Specimen in a Petri Dish: The Psychology of Public Body Policing
Welcome back to PsyberSpace I'm your host, Dr. Leslie Poston. And this week, we're talking about the psychology of public body commentary, why society feels entitled to it, and what it actually does to the people on the receiving end. This episode was inspired by a listener request. If you have a topic you'd like me to cover, you can send a note to the email in our RSS feed or leave a comment under any episode share on the Cyberspace Blue Sky account, and I'll see it.
Leslie Poston:A listener's daughter noticed that actress Jenna Ortega, who'd been subjected to negative body commentary for years as a young, totally normal sized actress looked noticeably thinner in a recent interview. The daughter expressed concern, and that concern opened up a much bigger question for me. This question doesn't just apply to famous women. It also applies to teenage girls and pretty much every woman who's ever existed in public. Why does everyone feel so comfortable having opinions about women's bodies in the first place?
Leslie Poston:I'm gonna trace a pattern that spans decades, look at the psychological research on what constant body scrutiny does to people, examine a rhetorical trick, and talk about how GLP-one medications like Ozempic can potentially contribute to the newest version of a very old trap. And then next week, in part two, I'll take it further and look at the history of body control as a deliberate tool of authoritarian power. Today, we're staying on the human and psychological level. Let's get into it. In August, Gina Ortega sat down with Esquire for a career retrospective.
Leslie Poston:She's 23. She's been acting since she was eight, and she came into the interview with a lot to say about the pressure of sudden fame, the uncertainty of building a career as a teenager, and what it was like to become one of the most recognizable young actresses in the country almost overnight after the success of her show Wednesday. As often happens to women in the spotlight, whether that's acting, politics, sports, or something else, within a day, almost none of the online conversation was about any of that. The comments under the YouTube video of the interview and across social media were overwhelmingly about her body. People called her skeletal, asked where her parents were, compared her to another woman under the same scrutiny right now, singer Ariana Grande, and worse.
Leslie Poston:The top comment on just one of the Instagram clips with over a 124,000 likes read, what's with her looking so emaciated? Buried inside the actual interview was a detail that got a lot less attention. Ortega described her experience as a child actor, saying that she would go entire days on set without eating or drinking because she wanted so badly to not be in the way of anybody. She called not looking after herself her mistake. And that's a young woman describing the experience of learning, at eight or nine years old, that her needs were an imposition, that taking up space, asking for water, being noticed as a person with a body that required care, all of it made her feel like a liability on set.
Leslie Poston:Ortega's not alone in experiencing this age old pattern. Ariana Grande has been dealing with the same cycle of public body surveillance for years. Fans started publicly raising concerns about her weight in 2023 during the filming of Wicked. Grande responded directly in a TikTok video, cutting through the noise to tell people that the body they kept comparing her current body to, the one they remembered as her healthiest look, was actually the period when she was at her lowest point personally. She was on antidepressants, drinking too much, and eating poorly.
Leslie Poston:She called attention to the fact that the version of her that the public had decided looked right was the version that was falling apart. Then in a December 2024 interview, Grande got emotional, describing feeling like she'd been a specimen in a Petri dish since she was 16 or 17, always observed, studied, dissected, and evaluated but never asked how she feels. She felt that she was being asked to exist for the benefit of whoever was looking at her. She said she'd heard every version of what was wrong with her, had tried to fix it all, and then been told it was all wrong again for some other reason. She called this public commentary on women's bodies dangerous.
Leslie Poston:If you're a bit older and you were paying attention in the early two thousands, none of this is new territory. Kate Winslet became one of the most famous actresses on the planet after Titanic, and the reward for that was years of tabloids commenting on her size, estimating her weight in print, and speculating about her diet. Median Joan Rivers made jokes suggesting that if Winslet had lost a few pounds, the Titanic wouldn't have sunk. Even her acting school told her to settle for fat girl parts. And not that it matters, but Winslet had a very slender and normal twenty six inch waist at the time.
Leslie Poston:In a 2024 interview with sixty Minutes, decades later, she became emotional describing the moment she confronted a reporter about it, telling them that I hope this haunts you. She since said she developed an eating disorder in the aftermath of the constant public commentary and judgment. Jennifer Lawrence was told by someone in the industry that she was obese by Hollywood standards and was shown near naked photos of herself and told to use them as motivation to lose weight. Raven Symone was 15 years old on a Disney show and was put on food restriction lists and given notes about what she could or couldn't eat. She said years later, I looked back and I wasn't even fat.
Leslie Poston:It made me so confused. These were all normal sized women and girls. The standard they were being measured against was never a real human body. And when they or others changed to meet the standard, the commentary didn't stop. It just reversed direction.
Leslie Poston:The public commentary then went from you're too big to you're too thin with the same saccharin sweet, fake concern tone, the same false sense of authority, and the same complete confidence that their unsolicited and loud opinion was warranted. That consistency of the public commentary swinging back and forth never satisfied is relevant. If the identical language of concern works whether someone is heavier or thinner, the supposed concern is never really about a body size. It's just an excuse to be vocally judgmental about someone else's existence. So where does this feeling of entitlement to comment actually come from?
Leslie Poston:There's a theory in psychology from Fredrickson and Roberts called objectification theory that can help us understand. Most discussions of this theory focus on what's called self objectification, which can explain the way women learn to monitor their own bodies from the outside, almost as if they're watching themselves be watched. That habitual self monitoring is linked to body shame, anxiety, disordered eating, and a reduced ability to notice internal signals like hunger, fullness, or fatigue. All of those findings have been replicated across multiple countries and populations at this point. Popular discussions of objectification theory sometimes skip where the theory actually starts.
Leslie Poston:The researchers didn't begin with women monitoring themselves. They began by studying what culture does to women first. The theory's actual starting point is the documented social practice of treating women's bodies as objects available for public evaluation. The self monitoring that women develop comes after years of living under that harmful treatment. It's a learned adaptation to growing up in a culture that considers your body a legitimate subject for commentary by anyone at any time for any reason.
Leslie Poston:That harmful culture creates the condition, and then women adapt to survive them. Philosopher Sandra Bartke extended this line of thinking by describing how women experience a form of psychological oppression through being reduced to their appearance in everyday interactions. And Susan Bordeaux's academic work examined how the female body functions as a cultural project, something built and maintained under observation with the observer always assumed to have standing to judge the result. Both of these scholars describe something most women recognize immediately from their own lived experience, the sensation of being looked at and evaluated by default in a way that men occupying the same spaces rarely are. This is the pattern underneath every example I just walked through, including the comments under Ortega's interview, the tabloid coverage of Winslet's waist, and the speculation about Grande's body during Wicked filming.
Leslie Poston:All of it rests on the prior assumption that we are only recently starting to question that women's bodies are appropriate subjects for public discussion. That assumption is so deeply embedded in how our culture operates that people exercise it while somehow thinking they're being kind. There's a term for the specific rhetorical trick that enables this. And even if you haven't heard it used in this context, you'll recognize it immediately, and that's concern trolling. When it comes to body commentary, that's the practice of expressing moral judgment about someone's body while framing it as a worry about their health.
Leslie Poston:One researcher examined public commentary during a body positivity debate in Finland and found that expressions of concern about overweight people's health consistently functioned as a socially acceptable vehicle for fat phobia. The rhetoric reproduced weight stigma and stereotypes while placing the person being scrutinized lower in a moral hierarchy than the person doing the scrutinizing. In other words, the performance of concern reinforced a pecking order and gave the commenter perceived permission to sit at the top of it. What makes this relevant to the Ortega situation is that the dynamic works identically in both directions. I hope she's taking care of herself, aimed at someone who's thin, uses the same rhetorical structure as I'm just worried about your health, aimed at someone who's fat.
Leslie Poston:Both claim compassion and both assume the speaker has standing to evaluate a stranger's body. And both position the speaker as a concerned authority while reducing the subject to someone who has failed to manage herself properly. Parasocial relationships amplify all of this considerably. I did a deep dive into parasocial relationships in season one episode seven if you want more detail. But effectively, research on one-sided emotional bonds with public figures goes back to Horton and Wool's work in 1956 and has been extended considerably in the social media era.
Leslie Poston:People develop a sense of closeness to celebrities that feels psychologically real even though it's entirely unreciprocated, and that felt closeness produces a felt entitlement. People track a famous woman's body the way they might track a friend's health, except the famous woman didn't ask for your input. They don't know you exist, and they can't opt out of your unsolicited scrutiny. A study by Young, Gabriel, and Sechrist specifically examined how parasocial relationships moderated the effect of celebrity body size on viewers' own body image. And the underlying assumption was telling People relate to a famous woman's body as something they personally have a stake in.
Leslie Poston:This dynamic isn't exclusive to fame, though. Everyday women and girls deal with the same sense of entitlement from family members, classmates, coworkers, and total strangers on a regular basis. Celebrity examples make the behaviors more visible because millions of people do it simultaneously and leave a written record, but this experience is universal. Everything I'm about to discuss in this section is population level research about what happens to people who live under sustained body scrutiny. I'm not making claims about any specific person's health or a diagnosis, and neither should anyone else in real life or on social media.
Leslie Poston:One of the longitudinal studies on this topic is called Project EAT, led by Jocelyn Haynes, Diane Newmark Steiner, and others. They followed a diverse sample of over 2,500 adolescents starting in nineteen ninety eight-nineteen ninety nine and tracked them for years. Their findings were consistent. Adolescents who were teased about their weight, regardless of their actual starting size were significantly more likely to develop binge eating, unhealthy weight control behaviors, and chronic dieting. The follow-up published in 2017 found that weight based teasing in adolescents predicted higher BMI, binge eating, unhealthy weight control, more eating to cope with distress, and poor body image well into adulthood.
Leslie Poston:These effects were especially pronounced for women, and the damage came from both peer and family sources of teasing. And just to reiterate the last part, teasing from family was just as predictive of this as teasing from peers. Researchers Pewell Dursault and Pearl have spent years studying a concept called weight bias internalization, which is the process by which a person stops simply experiencing external stigma and starts believing it describes them. Their research, and the broader literature building on it, has consistently found that internalized weight bias predicts worse psychological outcomes than the experience of stigma alone. We're talking about depression, body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, lower self esteem, and a reduced quality of life.
Leslie Poston:And these associations hold independent of a person's actual body size. So the tipping point, in other words, is the moment someone starts agreeing with the commentary. The comments themselves are bad enough, but the real damage happens when the person on the receiving end starts to internalize them as true. There's also a physiological layer to this. Weight stigma doesn't just cause emotional distress.
Leslie Poston:It produces measurable biological stress responses. A systematic review of 33 studies found that experiences of weight stigma were positively associated with elevated cortisol, oxidative stress, and C reactive protein, which is a marker of systemic inflammation. Randomized controlled experiments by Himmelstein and colleagues and by Schwey, Puehl, and Brunel found that simply exposing women to stigmatizing statements about weight caused their cortisol levels to spike. That cortisol response is linked to inflammation, insulin resistance, hypertension, and cardiovascular risk. On top of that, another study found that weight stigma is associated with health care avoidance and medical mistrust, meaning people under this kind of scrutiny become less likely to seek medical care when they actually need it.
Leslie Poston:The biological evidence shows us that commenting on people's bodies in the name of health concern produces exactly the kind of physiological stress responses that contribute to poor health outcomes. The performance of concern doesn't help. It does measurable, documentable harm. The people who claim to care about someone's health are, according to the research, actively making it worse. Every era produces new cultural material for body judgment, and the current chapter involves GLP-one receptor agonist medications like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro.
Leslie Poston:These are legitimate medications with real clinical applications. While they were developed for type two diabetes management, they're prescribed for a range of metabolic conditions, and for many people, they're life changing in a genuinely positive way. The medications themselves aren't what I'm talking about here. What I'm interested in is what the broader culture has done with them. By 2024, an estimated thirteen percent of American adults had used injectable weight loss drugs, and the cultural conversation around these medications has moved well beyond medicine and into moral territory.
Leslie Poston:Researchers are already documenting the shift. One article by Oswald argued that the discourse surrounding GLP-one medications reinforces existing hierarchies of bodily value by positioning thinness as increasingly attainable and therefore increasingly morally expected. If thinness is now pharmacologically accessible, the cultural logic goes, remaining in a larger body becomes harder to frame as anything other than a personal failure. The cultural availability of these drugs doesn't relieve the pressure on women. It can intensify it by removing what used to be considered a valid reason for not being thin.
Leslie Poston:And there's another layer to this cultural bind as well. In 2025, journalist Cassidy George interviewed women about their experiences taking GLP-one medications. One interviewee stated, Thinness achieved through medication suddenly doesn't count. If you suffered for it through diet and exercise, then culturally you are perceived as earning it. If you got pharmaceutical help, you are culturally perceived as having cheated.
Leslie Poston:The moral framework was never really about the body or your health. It was about whether you've performed enough discipline and enough visible suffering to earn the perceived audience of culture's approval. That goalpost was always going to move because it was attached to whatever allowed the most judgment at any given moment. This is the same dynamic we saw play out in the two thousands with tabloid photography as the delivery system, and now the delivery system is social media commentary and pharmaceutical moralizing. The technology changes, but the cultural feeling of entitlement to judge a woman's body does not.
Leslie Poston:Every person we've discussed today, Ortega, Grande, Winslet, Raven Symone, Lawrence, and the thousands of research participants in the longitudinal studies, all share something in common. Someone else decided their body was a legitimate subject for public evaluation, and that evaluation was framed as reasonable and even compassionate. On an individual level, there is research on what can help. Self compassion research has found that self compassion functions as a moderating variable between internalized weight stigma and disordered eating. People who are able to extend to themselves the same kindness that they would extend to a friend show less psychological damage from the same amount of external pressure, and that's certainly a meaningful and actionable finding.
Leslie Poston:But individual coping can only absorb so much when the culture keeps generating pressure. The question underneath everything I've talked about today is 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? That question is psychological, and we've treated it that way today. But it's also deeply political, and it's much older and more deliberately wielded than any single actress' interview or any single decade of tabloid culture. Controlling what women's bodies are allowed to look like has a long documented history as a tool of political power.
Leslie Poston:And that history is exactly where we're going with this topic next week in part two. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace I'm your host, Dr. Leslie Poston, signing off. Until next time, stay curious, and don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.
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