Source : the age
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has proven himself incapable, so far, of winning the unnecessary Iran war he started with his president, Donald Trump.
So when he announced last month that he was going to be testing all “war fighters” in the US military for their testosterone levels, it was tempting to believe Hegseth was projecting, to use the psychological term for when someone attributes their own weaknesses to another person.
“Under the supervision of our world-class medical professionals, war fighters age 30 and older are going to be tested annually as part of their periodic health assessment,” Hegseth said in a video posted to X, titled “The High-T Department of War”.
Addressing his troops, but only the male ones, it seems, he said the military needs to “constantly look for new ways to optimise your performance … ensuring you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best”.
He said troops with low testosterone levels would be topped up with hormone replacement therapy, to restore their “natural” function.
I’m no expert in military strategy, but even setting aside what such a pronouncement might do for the morale of your personnel, it seems strange to signal to your enemies that your troops might not be man enough.
It also sends a strong exclusionary signal to all women in the US military, from the same man who has blocked the recommended promotions of high-ranking women and people of colour, to a disproportionate degree.
As the United States polarises ever further politically, it seems the extremism in politics is jumping the fence and moving into other areas of public life – notably gender politics and the way men and women present themselves physically.
As men are encouraged to looksmaxx and take peptides to get larger and more imposing, to drive their muscles into hard edges and plane their chins to strong, manly angles, women are shrinking.
The extreme of the late-noughties body positivity movement, where some unhealthy bodies were presented as celebratory and desirable, has now swung to the other end of the pendulum.
A new kind of (possibly peptide-charged) thinness is now normal and increasingly common.
We see it on red carpets and in movies and on all the celebrity Instagram accounts, usually attributed to a Pilates regime and plenty of green juice.
This week, the pop star Ariana Grande drew widespread attention when she released a music video for her new song “Petal” in which she looks skeletal, the bones of her shoulders protruding like those of a famine-struck child.
Grande has shrunk herself into cartoonishly tiny proportions, and yet, the narrative of the film clip depicts a jobbing actress being repeatedly rejected by a panel of ugly studio-exec men for being “not good enough”.
The video ends with Grande, in character, returning to the audition room with a chainsaw and hacking the men to bloody pieces.
One minute she is cloyingly seeking their approval, the next she is massacring them: talk about extremes.
Fans have taken to social media to express concern about Grande’s gaunt appearance, and it has sparked multiple think-pieces on Substack and in major newspapers about whether it’s okay to comment on women’s bodies, even when it’s under the guise of worrying about their health.
Grande has this week released a statement saying she will be “taking a step back from visibility”.
It is perhaps a small consolation that men now subject themselves to this sort of body scrutiny, and they are subjected to it in the media, too.
This week The Times of London published an article about the “mini-paunch” of newly anointed UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
The article noted that Burnham is “slim and fit” and has competed in various marathons.
But “despite his efforts the new PM has found attention directed to his barely there mini-paunch, somewhat unfairly dubbed the ‘Burnham belly’”.
But the tone of the article was interesting – rather than fat-shaming Burnham, his problem paunch was framed as something that can happen to even the healthiest of men, and nothing terribly serious to worry about.
The writer shared various tips to get rid of male belly fat, if you really wanted to.
By contrast, Burnham’s wife, Marie-France Van Heel, was widely critiqued online for wearing a baby blue Victoria Beckham midi-dress on her first official outing with her husband.
I thought she looked great, but internet trolls did what they do to women who aren’t within the boundaries of whatever they decree is acceptable.
The casual fat-shaming of a prime ministerial wife and the skinny-shaming of a famous pop star are probably two sides of the same coin; two extremes of the same sickness.
Of course, in the United States, no social phenomenon pops up without many entrepreneurs popping up to monetise it.
So it is with the new thinness. The new crop of “skinny influencers” – who collectively have millions of followers, and subscriber-only clubs where women can join chat groups and see exclusive “skinny” content – are remarkably different from diet-peddlers past.
Their central message is to “drop the rules” many yo-yo dieters have had around food, and to develop a “normal” relationship with it, eating everything, but just not too much of it.
One such influencer recently posted about how she had been craving a cinnamon scroll. So she ordered one on Uber Eats, ate a small portion of it and then threw it away.
This influencer purports to be selling self-composure, regulation and healthy control. The skinny influencers evangelise that they can take or leave food, having a bite and then setting it down, and they claim that they can teach others this skill.
The irony of creating a career around decentring food, while constantly talking about, well, food, is lost on them.
Since humans were able to make images of themselves and others, certain standards of appearance have been elevated above others. Artists and romantics have always sought an ideal of beauty, and from the foot-binding of Ming Dynasty China to the corsetry of Victorian England, that ideal has often necessitated the suffering of women.
But the current crop of skinny influencers are not peddling beauty, per se.
They are peddling control and perhaps the related ideal of “hotness”, and it’s now spread to men who risk becoming just as strictured-by-expectation as women.
They are selling an extreme, which is the ultimate zeitgeist product.
Jacqueline Maley is an author and columnist.
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