute for knowing a person.

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Bodies Are Terrible Narrators

We want a body to tell us the whole story. As an eating disorder therapist with over a decade into my own recovery, I say this with confidence: bodies can be terrible narrators. They are evidence of something, for sure, but rarely evidence of only one thing.

A body can become thinner because someone is sick. It can become thinner because someone is recovering. It can become thinner because someone is aging, grieving, navigating chronic illness, taking medication, living differently, or simply inhabiting a body that has always been misunderstood by the people looking at it. An eating disorder can exist in a body of any size. A person can be medically compromised without appearing so.

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Bodies as Public Documents

The uncomfortable truth is that Ariana Grande's interior world cannot be known by looking at her. Perhaps that is precisely what is so difficult for some people. Bodies are treated like public documents, available to be read for evidence. They are assessed for desirability, health, age, sexuality, discipline, pathology. They are praised when they conform to the moment's aesthetic and met with concern when they deviate from it. Sometimes the language changes, but the unrelenting gaze does not.

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When Compassion Becomes Surveillance

The older vocabulary for bodies was blatantly cruel: fat, ugly, aging, desperate, vain. The newer vocabulary can sound deceptively compassionate: concerning, fragile, unwell, triggering, healing. What has been laid bare in recent years is that compassion quickly converts into surveillance when thrown to the court of social media. The result is that a more meaningful conversation about the culture that produces eating disorders gets displaced by speculation about one woman's body.

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My Own Complicity

I want to make more room to understand my own complicity in this. As a queer, bullied kid in the south I poured so much of myself into pop stars––their strong femininity in resistance to misogyny––in hopes that they would offer me identity refuge or some permission to become myself. I depended on their capacity to outgrow humiliation, command presence, and inhabit desire in the public sphere to help me imagine other ways to be in the world. With this claim on my own identity development, it is tempting to feel like I have some sort of claim on them. Perhaps that is one of the harder lessons of adulthood: learning that the people who helped you become yourself do not belong to you. Not symbolically and especially not physically. Ariana Grande does not owe us an explanation for her body, but I do think the conversation around her body can still tell us something.

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What Looking Says About Us

I wonder if the question is less about what Ariana's body can tell us about Ariana, but what our insistence on reading it tells us about ourselves. We can care about eating disorders without turning people we have never met into case studies. We can interrogate the culture that produces eating disorders without pretending to know the private life of a stranger. The work now is to become more sophisticated about the limits of what looking at someone can tell us.

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