Strong is the new skinny is the new snake oil
I don’t remember the first time I saw the slogan “strong is the new skinny,” but my guess is that it was sometime around 2011. It was probably on a T-shirt marketed at girls, a screen-printed slogan ready for proliferation and profit.
I’m pretty sure that when I first heard it, I was on board with it. Yes, our culture has glorified women’s thinness for too long! Yes, it’s more important to be healthy and strong than it is to be slim! Let’s celebrate bodies for what they can do, not how they look! Strong is the new skinny!
Except, of course, it wasn’t. It still isn’t. Thin is still in, only now, women are also permitted — or, depending how it feels to you, required — to have some muscle tone on their thin bodies. Not bulk, mind you, not big muscles. Just some tone. Some lean muscles, because god forbid you should ever look anything other than feminine.
Strong isn’t the new skinny; strong is just something women are now expected to be in addition to being skinny. Just as “curvy” has only ever meant “small waist, big tits, and miraculously cellulite-free ass,” “strong is the new skinny” wasn’t about replacing an oppressive beauty ideal with a free new era of function over form. No, it was just about adding another ideal on top of the existing one, and selling it to girls and women as progress.
One of the reasons “strong is the new skinny” took off was because, in the 1990s, some American media consumers finally got wise to the fact that bombarding girls and women with images of rail-thin women and tips on how to starve themselves with fad diets, was a bad idea. They started to look critically at the magazines and other media that told girls and women, constantly, that to be fat was a fate worse than death, and to be thin was the highest form of feminine fulfillment.
Thanks mostly to feminists, it became extremely not cool to encourage people to deny themselves food, which most experts agree is an important component to continued human existence, along with water, shelter, and, apparently, Love Is Blind. Around the edges, there was progress. Throughout the 2000s, there were hints, whispers, soupcons of size diversity in media, and a general gesturing towards body positivity. Plus sized models could have some magazine covers, as a treat.
But that’s all they were. Hints, whispers, nibbling around the edges. The underlying ideology, the underlying ideal, didn’t change. It’s 2020 — long after Americans discovered en masse that the skinny imperative is not just unrealistic for most women’s bodies but also very bad for for their psyches — but thin is still in. Only now, it needs cut delts and yoga shoulders.
If strong were actually the new skinny, our athleisure campaigns would be full of water polo players and shot put throwers, terrifically strong women who are often big and bulky. Instead, they are full of dancers — ballerinas model for Gap Fit, LuluLemon, and Tory Sport, to name just a few brands. Because in an era of “strong is the new skinny,” a ballerina is both. Or, as The Washington Post’s Monica Hesse put it this week, “strong is the new skinny but in a completely unrelated coincidence, all of the strong people we will now show you happen to be very thin.”
“Strong is the new skinny” has made its way into ballet, too. It used to be that dance teachers and company directors could just tell dancers to lose 5, or 10, or 20 pounds. We don’t care how you do it — what you smoke, or what you snort — just do it. As George Balanchine famously told Gelsey Kirkland, “must see the bones… eat nothing.”
These days, that shit doesn’t fly. Now, directors will say they want dancers who are “strong” and “fit.” What they mean, though, is that they want dancers — men as well as women — who are strong and fit, and who also look like a very particular version of strong and fit. It’s not enough to be able to lift your partner over your head in pas de deux, you have to have a six pack while you do it.
What this means is that when dancers are called into a director’s office for an annual review, or being advised by a teacher on improving their chances of getting a good role in the recital, they’re no longer told to lose weight. They’re told to “lengthen” or “elongate,” to “work on their lines” or “get into shape.” Yes, these are all euphemisms I’ve heard from dancers and nutritionists I’ve interviewed for the book, and yes, they all mean the same thing. Lose weight.
Strong became the new skinny in ballet, but as in the rest of the world, skinny didn’t suddenly become optional. Inside of ballet and out, it amounts to the same thing: gatekeepers and standard-setters know that they can’t ask for what they really want, but they’re not willing to give it up, either. And it’s girls and women who bear the burden of their hypocrisy, while those gatekeepers get to enjoy their gloss of diversity and open-mindedness. If they’re lucky, they’ll even turn a profit from printing it on a T-shirt.
One day, we will stop gaslighting girls and women by telling them one thing and showing them another. One day we will stop asking impossible things of women’s bodies and acting like the real failure is theirs. In the meantime, take a few minutes — or more — today, to enjoy your body, whatever it looks like, and remember that you are not your delts. Strong, skinny, both, neither, you’re great. I hope you know that.
That’s it from me this week. Thanks for reading.