Recently Instagram led me to the account of a very thin social media influencer. I would not usually begin an article with a description of the subject’s body, but in this case it’s also her personal brand. She often appears in luxury apartments or hotels, modeling club wear while filming skits about how heterosexual men and women ought to relate to one another — pretty standard fare for an Instagram model in 2025.
The twist? She identifies as disadvantaged, a survivor of adolescent bullying over her slender frame who has become a champion of “body positivity” for the ultrathin. In one video, she lists her height and weight in the corner of the image as she films herself stretching in athleisure; in another, she works to “boost the confidence of girls with a slim body type” by celebrating her own “small waist,” sharp jaw and prominent collarbone.
As I scrolled, mesmerized, through her account, I watched her knit together two seemingly irreconcilable cultural forces. She performs a narrow beauty ideal for women and cloaks it in the language of inclusivity. Her feed is a clever combination of methods for capturing online attention: look like a model, talk like an activist, behave like a troll. And it represents a new balancing act for women in the public eye, and those who are watching them.
An influencer may now mold her body to a punishing standard while denying that any standard exists, or even that there is anything punishing about it. The woman herself appears to resolve all of these contradictions under the banner of self-love. It’s cognitive dissonance as a content strategy, and it’s everywhere.
I see it in Clara Dao, the influencer who amassed 2.9 million followers on TikTok by encouraging flat-chested women to embrace their look — then revealed a set of breast implants and started a new brand around her unwavering acceptance of her new body. I see it replicated across social media, where slender models post unfiltered, unposed, #relatable shots that reveal some absurdly minor imperfection, like a single stomach fold or a barely perceptible pooch.
I saw it on “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” last season, when a woman celebrated her upcoming vaginoplasty procedure by gathering her girlfriends to paint their ideal vulvas, a bizarre perversion of a feminist consciousness-raising exercise meant to banish shame. I even caught a glint of it during the “Wicked” press tour, when fans expressed concern over the apparent weight loss of the film’s stars, prompting one of them, Ariana Grande, to caution that talking about other people’s bodies is “dangerous to all involved.”