Bella Fascista: Racism, Fatphobia, and the new Christofascist Americana

What do we mean by ‘thin is back in’?

After a six year hiatus, the famed Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show has made its return. In its heyday this was an exclusive and exciting event, the supermodel Superbowl, making or breaking model’s careers as they aspire towards the coveted VS Angel wings. This year however, it seems to have fallen flat. The Telegraph called it a ‘tired pageant of Diamante thongs’, and social media users bemoaned the uninspired cheap looking outfits and the flat unexciting hair.

On the same day, UK Health Minister Wes Streeting announced a bizarre new policy aiming to give weight loss drug Ozempic to overweight unemployed people, because he feels this will somehow make it easier for them to find a job. Dr Dolly van Tulleken points out the obvious issue with this, which is that there are “serious ethical, financial, and efficacy considerations” with “measuring people based on their potential economic value, rather than primarily based on their needs and their health needs”. Dr. Van Tulleken is right— there is nothing wrong with the NHS offering Ozempic to patients who want and need it, but the idea that this should be the purview of the Department of Work and Pensions or, god forbid, that out of work benefits should be dependent on agreeing to take it, is absurd and dystopian. Nevertheless, a trial of this scheme is going ahead in Greater Manchester.

What can we glean from the confluence of these two events? Is it that ‘skinny culture’ is back? No, I don’t think it ever really left. Just because as a society we decided it was okay to have a big bum for five years and Lizzo made it big doesn’t mean that the inherent values around weight actually changed in a meaningful way. Our social ideals of body image shift in discreet ways constantly- from a more athletic figure in the 80s, the era of aerobics, to 90s heroin chic, to 2010s BBL ‘slim thick’, all of these aesthetic ideals still tend towards thinness, just in slightly different ways. Our latest iteration has just been a curvier physique, which is now giving way to the ‘pilates princess’ as our social obsession with equating thinness and health rises once again to the fore. Other writers have already covered this in excellent detail for The New York Times and The Guardian among other places so I won’t belabor the point, but eating disorder rates continue to rise and models continue to be skinny.

Articles to the effect of ‘thin is back in’ started appearing in late 2022/early 2023. According to Statista, 2022 also saw a peak in both the UK and USA for racially motivated hate crimes. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights also reports a substantial increase over the last few years in rates of racial discrimination across Europe. Dozens of other reports confirm: racism is on the rise globally. At the same time, the cultural impact of Black America is waning. White celebrities are less interested in adopting the aesthetics of blackness, whether it’s the Kardashians leaving their Black partners for white men or internet jokes about how Ariana Grande is ‘white again’. With a cultural return to whiteness comes a cultural return to thinness. Racism and fatphobia are ontologically intertwined concepts, and this is the newest iteration of this long and complex relationship.

In her landmark book on the topic, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia, Dr. Sabrina Strings traces the origins of this connection back to Protestantism and the Atlantic slave trade. Strings argues that ‘Racial scientific rhetoric about slavery linked fatness to “greedy” Africans. And religious discourse suggested that overeating was ungodly’. As African people began to be visible in European societies, white Europeans in the early modern period painted Africans as greedy, sexually deviant, lacking in self control. At first they viewed the Africans as ‘diminutive in both size and social status’, criticising entire ethnic groups for their alleged scrawny builds and poor health. This contrasted with the idealised female physique at the time, which was rounded and full-figured, best exemplified by the work of Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens. In his treatise on ideal female beauty, Rubens specifically praised women whose skin was ‘solid, firm and white, with a hint of a pale red, like the color of milk tinged with blood, or a mix of lilies and roses’.

Venus in front of the mirror, Peter Paul Rubens c. 1614-15

As Europeans in the eighteenth century began to construct new ‘scientific’ ideas of race, their perception of Black women began to shift. The new archetype was best exemplified by the cultural phenomenon around Sarah Baartman, known as ‘the Hottentot Venus’. Sarah was a Black South African woman born in 1789. In her early twenties, she left South Africa with her Dutch employer Hendrik Cesars with the aim of putting her body on display through Europe as a sort of curiosity to white Europeans who had never encountered African women before. (There is some debate as to how coerced this arrangement was, but it is generally accepted she left initially of her own free will). Sarah was displayed as both an object of racial scientific and of erotic fascination, and described in promotional material as the ‘perfect specimen’ of her ethnic group, and as having 'the kind of shape which is most admired among her countrymen’. She was very short, with very large hips and backside, and she was generally displayed wearing clothing made up to look like the European’s idea of ‘exotic’ and ‘tribal’. Sarah and other women like her were used to construct the idea of Black and African women as fat, curvy, and eroticised.

Following on from this construction, it became important for white European women to define themselves in opposition to Black African women. In their mind, the African woman was lazy, hypersexual, savage, and impure. With the rise of Protestant ideals about discipline and temperance came a wave of new obsession with health and diet. For women, dieting was both a way to adhere to the Protestant ideal of delicate femininity, and a means to strengthen their relationship with God by making their bodies a site of purity. In Fearing the Black Body, Sabrina Strings details how the English media began to criticise fat women both as unattractive and as lower class and unsophisticated. This would play a major role in the construction of identity for English women in the early United States, who were very eager to solidify their status at the top of the racial totem pole by emphasising their Anglo-Saxon and Protestant heritage. This painted them in opposition both to Black women and to other European ethnicities, particularly the Irish and later Italian and Jewish migrants.

The effects of this racist history continue to manifest today. From medicine to high fashion, our culture is imbued with this legacy of anti-blackness. In an article for Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Strings details the evolution of the ‘medical trope of the unrestrained Black woman as deadly’. This manifests as overindulgence and as hypersexuality, painting Black women as overly promiscuous harbingers of disease. Colorism continues to dominate ideas of beauty across much of the world, as sales for skin lightening products continue to rise. Black women in the modelling industry are alternately criticised for their features or fetishised as exotic.

Now, there is a new manifestation emerging. In a modern global culture dominated by American cultural hegemony, white supremacist beauty ideals find new ways to rear their ugly head. Conservative nationalist populism across North America and Europe emphasises the myth of The Great Replacement, a theory that suggests immigration and multiculturalism are diluting the white majority in these countries and thereby erasing the local cultures. The theory originated in the early 2010s with French writer and far right conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus, but has since become popular among the Trump supporting conservative movement in the USA, as well as other European nations.

Donald Trump Jr. recently joined other far right Twitter accounts in celebrating Danish pageant queen Victoria Kjaer Theilvig’s Miss Universe victory, saying ‘Biological & objectively attractive women are allowed to win beauty pageants again’. Other tweets from far right accounts criticised ‘woke culture’ for allowing non-white women to win the pageant in previous years, and Elon Musk posted an image captioned ‘Breaking: Internet Stunned After an Attractive Biological Female Human of Healthy Weight wins Miss Universe Pageant’. This obsession with Nazi conceptions of Nordic ‘Aryan’ beauty ideals intermixes with transphobia and fatphobia to define womanhood through the narrow lens of the thin white European woman.

These people, of course, do not care that no trans woman or plus size woman has ever been crowned Miss Universe. They don’t care that Donald Trump was the owner of the Miss Universe brand for twenty years, or that the blonde-haired blue-eyed Danish winner was crowned while the pageant is in fact currently owned by a transgender woman, Anne Jakrajutatip. Their vitriol is really for the Black and ethnically-othered winners of the pageant, who they do not perceive as women, at least not women in the same sense as women like Victoria.

This new form of obsession with conformity to white femininity presents itself online in an even more blatant manner through the figure of the tradwife. Tradwives are women who live by ‘traditional’ values and ‘traditional’ ideas of women as mothers and homemakers, confined to the domestic sphere. Aesthetically, they are inspired by a 1950s women's magazine idea of femininity, with blonde curls and floral dresses and high heels in the kitchen. These women are almost all white, with the famous exception being Mormon food influencer Nara Smith, but she is the exception that proves the rule- she is mixed race but she is a Mormon, American, wealthy, married to a white man, and has light skin, is thin, and her appearance conforms to Eurocentric standards of beauty.

Nara Smith and her family for GQ Magazine

The tradwife symbolises a new aesthetic of Christofascist Americana, a white supremacy that begins in the home and reaches its ugly tendrils up to the highest offices of government. It is a Norman Rockwell painting reimagined by Thomas Kinkade, a nostalgia for a nonexistent pastiche of 1950s suburbia. It is Mussolini’s donna fascista for the modern American woman. It reinforces motherhood as a civic responsibility. It is the white woman’s job to raise white birth rates and preserve the white race for the white nation. J.D. Vance’s mocking of the ‘childless cat lady’ is not just petty rudeness, it is political. Vance and his political project view childless women as obsolete. Across the world in Russia, the government has revived its practice of awarding mothers of ten or more children a Mother Heroine medal. In Italy, fascist prime minister Giorgia Meloni has banned surrogacy, saying ‘yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby’. While the tradwife has a uniquely American character, the reactionary pro-natalist misogyny is a global phenomenon.

Even internet trends that seem much more innocuous can reinforce this white supremacist beauty ideal. Take the ‘pink pilates princess’, for example. The pink pilates princess is the newest iteration of the Pinterest it girl, defined by a lifestyle dedication to thinness and ‘health’. It carries the aesthetics of Lululemon, Victoria's Secret, Uggs and Erewhon smoothies. The aesthetics wiki rightly points out that ‘Similarly to the That Girl aesthetic, there is a big focus on the lifestyles of upper middle class thin white girls.’. Alongside the ‘clean girl’ and the debatably more explicitly conservative aesthetics of ‘coquette’, the pink pilates princess defines femininity and also health as thinness and whiteness. It also, much like the tradwife, paints a picture wherein a woman must dedicate all her waking hours to achieving this model of femininity. Being a feminine woman becomes a full time job, preventing women from participating in public life.

In this political climate we must be vigilant towards white supremacist ideology. We must stay alert towards the more subtle and insidious way it manifests in our cultural imagination. Fascism is not strictly the realm of militarised masculinity. There is a femininity of fascism too. It comes to us on our TikTok feeds, on runways, in magazines. It is on Pinterest and recipe blogs, in our $6 thongs we buy at the mall. It is not always intentional- in fact, it is often not. But allowing unintentional reinforcement of white supremacist ideas of beauty and the body to go unremarked upon is to enforce a dangerous cultural hegemony that will one day come for us all. We must all work to combat this creeping culture of white supremacy, even more so under a new Trump presidency that aims to take away women’s bodily autonomy. In our resistance against white supremacist ideas of beauty, we are also resisting misogyny, racism, transphobia, fatphobia, ableism, and myriad forms of oppression. Our bodies are ours to control, whether that is in choosing not to devote our time and effort to achieving thinness and ‘beauty’ or whether it is choosing to have an abortion, to take birth control, whether or not to have children, to take hormone replacement therapy, or being able to live with dignity as a disabled person. These things are all interconnected. Nothing exists in a vacuum. This evident shift in our cultural ideas of beauty is a sign of the political times, and we must not forget what underpins it politically.

Thank you for reading. I make a commission from any books purchased via the bookshop.org links in this piece or from my profile, where I have a list for some further reading on this topic. Buying via these links helps support my work so I really appreciate it! Please also subscribe for more writing and podcasts- an episode on these themes is coming very soon.