what every conversation about the Wicked stars’ bodies is getting wrong

Tackling the question of if there is any productive way to talk about women's bodes.

So if you haven’t heard, Wicked co-stars Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo and Michelle Yeoh have all gotten extremely skinny. There’s really no way you weren’t aware because while some of the discourse is empathetic and some of it heartless, all of it is endless.

As I’ve watched this conversation unfold for over a year now, I find myself less concerned with everyone’s go-to question: why are these women so skinny? And instead have been wondering, is this conversation productive? Is there any productive way to talk about women’s bodies?

I initially aired on the side of no, this is an at best useless conversation, and at worst, harmful. I thought this because of the extremely overlooked but completely obvious fact that none of us know the Wicked stars personally. We can not say definitively how or why they lost weight, nor can we impose any sort of treatment plan to restore them back to what we think is healthy.

And to say the quiet part out loud, if these women have eating disorders one of the worst we can do is keep haphazardly commenting on them. Eating disorders are a complicated illness. Often those inflicted with them relish in their weight loss and find any comment on it–regardless of if it’s coming from a place of fear and concern–validating. In the disordered brain concern is taken as validation that it’s working.

This is not to say that zero conversation on eating disorders or the rapid change of celebrities’ bodies is a good idea either. With the Wicked stars the primary concern has been about how the young and impressionable girls watching them will react to their bodies.

When I was in middle school I was such a big Ariana Grande fan that I not only pursued her size but I attempted to mimic her laugh as well. I thought that if I could only capture her effortless whimsical essence then maybe I’ll be just as adored and celebrated as she is.

Young people copying celebrities is something that has to be accounted for. Many moms and teachers have already come forward talking about the worrying comments the young girls around them have made about the Wicked stars, with one mom saying her daughter wants to have a waist as small as Grandes.

This is where my opinion shifted. No conversation means there is no buffer or competing narrative for these young women to take in on whether or not it’s healthy to look that way.

Some of the people opposing a conversation on the Wicked stars did so by invoking the story of Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman, who got ridiculed for his weight loss but was later discovered to have been suffering from colon cancer and passed away in 2020.

This did present the important reminder that we don’t always know what is going on with the celebrities we admire, but to act like the extreme weight loss these female celebrities underwent while working on a blockbuster movie is at all a new phenomenon seems to feel a bit like gaslighting.

We’ve seen famous women lose weight over and over again, to chalk it all up to a secret debilitating illness is to ignore the impact of the social pressures these women are under to lose weight and appear perfect.

This is a difficult balancing act that must be struck in order to productively have this conversation: we have to center the young girls who might be negatively impacted from the glorification of small bodies as well as the individual celebrity women who don’t deserve to have their bodies analyzed and criticized at the public’s will.

Where I have landed is to refrain from commenting on these celebrities’ bodies and to instead speak more broadly to our cultural obsession with thinness and the importance of dismantling the idea that beauty must be of the utmost importance. It is precisely these forces that lead many women to lose a concerning amount of weight anyway.

The heart of this issue is not any celebrity or the young girls watching her, it’s the social pressure women are under to be small. If we want productive conversation, that’s where we have to focus.