I was listening to a podcast recently where they talked about the status symbol of having a sickly wife in the Victorian era, for the upper classes, anyway. It was seen as underlining the husband's virility that he could be the sole support for his entire family (and presumably, staff/household), and it was conversely emasculating for a woman to be healthy and vital. It's so creepy to me to think that women's basic health is read as having anything at all to do with masculinity.
Yes! In my book I talk about how, when I was 7 or 8 (in the 70s), girls around me started humble-bragging about their doctors diagnosing them as "underweight," a problem they just "couldn't help" but clearly starved themselves to perpetuate.
Really fascinating as someone with invisible chronic illness who "doesn't look sick." The most attention I get is flashes of red on my super pale face which then others "decide" I'm nervous or anxious or emotional even if it just... a random histamine-induced flare from something I ate. The big line in this world is "but you don't look sick"... which creates a performative feedback loop because if you look sick you get lectured on how you should get healthy according to that non-medical expert. Each of your articles rattles through my brain! Love brain food. :-)
I hear you on that. It’s a bit off subject from Jessica’s piece but worth exploring-friends and I discuss this weird reaction constantly. Sufferers of ‘invisible’ diseases (mine are auto immune but they run the gamut) haul ourselves around day to day just trying to live as normally as possible while being anywhere from mildly uncomfortable to screaming silently in pain. Buried in the ‘but you don’t look sick’ frustration is the idea there are women who TRY to look some version of sick. A whole industry devoted to it. As comic strip hero Kathy used to scream, “ARRRRGH!!”
I'm a fellow invisible illness sufferer, this is so true! And of course I got the most compliments after I was at my sickest, miserable, & lost weight rapidly. Wow you look amazing! How'd you lose all the weight, you look fabulous, etc. So frustrating, esp bc I was still feeling bad but looked 'good.' I actually told my MIL the weight loss was from illness & she said she was jealous!!
THIS: But also, I think it’s important to view the extreme level of aesthetic manipulation that adhering to today’s Western beauty standard demands through this lens. Even if some of the trends themselves seem to reject traditional femininity on the surface — like bleached eyebrows, or the whole “succubus chic” thing — the associated behaviors reinforce the ultimate feminine gender role: full submission to a culturally-conditioned ideal.
It's so true---no matter what you call it, the beauty industry and the "beauty-as-wellness" trends are madness and self-effacing---in order to keep up with it you must go into debt, hunger, self-destruction and submit to addiction in its most toxic form which is "normalization."
As someone who has been trying to slow her roll and feel her feelings and who's been sober nearly 7 years---this SICKNESS and promotion of sickness is actually what really makes me sick. You have to be weak and succumb to society's every whim. Even the morning news has a beautiful woman who has a slightly droopier eye every other week or so due to Botox injections. She is perfectly beautiful and effervescent in every other way. But if the eye droop were the result of a palsy? APPALLING AND NOT COOL. Sick, sick, sick.
Recently a young friend posted her “fashion photo shoot” on social media, & it was such a bizarre, strange looking series, I wondered if she had become anorexic. Thank you for this post, & for giving me the words “succubus chic” & “dark bimbo” to describe this “trend” I never understood before. Whatever it’s called, it’s still creepy to me.
Oh sickness chic dates back further than that. Of course it’s the ‘frail little thing’ mentality men have foisted upon women since humans developed tools and women didn’t have to hunt and gather alongside their families anymore. Men look more manly when their women are wan and drawn, and women are easier to subjugate when they actually are wan and drawn from sickness, be it physically or (so much more often) psychologically. The difference I see in this trend that the “beauty” industry has undertaken with great zeal the last 5-6 decades, is the slow reduction of the frail feel from the Twiggy decade of the 60’s evolving to the 90’s more edgy feel of ‘sick chic’ (think hungry heroin addict vs super skinny pale uber model). [Wow long sentence there 🫠] Quite different from the ‘vapors chic’ of the 1920’s and Victorian eras though still a winner for cosmetic conglomerates and drug companies. Not sure the more modern ‘edgy sick’ is any less damaging to growing minds than the old ‘vapors’ version. Still a quite unattainable standard of appearance for most healthy women, right up there with perfect skin.
"The difference I see in this trend that the “beauty” industry has undertaken with great zeal the last 5-6 decades, is the slow reduction of the frail feel from the Twiggy decade of the 60’s evolving to the 90’s more edgy feel of ‘sick chic’ (think hungry heroin addict vs super skinny pale uber model)."
I might be reaching, but I wonder if this has some link to female sexuality. I think the image of a "hungry" heroin addict has a stronger air of being out of control and wild, whereas a starving model seems more... not demure, but "pliant"? It's like, as women gained more agency over their sexuality, the fears surrounding female sexuality (i.e., that it's wild and uncontrollable) got incorporated into the beauty ideal. I might be overthinking though 😅
Wow, reading this I remembered how, as a child, I used to think being dainty and frail was really compelling... I think that kind of conditioning transcends beauty culture, but beauty culture is a big agent of it. Whatever the agent is though, anything that encourages women to be small and fragile is beneficial to a patriarchal society. It makes so much sense that in our modern hyper-capitalist society, there's this shift to extreme product consumption (and it also serves to make women fragile financially!).
I remember hearing somewhere that the "messiness" and "illness" of heroin chic was a response to the healthy ideal of the 80s/80s aerobics culture, etc. I wasn't alive in the 80s so I don't know how accurate that description of the 80s beauty ideal is, but I wonder how it fits into the illness/beauty trajectory.
Your analysis about projected "wellness" (at the expense of real wellness) feels absolutely spot on. Anyway, I'm gonna chew on all this a while -- you always give me so much to think about!
Yes, I thought the same growing up! After I saw Little Women, even though I loved Jo, I was obsessed with (sickly, dying) Beth (Claire Danes). I thought she was so pretty & ethereal almost, & had the daintiest piano-playing fingers. I used to pretend play that I was her, & try to make myself more frail & dainty lol. And for a long time I thought my fairly small fingers were not pretty & dainty enough to play piano. Interesting how these messages stick in our brains!
WOW! BANG! Jessica, you hit the nail on the...and it chipped off! This is another link in the chain of oppressing women. They just create multi colored links, trends that cycle. A chain that chokes us to death, slowly. I always think of how much thought, time, energy, creative juice, joy, fun, bliss goes down the drain chain. It is a ginormous distraction - and it's everywhere, all the time. So we must focus within where our heart beat tells us how divine we truly are. The Earth care takers says Sharon Blackie.
Right Neen you said it better than I did-you got it exactly right. The agency women were able to attain with the less sexually uptight 60’s and 1970’s Roe, for example, did indeed inform the end result of of the trend. That’s what I was getting at (very ineloquently I might add-I get excited to remember things and contribute and I forget all the buzzwords in the process.).
AND ANOTHER THING----I subscribe to Agent Nateur and I'll attest I have loved what I have tried but she is one minute selling real science, then goes on to pseudoscience, the next minute talking about the dangers of over-bleaching your hair and how it's the fault of your hair dresser for over bleaching, then she is talking about the dangers of toxic chemicals in our environment leading to AI issues like endometriosis. I thought I couldn't afford it financially (cents) but I really just cant make sense of it and afford the mental overload of WT actual F I'm buying $150 holy eye cream.
You write amazingly as always, but could you provide a source that rhinoplasty came from the Holocaust? I cant find any information on that at all. I'm Jewish and have seen first hand the connection between rhinoplasties and trying to hide your "exotic features". But every source I've found says that rhinoplasties were invented before the Holocaust
(Just want to jump in here and clarify that the Jessica writing these comments is not me, Jessica DeFino, the writer of this newsletter. Lol just in case there was any confusion!! I don’t have a source for that claim and don’t use it in my work.)
I was listening to a podcast recently where they talked about the status symbol of having a sickly wife in the Victorian era, for the upper classes, anyway. It was seen as underlining the husband's virility that he could be the sole support for his entire family (and presumably, staff/household), and it was conversely emasculating for a woman to be healthy and vital. It's so creepy to me to think that women's basic health is read as having anything at all to do with masculinity.
Yes! In my book I talk about how, when I was 7 or 8 (in the 70s), girls around me started humble-bragging about their doctors diagnosing them as "underweight," a problem they just "couldn't help" but clearly starved themselves to perpetuate.
Really fascinating as someone with invisible chronic illness who "doesn't look sick." The most attention I get is flashes of red on my super pale face which then others "decide" I'm nervous or anxious or emotional even if it just... a random histamine-induced flare from something I ate. The big line in this world is "but you don't look sick"... which creates a performative feedback loop because if you look sick you get lectured on how you should get healthy according to that non-medical expert. Each of your articles rattles through my brain! Love brain food. :-)
I hear you on that. It’s a bit off subject from Jessica’s piece but worth exploring-friends and I discuss this weird reaction constantly. Sufferers of ‘invisible’ diseases (mine are auto immune but they run the gamut) haul ourselves around day to day just trying to live as normally as possible while being anywhere from mildly uncomfortable to screaming silently in pain. Buried in the ‘but you don’t look sick’ frustration is the idea there are women who TRY to look some version of sick. A whole industry devoted to it. As comic strip hero Kathy used to scream, “ARRRRGH!!”
I'm a fellow invisible illness sufferer, this is so true! And of course I got the most compliments after I was at my sickest, miserable, & lost weight rapidly. Wow you look amazing! How'd you lose all the weight, you look fabulous, etc. So frustrating, esp bc I was still feeling bad but looked 'good.' I actually told my MIL the weight loss was from illness & she said she was jealous!!
THIS: But also, I think it’s important to view the extreme level of aesthetic manipulation that adhering to today’s Western beauty standard demands through this lens. Even if some of the trends themselves seem to reject traditional femininity on the surface — like bleached eyebrows, or the whole “succubus chic” thing — the associated behaviors reinforce the ultimate feminine gender role: full submission to a culturally-conditioned ideal.
It's so true---no matter what you call it, the beauty industry and the "beauty-as-wellness" trends are madness and self-effacing---in order to keep up with it you must go into debt, hunger, self-destruction and submit to addiction in its most toxic form which is "normalization."
As someone who has been trying to slow her roll and feel her feelings and who's been sober nearly 7 years---this SICKNESS and promotion of sickness is actually what really makes me sick. You have to be weak and succumb to society's every whim. Even the morning news has a beautiful woman who has a slightly droopier eye every other week or so due to Botox injections. She is perfectly beautiful and effervescent in every other way. But if the eye droop were the result of a palsy? APPALLING AND NOT COOL. Sick, sick, sick.
Recently a young friend posted her “fashion photo shoot” on social media, & it was such a bizarre, strange looking series, I wondered if she had become anorexic. Thank you for this post, & for giving me the words “succubus chic” & “dark bimbo” to describe this “trend” I never understood before. Whatever it’s called, it’s still creepy to me.
Man, I regret the day I learned what "buccal fat removal" was. GROSS.
Oh sickness chic dates back further than that. Of course it’s the ‘frail little thing’ mentality men have foisted upon women since humans developed tools and women didn’t have to hunt and gather alongside their families anymore. Men look more manly when their women are wan and drawn, and women are easier to subjugate when they actually are wan and drawn from sickness, be it physically or (so much more often) psychologically. The difference I see in this trend that the “beauty” industry has undertaken with great zeal the last 5-6 decades, is the slow reduction of the frail feel from the Twiggy decade of the 60’s evolving to the 90’s more edgy feel of ‘sick chic’ (think hungry heroin addict vs super skinny pale uber model). [Wow long sentence there 🫠] Quite different from the ‘vapors chic’ of the 1920’s and Victorian eras though still a winner for cosmetic conglomerates and drug companies. Not sure the more modern ‘edgy sick’ is any less damaging to growing minds than the old ‘vapors’ version. Still a quite unattainable standard of appearance for most healthy women, right up there with perfect skin.
"The difference I see in this trend that the “beauty” industry has undertaken with great zeal the last 5-6 decades, is the slow reduction of the frail feel from the Twiggy decade of the 60’s evolving to the 90’s more edgy feel of ‘sick chic’ (think hungry heroin addict vs super skinny pale uber model)."
I might be reaching, but I wonder if this has some link to female sexuality. I think the image of a "hungry" heroin addict has a stronger air of being out of control and wild, whereas a starving model seems more... not demure, but "pliant"? It's like, as women gained more agency over their sexuality, the fears surrounding female sexuality (i.e., that it's wild and uncontrollable) got incorporated into the beauty ideal. I might be overthinking though 😅
Wow, reading this I remembered how, as a child, I used to think being dainty and frail was really compelling... I think that kind of conditioning transcends beauty culture, but beauty culture is a big agent of it. Whatever the agent is though, anything that encourages women to be small and fragile is beneficial to a patriarchal society. It makes so much sense that in our modern hyper-capitalist society, there's this shift to extreme product consumption (and it also serves to make women fragile financially!).
I remember hearing somewhere that the "messiness" and "illness" of heroin chic was a response to the healthy ideal of the 80s/80s aerobics culture, etc. I wasn't alive in the 80s so I don't know how accurate that description of the 80s beauty ideal is, but I wonder how it fits into the illness/beauty trajectory.
Your analysis about projected "wellness" (at the expense of real wellness) feels absolutely spot on. Anyway, I'm gonna chew on all this a while -- you always give me so much to think about!
Yes, I thought the same growing up! After I saw Little Women, even though I loved Jo, I was obsessed with (sickly, dying) Beth (Claire Danes). I thought she was so pretty & ethereal almost, & had the daintiest piano-playing fingers. I used to pretend play that I was her, & try to make myself more frail & dainty lol. And for a long time I thought my fairly small fingers were not pretty & dainty enough to play piano. Interesting how these messages stick in our brains!
WOW! BANG! Jessica, you hit the nail on the...and it chipped off! This is another link in the chain of oppressing women. They just create multi colored links, trends that cycle. A chain that chokes us to death, slowly. I always think of how much thought, time, energy, creative juice, joy, fun, bliss goes down the drain chain. It is a ginormous distraction - and it's everywhere, all the time. So we must focus within where our heart beat tells us how divine we truly are. The Earth care takers says Sharon Blackie.
Right Neen you said it better than I did-you got it exactly right. The agency women were able to attain with the less sexually uptight 60’s and 1970’s Roe, for example, did indeed inform the end result of of the trend. That’s what I was getting at (very ineloquently I might add-I get excited to remember things and contribute and I forget all the buzzwords in the process.).
It all comes back around to tuberculosis...
AND ANOTHER THING----I subscribe to Agent Nateur and I'll attest I have loved what I have tried but she is one minute selling real science, then goes on to pseudoscience, the next minute talking about the dangers of over-bleaching your hair and how it's the fault of your hair dresser for over bleaching, then she is talking about the dangers of toxic chemicals in our environment leading to AI issues like endometriosis. I thought I couldn't afford it financially (cents) but I really just cant make sense of it and afford the mental overload of WT actual F I'm buying $150 holy eye cream.
So interesting, as usual!
Brilliant. Again.
This is the weirdest thing and I had no idea. Can’t wait to read the whole article.
You write amazingly as always, but could you provide a source that rhinoplasty came from the Holocaust? I cant find any information on that at all. I'm Jewish and have seen first hand the connection between rhinoplasties and trying to hide your "exotic features". But every source I've found says that rhinoplasties were invented before the Holocaust
(Just want to jump in here and clarify that the Jessica writing these comments is not me, Jessica DeFino, the writer of this newsletter. Lol just in case there was any confusion!! I don’t have a source for that claim and don’t use it in my work.)
Ah oops! Thank you for the clarification! :)