Do fascism and thinness actually correlate?
Testing the theory with statistics
In 1975 Susan Sontag wrote an essay called fascinating fascism where she explored how German filmmaker and photographer Leni Riefenstahl used fit, muscular bodies to glorify and represent the Nazi party in her propaganda films Olympia and Triumph of the Will. Her films consistently fetishise crowds of perfect bodies, praising their leader — an aesthetic that Sontag called ‘fascinating fascism’. She argued that this was done as a way to draw people in even when they do not align with the politics but perhaps admired the aesthetics.
Here, it is suggested that the regime used the ideas of the perfect body to both project the power and to assert control, by assigning certain bodies as morally aligned with the party (and other bodies as not aligned).
While other theorists have taken this on, let’s jump to Sabrina Strings’ 2019 book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia where she unpacks how fatphobia and thin supremacy originated with the dual purposes of disciplining white women into adherence to bodily ideals and structurally punishing Black women for not fulfilling them. While Sontag’s original connection between bodies and fascism manifested through fit and strong bodies, Strings brings in the idea of the thin body as a method of control, not necessarily just by a regime but via religion, the medical establishment, and culture more broadly.
Now, these theories have merged in the past few months, and we now have an idea circulating online that when fascism takes over, women get thinner as a result. And further: the current approach to fascism in the USA is what is causing the thinness epidemic in our culture. This first came to my attention through a follower’s DM at the beginning of last year where she was asking if I could test the theory, which she had seen on TikTok. (I would love to screenshot it here but I can’t search ‘skinny’ or ‘thin’ in my DMs without Meta suggesting ‘help is available’.) Hannah Einbinder summarises the theory and online conversation in an interview with Cosmopolitan, where she states that her fashion hot take is there is a direct correlation between the rise of fascism and the thinness of women’s bodies.
More than just Einbinder’s statement, if you search “skinniness and facism” on Substack or TikTok, you will be fronted with dozens of creators discussing the same theory.
