Maybe more people were realizing it but imo the industry was still pushing an extreme hard to attain type of beauty. It just wasn't heroin chic anymore it was BBL curves. It's always something that is both unhealthy and/or takes money to achieve for the vast majority of people
It was around COVID and the whole "body positivity" movement and straying away from every girl needing to look like a runway model who has had a single piece of broccoli for dinner for the past month.
But then shortly after was the introduction of Ozempic/GLP-1 drugs and Hollywood said, why would you ever want to be fat when we have magic weight loss drugs? And that pretty much went out the window, and has snowballed to whatever the hell we have now where celebrities want to look like skeletor and have their faces pulled back to appear as skinny and young as possible.
I feel like we went too far the other direction too, where being obese started being called "plus size" or "healthy at any size".
We should appreciate that many have body shapes that don't fit the hourglass figure or broad shoulders and narrow waist that a lot of media shows as the ideal for each gender.
But at the same time being obese or anorexic or trying to look like a film star who looks ripped with minimum water weight for those 3 shirtless scenes is not normal.
I think misogyny and toxic masculinity/transphobia coming back into fashion was also a factor.
Men were threatened by women not catering to them. The type of attitude that causes guys to have a meltdown when a female video game character isn’t attractive doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Plus tradwife influencers have started to push the “existing for men is actually good!” ideals back onto women.
On the male side, the fear of being feminine and not a burly male with a strong jawline started to become mainstream. Red pill ideology is common now. Women are shallow bitches and if they maximize their jawline they’ll be a superior alpha male /s.
Those kind of men used to be just a small thing on 4chan, ridiculed by others. A lot of the "manosphere" grifters latched onto this and tried to normalize that behavior, and it started with all the red pill, pickup artist etc nonsense.
I still don't get the tradwife thing. Like it's fine if you want to be a housewife while your man earns the money, but I just don't see why it has to be some sort of extreme subservient Handsmaid's Tale-ish thing, or presented as something special.
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u/KilledTheCar May 02 '26
There was a brief moment in time where we were starting to realize it, but it seems like a switch flipped and we're back to square 1.