Gossip magazines keep us constantly abreast of what’s happening to the bodies of famous women, the better to keep the rest of us in line. The weight fluctuations of famous women are tracked like stocks because their bodies are, in their line of work, their personal stock, the physical embodiment of market value. When a celebrity loses weight she is often billed as “flaunting” her new body, which is, in fact, the only body she has ever had, but at a size more acceptable to the tabloids. When celebrity women have babies, their bodies are intensely monitored during and after—from baby bumps to post-baby bodies. After a celebrity has a baby, her size is assiduously tracked and documented until she once again resembles the extraordinarily thin woman we once knew.
Celebrity bodies provide the unachievable standard toward which we must nonetheless strive. They are thinspiration—thin inspiration—a constant reminder of the distance between our bodies and what our bodies could be with the proper discipline.
Celebrities understand the economy of thinness, and most of them are willing to participate in that economy, taking to social media, where they pose for selfies with their cheeks sucked in to make themselves appear even gaunter. The less space they take up, the more they matter.