Avoiding an Annieyurism

  Aestheticism through Asceticism   Back in the 90s, women were kept skinny. Late night dinners were traded for low rise jeans, and you were considered successful if you could subsist in a calorie deficit. Kate Moss was heralded as the body to strive for, and no amount of hunger pains couldn’t be fixed with a diet coke.  The oppression of diet culture and corporeal pressure placed upon women’s bodies was, by this time, nothing new. Take July Garland, for example. Years earlier she was famously told to smoke more and eat less in order to maintain a youthful figure during filming for the kids’ film, The Wizard of Oz in the 1930s.  This narrative suggested that it wasn’t enough for your body to be instrumentalised for household labour or male pleasure. It also had to be desirable, youthful, and above all, small enough that it wouldn’t take up too much space.   Then in the early 2000s, the growth of surveillance culture through the rise of social media platfo...