Specimen in a Petri Dish Part Two: Body Control as Political Power
Welcome back to PsyberSpace I'm your host, Dr. Leslie Poston, and this is part two of our series on public body policing. This episode builds directly on the research and examples I covered last week. If you haven't listened to part one yet, I recommend going back to last week's episode and starting there.
Leslie Poston:I ended part one with a question. Who assumes they get to decide what a woman's body should look like, and what gives them the perceived authority to enforce that decision? I treated that question psychologically last week, looking at objectification theory, concern trolling, parasocial relationships, and the biological and psychological effects of weight stigma. Today I'm treating it politically, because controlling what women's bodies are allowed to look like has a long documented history as a deliberate tool of authoritarian power. That history has a direct throughline to what's happening right now in both traditional media and social media.
Leslie Poston:Let's get into it. One of the clearest historical cases of body control as state policy is Mussolini's Italy. The fascist regime didn't just have preferences about what women should look like. It built an entire propaganda system around two explicit archetypes of womanhood. The first was the donna madre, or the mother woman, voluptuous, fertile, devoted entirely to her husband and her many children.
Leslie Poston:She was the patriotic ideal. The second was the dona creisi, the crisis woman, thin, fashionable, childless, cosmopolitan, and branded by the regime as degenerate and a direct threat to the nation. Natasha Chang published an academic study examining the Donacrisi's position within Italian fascist culture, tracing how this figure was constructed through scientific, medical, and popular literature of the period. Leslie Caldwell's research on women as reproducers of the nation documented how the regime insisted women be optimally round and robust and that any pursuit of slenderness or fashion was framed as selfish, unpatriotic, and evidence of sterility. The regime wasn't expressing an aesthetic preference.
Leslie Poston:It was moralizing body types. The right body signaled loyalty. The wrong body signaled treason. Historian Victoria de Gracia's How Fascism Ruled Women provides broader scholarly grounding for how this operated in practice. De Gracia drew on memoirs, novels, government records, propaganda, and mass culture to show how the regime promised women modernity while systematically denying them emancipation.
Leslie Poston:Women's bodies were explicitly framed as state resources, and the body you had communicated your political alignment, whether you intended it to or not. And that dynamic wasn't unique to Italy. Susan Sontag's essay Fascinating Fascism analyzed how German filmmaker Lenny Reifenstall's Nazi propaganda films used idealized bodies to project state power. Sontab argued that the aesthetic of perfect bodies praising their leader created an appeal that drew people in even when they didn't agree with the politics. The body functioned as a recruitment tool, not just a symbol.
Leslie Poston:Terror management theory from Greenberg, Solomon, and Psyzinski helps explain why populations go along with this. When people feel existentially threatened, whether that's by war, economic collapse, or social instability, they cling harder to their cultural norms and become more punitive toward anyone who deviates from them, which means authoritarian regimes don't have to force body conformity on an unwilling public so much as amplify the fear that makes conformity feel like survival. And these are historical regimes, but the frameworks they established didn't disappear when they fell. The idea that a woman's body communicates her moral character, discipline, worthiness, and even her loyalty to the social order just migrated. It didn't need the dictator to sustain it.
Leslie Poston:It had embedded itself in medicine, fashion, popular culture, and even in the way families talk to their daughters about food. The fascist regimes had their own body hierarchies, but the broader system of fat phobia that persists in the West today has an older origin that's even more specific, and it doesn't have anything to do with medical science. Sociologist Sabrina Strings traced this history in her book Fearing the The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. Strings' central argument is that fat phobia originated during the Enlightenment and the Transatlantic slave trade. She traces the historical narrative from the Renaissance to the present, analyzing works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, scientific literature, and medical journals to show how fat bodies were once praised in European culture, and that changed as the slave trade reshaped European societies.
Leslie Poston:Colonial pseudoscience used body size as a way to differentiate black women from white women, associating fatness with what colonists would describe as savagery and a supposed lack of intellectual capacity for self discipline. Thinness, by contrast, became a marker of whiteness, morality, and social standing. As journalist and researcher Lois Sheerin summarized Strang's work, thin supremacy was used to police the borders of white womanhood, positioning it as demure, delicate, and self sacrificing. The thin ideal was a racial project from the start, and its target has always been specifically women's bodies. Strings traces a second idea through Protestant moral theology, where bodily restraint became evidence of spiritual discipline and moral character.
Leslie Poston:In this framework, fatness didn't just signal poor health. It signaled a moral failure, a lack of the self governance that Protestantism prized. These two ideas, racial hierarchy and religious moralism, wove together over centuries to produce this moralizing language about thinness that we still hear today every time people talk about weight as a matter of discipline or self control, that language doesn't come from medicine. It comes from systems that were designed to sort people into categories of worthy or unworthy. And those categories were racialized and gendered from the very beginning.
Leslie Poston:Deshaun Harrison extended this analysis into the present in their book Belly of the The Politics of Anti Fatness as Anti Blackness. Harrison makes the connection between anti fatness and anti Blackness both explicit and ongoing, describing diet culture as a disciplinary technology used to regulate and control populations in the service of national image. Harrison argues that body fascism as a concept promotes thin, muscular, cisgender, heterosexual white bodies as patriotic symbols and that this promotion is active now, not historical. It operates through social institutions, including education, media, and medicine, and it does so whether or not the people participating in it recognize what they're doing. Every time a government or an industry decides whose body is acceptable and whose needs to be corrected, that's body fascism at work.
Leslie Poston:System justification theory helps us explain why the system perpetuates itself without needing a dictator at the top. People are psychologically motivated to defend and justify existing social hierarchies even when those hierarchies disadvantage them personally, which is part of why women enforce thinness standards on other women and why Black women face pressure to conform to a thin ideal that was structured to exclude them. Moral foundations research adds another layer. Moral reasoning organized around purity and contamination is strongly associated with conservatism and authoritarianism. And the language around bodies like clean eating, pure, disciplined maps directly onto that purity foundation, which is one reason the moralizing language that Strings documented slides so easily from body talk into political ideology.
Leslie Poston:The system that tells women their bodies are wrong is the sorting system that is the foundation of everything else we're discussing today. So if the historical regimes used propaganda offices and state controlled media to enforce body standards, What are the current delivery systems? The answer is both traditional media and social media, working in tandem. Let's start with the fashion industry. One 2026 study analyzed 793,199 appearances of women models across fashion magazines, advertisements, editorials, magazine covers, and runway shows between two thousand and twenty twenty four.
Leslie Poston:That's almost 800,000 data points across twenty five years, which makes this one of the most comprehensive analyses of beauty standards that's been conducted. Their core finding: while diversity increased in some surface level ways over that period, the industry's actual body ideal remained overwhelmingly thin across the entire twenty five years. In other words, the industry got slightly more diverse in terms of who appeared, but they barely changed the body type that they were already treating as ideal. George Gerbner's Cultivation Theory explains why twenty five years of that consistency matters at a population level. Long term repeated exposure to media content gradually shifts people's perceptions of what's normal and typical in the real world.
Leslie Poston:So heavy consumers of fashion and social media don't just see thin bodies more often, they come to believe thin bodies are more common and more normal than they actually are. The researchers also found that nonwhite models were 4.5 times more likely to be plus sized than white models, which led them to conclude that the industry consolidates multiple markers of diversity onto already underrepresented individuals rather than broadening inclusion structurally. So if you're a non white model, you're disproportionately likely to be cast as the quote diversity body rather than the aspirational body. That finding directly extends strings analysis into current industry practice. The thin ideal still functions as a racial and class marker, even inside an industry that talks about diversity constantly.
Leslie Poston:The numbers have also gotten worse recently, not better. Vogue did a business size inclusivity report and tracked this regression. Plus sized representation on major fashion week runways dropped from 2.8% in 2020 to point 8%. That's 0.8% by 2025. At the fall winter runways 2020, it's at 0.3%, the lowest on record.
Leslie Poston:97.1% of spring summer twenty twenty six runway looks featured very small models as well. Fashion journalist Dan Awa observed, and I quote, a wider cultural turn toward conservatism has reframed inclusivity as excess and complexity as inconvenience, end quote. I thought that was a useful description of how political shifts are translating into aesthetic ones. And this connects us back to Ariana Grande's experience that we discussed in part one. Her treatment as a specimen in a Petri dish didn't happen in a vacuum.
Leslie Poston:It was happening inside this media and industry culture that's already structured to evaluate and sort women's bodies along these precise lines. Grande has been scrutinized by traditional media outlets, fan communities, tabloids, and by social media commentators simultaneously, and the scrutiny has intensified as the broader culture has shifted back toward thinness as an enforced standard because she is an example of excess thinness right now. One article connected Grande's body to the current political moment, documenting how her frame has become this site of political contestation. With commentary on her appearance now entangled with broader cultural battles over what women's bodies are supposed to look like and who gets to decide. Now add in social media.
Leslie Poston:Skinny talk is the algorithmic version of this same system. That hashtag has surpassed 2,400,000,000 views on TikTok. Belgium's government formally warned the European Commission about it. The content within it promotes extreme thinness through calorie restriction videos. What I eat in a day posts featuring dangerously low intake, and mantras like a skinny body is rented, not owned.
Leslie Poston:This is the proanic community of the early two thousands, algorithmically amplified and critically and politically connected in ways the two thousand's version was not. Journalist Lois Sheering, who wrote Pink Pilled, Women in the Far Right, spent eighteen months using a fake identity to infiltrate far right women's communities across TikTok, Instagram, Telegram, and other social platforms. Her reporting directly connected Thinnes promotion to far right radicalization, documenting how wellness and body content functioned as entry points into increasingly extreme political spaces. Any Joy Williams reported similar findings for The Atlantic. When she started engaging with skinny talk content, tradwife content immediately entered her algorithm, followed by divine femininity and natural role content, Then followed by overtly far right material.
Leslie Poston:Experts she spoke with confirmed this as a known recruitment tactic, starting with seemingly apolitical diet content, then steering viewers toward political ideology. We've talked about this pipeline in earlier episodes, but in those episodes, we talked about how for men, this starts as fitness content, weightlifting content, and then steers them down the far right pipeline of lux maxing, etcetera. Academic researchers have documented this pipeline as well. Sykes and Hoppner's research examined how TikTok tradwife creators naturalize women's return to the domestic sphere through a romanticized visual aesthetic of baking, aprons, and biblical submission. Researchers Betz Lisz and Ramsey, writing on the tradwife phenomenon, noted that the tradwife lifestyle that was once only available to white, wealthy, heterosexual women is being marketed through false nostalgia as universally achievable and perhaps more risky as universally desirable.
Leslie Poston:One detail from Salon's reporting is especially telling in my opinion. MAGA and MAHA influencers have moved beyond being just anti fat. Even building muscle is now being framed by that community as suspiciously feminist. The ideal being promoted for women isn't just thin at this point. It's frail.
Leslie Poston:Weakness as femininity. And that's a very specific political message wrapped in an aesthetic package. And it's reaching millions of young women through their social media feeds every day because of the way social media algorithms are designed. If you put the Donna Crissy and Donna Madre side by side with the skinny talk ideal and the tradwife aesthetic, the parallels are hard to miss. The, quote, right body is thin, controlled, nonthreatening, and devoted to domestic life, centering men.
Leslie Poston:The wrong body, quote, takes up space, builds strength, or refuses to comply. So while the technology might be different, the political function is the same. So why are women and girls susceptible to this? The answer is connected directly to the research that we covered in part one. The objectification, self surveillance, and internalized weight bias we discussed last week aren't just individual psychological experiences.
Leslie Poston:They're the preconditions that make this kind of political recruitment effective. If you've spent years in a culture that treats your body as public property, as we discussed with objectification theory, you've already been trained to monitor yourself from the outside. You've learned to watch yourself being watched. If you've internalized the belief that your body is wrong as the weight bias internalization research documents, you've already accepted the premise that discipline is the answer and that your failure to meet the standard is a personal failing. And that's the psychological groundwork.
Leslie Poston:The far right pipeline builds directly on top of that. So it doesn't need to convince you that your body is a problem. Culture has already done that. It just needs to offer you what feels like a solution. The tradwife and thinness content that researchers have documented doesn't start with politics.
Leslie Poston:It starts by offering relief. Bliss and Ramsey noted in their research that tradwife content capitalizes on real legitimate frustrations that women have with modern life, unaffordable housing, crushing work expectations, and the sense that you're expected to do everything, yet you still somehow fall short. The lifestyle that tradwife influencers present with its soft lighting and homemade bread and gingham aprons looks to you like rest, like an answer to exhaustion. Thinness content functions in a similar way. It offers what feels like control, and a life that feels uncontrollable.
Leslie Poston:It says here's something you can manage, discipline that will be rewarded, and a version of femininity that will keep you safe. The psychological process under that appeal to safety is called compensatory control theory. It finds that when people feel a lack of personal control over their lives, they're drawn to external sources of order and structure, including rigid ideologies and authoritarian systems. And the thinness and tradwife pipeline offers them exactly that kind of structure disguised as personal choice. Self determination theory draws a distinction between autonomous motivation, where you act from your own values, and controlled motivation, where you act from external pressure, guilt, the need for approval.
Leslie Poston:And what makes this pipeline effective is that it packages controlled motivation to look like autonomy. I'm choosing this for myself is the language of freedom, but when the choice is shaped by algorithmic funneling and social punishment for deviation, It's compliance dressed up as empowerment. The problem is that the safety being offered comes with condition, and those conditions escalate. What starts as diet tips becomes moral judgment about food. Homemaking content becomes an argument that women only belong in the home.
Leslie Poston:An aesthetic becomes an ideology. And because the entry point feels personal and helpful, not political, the shift can happen internally before the person experiencing the pipeline recognizes what's changed. Authoritarian movements don't start by asking for your political loyalty. We've talked about authoritarianism in an earlier episode in much deeper context. They start by offering you a way to feel safe, even though it's an illusion.
Leslie Poston:And for women and girls, that offer frequently comes wrapped in beauty standards and bodily ideals. By the time the politics are visible to you, all of this has been internalized. Your body just came first. This two part series started with a listener's daughter noticing something about Jenna Ortega, and it's ending with a question about political power. The distance between those two points is so much shorter than it looks.
Leslie Poston:Objectification research from part one, weight bias internalization, self surveillance that we develop after years of being treated as public property, all of that is the psychological infrastructure making the political project possible. If you wanna go deeper on the scholarship we've covered today, I always put things in the show notes at Cyberspace, although I'm a few weeks behind, so I need to catch up. I especially recommend Sabrina Strings' Fearing the Black Body, Deshaun Harrison's Belly of the Beast, and Lois Sheerin's Pink Pilled. Doctor Joy Cox, author of Fat Girls and Black Bodies, Creating Communities of Our Own, addresses these issues. All of these women go much deeper than we had time for today.
Leslie Poston:Additionally, I recommend you find and listen to online creators like Imani Barbarin, who goes by Crutches and Spice on most social media and on her Patreon, doctor Tressie McMillan Cotton, who goes by Tressie McPhD on most social media, and people like Sarah Durham Wilson, who goes by Sarah of Magdalene on most social media. They all publish fairly consistently on these topics. If this two part series sparked something for you, send your topic to the email in our RSS feed or make a comment on the cyberspace blue sky account. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off.
Leslie Poston:Until next time, stay curious, and don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.
Creators and Guests
