She had a brash, snarky style that worked perfectly online and was widely imitated. If conflict was the currency of Web 2.0, West was an expert day trader. Her takedowns were vicious, and viral. Sex and the City 2, she wrote in one of her first breakout pieces, “takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human… and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car.” She tore into her Stranger colleague Dan Savage to accuse him of fat-shaming, in a blog post published on the Stranger. She tracked down and interviewed one of her own worst trolls. The internet was her element.

West’s fans tend to love her for what she is as much as what she writes. She became a role model for fat women who chose self-acceptance over self-hate. In 2015, she married the musician Ahamefule J Oluo, and presented their relationship as a “radical act” for body positivity. “[My partner],” she wrote, “is conventionally desirable and I am a ‘before’ picture in an ad for weight-loss tapeworm eggs. It is considered highly unlikely — borderline inconceivable — that he would choose to be with me in a culture where men are urged to perpetually ‘upgrade’ to the ‘hottest’ woman within reach.”

By 2018, West appeared to have everything she could desire. She was also, according to her new memoir Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane, devastatingly, dysfunctionally unhappy: “The shift happened imperceptibly, in the two years after Shrill the book came out. I stopped wanting to work. I wrote less and less. I never answered emails. I let professional relationships slip away. I fumbled opportunities. I alienated my colleagues. I stopped seeing my friends. I was afraid to go outside, because I had become a public figure, at least in Seattle… I ate obsessively, just to feel some sort of tangible, reliable pleasure. I was in perpetual physical pain. I stopped moving my body. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t sleep.”

Her marriage was no consolation. The fairytale vision she constructed in her writing and social media posts was, she writes, “an optical illusion, a conjurer’s trick, an inversion, a photo negative, a plaster cast for a life that didn’t exist.” She and Oluo only appeared to be contented because they were grimly suppressing any conflict: “we’d never figured out how to talk about anything hard. When things did crack open, he’d get angry and I’d grovel.”

The hardest thing of all? In 2012, in the early stages of their relationship, Oluo had made non-monogamy a condition of being with West. “He believed that monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership. I had to admit that perhaps I didn’t feel it as keenly, as a white person.” (Oluo is mixed race.) But West wasn’t OK with non-monogamy. When she’d written about the significance of being a “fat bride”, she had been sincere: “Monogamous heterosexual true love had always been withheld, so that’s what I chased. I wasn’t naive; I was furious.”

But she also didn’t feel able to object. For one thing, she was a committed progressive, and in the 2010s, “being cool about polyamory felt like a growing imperative in progressive circles.” For another, she was afraid she would lose Oluo. (It is relevant that Oluo raised the non-monogamy issue shortly after West’s father died, when she was at her most pliable.) So she struck a bargain, with him but mostly with herself: if Oluo were to have other relationships, she never wanted to hear about them. This willed ignorance sort-of worked – for a while.

Then in 2019, West got a message from a fan who had spotted Oluo in a bar in Seattle, kissing another woman. So much for discretion. But Lindy West is not Lily Allen — and Adult Braces is not the story of how she kicked Oluo out the house and won back her self-confidence. Instead, it’s the story of how West convinced herself that she was also in love with Roya, the woman with whom her husband was having his affair. “I figured he probably had great taste in women,” West rationalizes. Today, the three of them live together as a “throuple”.

West is insistent that embracing polyamory has cured her “codependency”, but her assertions sound hollow. Whatever erotic independence she is theoretically allowed, she doesn’t appear to have pursued it. She is far more convincing writing about her reasons for valuing monogamy than she is in the stilted, formal exchanges she quotes between her and Roya, who is younger and thinner and very much what the “culture” would see as an “upgrade” on West.

In fact, the whole book reads like a desperate, and desperately sad, cope. West is too intelligent to fully repress her insights. “Yes, it was spectacularly unlikely that I would — in a wholly uncomplicated, non-disordered way — connect with my husband’s girlfriend,” she writes. But she swats away the self-knowledge: “I don’t know, crazier coincidences have happened!” This surrendered pose is difficult to reconcile with the fighty, seemingly fearless writer of the 2000s and 2010s.

Whatever happened to Lindy West? And whatever happened to the kind of feminism she represented? These are questions that West appears to be asking herself, intermittently. “Sometimes I wonder if my last couple of years at The Stranger… were the very best of my life — if it would be worth it to go back to the smaller world of a Seattle alt weekly, a big fat fish in a pond I loved and understood, where everyone loved and understood me. I was broke and lonely, but I was myself; I was great at what I did, and I never second-guessed it.”

She’s right. She really was great at what she did. In 2009, West — then aged 27 — reviewed a branch of Hooters, the chain “breastaurant” where female servers wear tight shirts and short-shorts and are contractually required to flirt with the customers. The result was savagely funny and spikily political. “Hooters is like a misogyny theme park,” she wrote, “where… all the women are girls, all the girls who weren’t born ‘empowered’ have cut open their chests and stuck plastic bags of goo in there and sewn ’em up again in the name of making money and making men happy, and no one’s shaming you into treating them like humans with brain-parts.”

Then she added: “It’s like — a friend pointed out later — if someone opened a restaurant called N*****s, and the all-black waitstaff dressed like slaves and step ’n’ fetched you platters of watermelon.” She did not asterisk out the N-word, and it’s shocking to see; not only because the N-word has now become thoroughly taboo (a process that was already well underway by the late 2000s), but because West went on to become exactly the kind of writer who would prosecute linguistic taboos with vigor — a paragon of progressive right-think.

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But the internet that made West successful was a place of roiling social mores. Things went from acceptable to edgy to verboten with breakneck speed — and West was one of the most significant writers in shaping (or at least, narrating) that process. That didn’t mean she was doctrinaire, or at least not at first. Her 2012 Jezebel essay “How to make a rape joke” does not say that rape is off-limits as a topic of comedy. In fact, it lays out several examples of rape jokes that West thinks are funny and have more than shock value.

It’s also self-critical. Revisiting her SATC2 review, and the “rapes it to death with a stiletto” line, she writes: “I chose ‘rape” on purpose at the time — because it’s gendered and jarring and I wanted to convey the severity of my disgust, as a woman, with that fucking garbage movie. But if I wrote that review today, would I write it the same way? Nope… I, Lindy West, am sorry.” The subtleties of her position were missed by a significant male contingent, who duly decided that the best way to punish West for writing about rape was to send her a tsunami of rape threats, largely via Twitter.

Being harassed at that scale is scarring, and when West writes about the experience in Adult Braces, she sounds fragile and wounded: “It turns out that having thousands of people make fun of you and threaten to rape and murder you can make you feel unsafe in certain spaces for way longer than you expect.” There’s a change in her writing around this time. She doesn’t become less aggressive, but she does become more selective about who she will be aggressive towards, as though the lambasting she received has made her more fearful of being rejected by her own “side”. When the British journalist Suzanne Moore was at the center of a horrific Twitter pile-on six months later over a line in an essay that was deemed to be transphobic, West’s recent experience did not make her sympathetic. Instead, it seems to have hardened her attitude. “Trans women are women, and to say otherwise makes you sound like a batty old dinosaur,” she wrote in a snide post on Jezebel.

Having read her for a long time, it seems unlikely to me that West always believed “trans women are women”. Instead, it seems to be an opinion that solidified into conviction some time between 2012 and 2013 — when the social cost of being labeled a “terf” became inescapable. As West says in her piece, she is writing as someone “versed in the current social justice dialog”. If you want to put it another way, she is writing as someone who has learned to second-guess herself. She is less concerned about what is true or fair than she is about what is acceptable to her peers.

You can see this same evolution in the adaptation of Shrill for the screen. In the second episode of season one, first broadcast in 2019, West’s Hooters trip gets revived for her on-screen analog, the character Annie (played by Saturday Night Live’s Aidy Bryant), only the TV version is very different.

In the Stranger piece, West’s interactions with the server (who she nicknames “Professor Boobies”) were stilted and painful, and West is left feeling “fat and condescending”. In the TV version, though, Annie is a respectful tourist of the strippers’ workplace, diligently listening to sex workers in the way that, by 2019, all liberals had been instructed that they should. When Annie asks one (black) dancer whether she finds it undignified to do what a man tells her, the dancer replies: “Men do not tell me what to do. I’ve got a fat ass and big titties — I tell them what to do.”

Later in the episode, inspired by this pep talk, Annie will assert the value of her own “fat ass and big titties” to a disrespectful boyfriend.

There’s no room in here for a critique of plastic surgery. The “misogyny theme park” has been replaced with a female empowerment playground. And there is certainly no comparison here between girlie shows and black minstrelsy — never mind a provocative deployment of the N-word. By the late 2010s, the official progressive line was that sex work is work and waitressing in a breastaurant was no less dignified than serving in McDonalds. There was also a heavy taboo on drawing an analogy between racism and any other kind of oppression; indeed, to do so was considered to be in itself a form of racism. West’s own desire not to be racist was so strong that, as we’ve already seen, her husband used it to pressure her into non-monogamy by claiming that monogamy was tantamount to slavery.

To be entirely clear, I have no desire to return to a time when the N-word was dropped with impunity and rape jokes were background noise — though if I did, I could simply log into Elon Musk’s X. Nevertheless, when reading West’s old Stranger essay, it’s painful to see how much more fun it is than West’s output now. You’d have a considerably better time hitting up Hooters with the 2009 version of West and making jokes about boob jobs than you would obediently receiving homilies about self-esteem from a woman in a thong.

Her retreat to linguistic policing turned her into an exemplar of “conduct book feminism” (as the writer Victoria Smith calls it); and conduct book feminism, it turns out, was repellent to quite a lot of people. Earlier this month, New York Magazine published a report on “The Women Leaving the New Right”. The women’s reasons for leaving a movement they had once assiduously boosted were interesting, if predictable: turns out that when men say women should be subservient domestic chattel, some of them mean it. But more revealing than that, to me at least, were the factors that had drawn them to the New Right in the first place. The journalist Sam Adler-Bell profiles a woman referred to as Anna who rebelled against a conservative background to embrace liberal politics. However, when exposed to the “overweening, haughty moralism of Peak Woke” in the mid-2010s, she came to find the humorlessness of the Left “more alienating than the conservatism of her youth.”

You can trace precisely this creep of humorlessness in West’s career. But you can also see other things that might have persuaded a woman like Anna that the supposedly feminist Left did not have her best interests at heart.

West cleaved to all the beliefs a female writer was expected to have if she was to avoid ostracism from the progressive mainstream. She adhered to body positivity, even though she suffered terribly from being debilitatingly overweight. She learned that sex work is work and trans women are women — or at least, she learned better than to say she thought otherwise. And she learned that when your husband decides to move his mistress into your home, it’s better to convince yourself you’re also into her than risk losing him.

None of these things are advances for women’s rights. Instead, they are advances for male sexual entitlement which women like West have accepted under the aegis of feminism, because to fight against them would be to set yourself against the men of your own political tribe.

Throwing your lot in with ethnonationalists and opponents of female suffrage, as the women of the New Right did, is not a rational reaction. But nor can you say that staying primly within the bounds of accepted progressivism has worked out well for West. She still couldn’t keep pace. The New York Times review of her 2019 book of #MeToo essays, The Witches are Coming, chided her for being “heavily focused on white, cisgender men while overlooking the fact that white women can be just as invested in white supremacy”.

No wonder West is nostalgic for the late Noughties. Yes, it’s natural to be wistful for the era of your greatest potential — but it also makes sense that West would yearn for a time when she had both the freedom to make mistakes, and the confidence that she could survive them.

The genre of feminism that made West successful also made her, eventually, its prisoner. As she patrolled the bounds of acceptable discourse for others, she also shrank her own realm of the thinkable until it mapped exactly onto her husband’s whims. The feminism of the blogosphere was not a form of politics. It was a form of branding, a spritz of differentiation in an overcrowded market where the best way to get ahead was to clamber over somebody else. West, it’s true, was good at that. She left a trail of the canceled in her wake. But reading Adult Braces, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that all the success this won her has left her more alone than failure ever could.

Vogue’s online obituary for the late Brigitte Bardot is a case in point. The magazine long ago abandoned its mission of providing gorgeous inspirational eye-candy for young women who were never going to be able to afford the clothes, in favor of the dreariest woke-ism. So it’s no surprise that the Vogue cultural critic and body-positivity icon Emma Specter has written about Bardot’s politics instead of her style. 

Bardot was a French actress, singer, sexpot, and style icon, whom Vogue could have celebrated for many things — her smoky eye, her blond beehive, her embodiment of French-girl chic, which combined bombshell cleavage with boyish, gamine stripes. I’ve never particularly liked Bardot — she had the cruel face of a small animal, a sclerotic trout-pout, and looked spray-tanned long before it was a thing — but you could learn a lot about scarves from her. The orange skirt, metallic jacket, and black beret she wore in the video for the song “Bonnie and Clyde,” with Serge Gainsbourg, was both playful and timeless, and would look good on the streets of any city today. If you wanted to know what to pair with pumps, or how to rock an off-shoulder corset top, or the scornful angle at which to hold a cigarette, Bardot was your girl. 

Specter, a writer for a major fashion magazine, doesn’t mention any of this. “Mourning Brigitte Bardot Doesn’t Mean Absolving Her,” the headline on her obit piece reads. Instead, Specter preaches: “It’s our collective responsibility not to let [Bardot’s] legendary beauty and talent obscure the ugliness of her Islamophobia, sexism, and far-right apologia.”  She calls the actress the “embodiment of prototypically ‘perfect’ white womanhood,” and asks readers to consider that her fame “relied upon systemic marginalization and outright racism.” We expect such claptrap from Jezebel, but from Vogue? 

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The magazine was ratioed online for the piece — meaning it garnered many more negative comments than likes or reposts — as well as for the identity of its author. Specter, who has been profiled on a Substack called “Big Undies,” is morbidly obese, and in 2024, she published a memoir about her eating disorder, titled More, Please: On Food, Fat, Binging, Longing and the Lust for Enough. She recommends dressing flamboyantly and unabashedly “for the body you have” and has a certain in-your-face approach to it: think sheer red-lace dress over giant red undies, or playful, color-block outfits that seem to emphasize what fashion magazines used to call “problem areas.” 

The urge to criticize her for tearing down Bardot is ignoble, but obvious. 

I worked for Vogue’s publisher, Condé Nast, decades ago, in the era when you had to be thin to even work at Vogue, let alone be photographed for its pages, and I found its militant policing of the beauty standard as noxious as everyone else did. Little did I know I’d want it back, but I do, though not because I agree with Specter’s online critics. What’s annoying about Specter on Bardot, is not the author’s weight, but her joylessness. She’s a humorless writer, offering only the most predictable of insights, such as that Bardot was a Right-winger and favored restricting immigration. 

In another controversy, in 2024, Specter wrote a piece criticizing the author Sally Rooney for not featuring enough (any) fat girls as romantic leads in her novels — a woeful misunderstanding, for a cultural critic, of Rooney’s brilliant mixture of idealized romance and the millennial hyperreal. Fat girls don’t star in Rooney’s novels — but judging by the books’ mega popularity, they read them, and love them, precisely for their preternaturally beautiful, carved-hollow lead characters, and the handsome men and kinky sex they enjoy. Shouldn’t this tell us something? 

Specter as a critic is a contrast to Specter the persona. In photographs, the writer has a sweet face, a winning smile, and a good sense of the color, cut, and flow of clothing — she’s stylish. When she’s putting her large body out there and looking happy, as she often does, she provides legitimate inspiration to any woman who struggles with her weight but still wants pretty clothing and to enjoy her day. Her choices, like a black dress with loopy boob-piping, or a frothy minidress over bike shorts are often whimsical and charming, and even the ones that seem aggressively-in-your-face offer a frisson of power. You don’t like it? Deal with it. The playful, punk-rock elements of her bodily nonconformity are good in themselves. They don’t rewrite the beauty standard, but they’re an escape valve from some of its more crushing demands. If she were my friend, I’d admire her. 

These elements of Specter’s personality are far more interesting, inspirational, and even subversive than her politics. A more honest body positivity might admit that beauty exists, and we all like to look at it, and that asking people to think otherwise is dumb. At the same time, to be beautiful is a chance of fate, and not a moral good. It’s completely possible for Brigitte Bardot to have been an icon of beauty and style, and also a sour little troll. And it’s enjoyable and appropriate for a fashion magazine to celebrate the one without reference to the other.

Vogue, even at its best, was cruel and status-conscious, but it was also once liberating, wildly creative, and a land of dreams, where death-by-perfume-card was a possibility, but at least you’d die in nice clothes. Its embrace of the woke orthodoxy has constrained the escapism without much diminishing the cruelty. And in some ways, the new demand — that we be fat and love ourselves for it — is crueler than the old. 

Emma Specter isn’t a Vogue writer because she’s beautiful; she’s there as a political token for the magazine to display its conformity to the current body-positivity status quo. And the rage against her online isn’t — or shouldn’t be — because she’s fat, but because she’s peddling a kind of untruth about the value of beauty. To stop pretending would be to free her to be appreciated for her good qualities, which are real, and it would allow us to appropriately censure her detractors, too. It would let Vogue return to fantasy-land, where it belongs. 

Those iconic names thrust me back to 2003 or thereabouts, where — fag in hand on the sofa, bootcut trousers flapping round my ankles — along with much of the country I would find myself raptly watching two posh birds on telly, nominally talking about fashion. Each had a resting bitch face, stripy hair, and anhedonic drawl. In my memory, one of them is jabbing the other’s arm fat aggressively and saying her bracelet makes her look like a Roman Centurion going into battle. It really is true that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.

The news stories this week — in the vaguest sense of “news” — were about the respective 20-something daughters of former What Not To Wear presenters Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine. Lyla (Trinny’s daughter) and Esme (Susannah’s) are apparently good pals, jointly occupying Tatler’s latest cover and giving an interview together. 

Displaying the slavish respect for social etiquette we have come to expect from members of her generation, Lyla said of the pair’s more famous mothers: “I think they would be cancelled if the show was made now. You can’t really speak to people like that anymore and say things like, ‘You’re so ugly.’” She’s probably right, though. It certainly was a different time. Back then, we even called them Trinny and Tranny and nobody lost their jobs.

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Checking in with the internet to remind myself of the details, I found myself gasping with laughter at the two presenters’ brutal summations, coming thick and fast as they comment on the secret filming of some poor schmuck before that week’s redemptive fashion makeover. Take Trinny to a sartorially challenged Church of England vicar: “Just because you wear a dog collar during the day doesn’t give you an excuse to look like a dog’s dinner at night.” Later on, Susannah tells the same woman that she looks like “Robin Cousins about to go onto the ice rink in those trousers”. 

In another episode, Trinny says of an admin manager attempting to use quirky prints to distract from her large bosom: “To have a skyscraper on your left tit and a bridge on your right does nothing to detract from the size of your breasts.” But then again, they are just as critical about themselves. Susannah frequently unveils her wobbly tummy in order to poke and berate it for the benefit of viewers. The skeletal Trinny gamely does her bit too, persisting in the fiction that she is a “saddlebagger” with “thick calves” and “stumpy legs”.

As each presenter receives soul-crushing feedback from the other with serene equanimity, one wondered how they are still standing, let alone positively rocking a floaty skirt and knee-high boot. In one clip I watched, Susannah appraises a dress of Trinny’s thus: “Oh my god, I can’t bear to see it… look at your bottom… your bottom is just dribbling down the back of your legs, so we really are seeing the shortness of those little stumps.” Later on, Trinny tries to get her revenge, leaping on her co-presenter’s crop top: “You turn round and you see the tummy and you think urgh, that’s actually disgusting.”

The canonical story about What Not to Wear — emerging towards the end of its run and barely challenged since — was that the programme was viciously cruel and intensely classist, teaching a generation of young women to hate themselves. The sociologist Angela McRobbie has even written about its “post-feminist symbolic violence” towards working-class women, in the form of “public humiliation of people for their failure to adhere to middle-class standards in speech or appearance”. 

She lists a number of the presenters’ most judgemental moments, describing them as “reminiscent of Fifties boarding school stories where the nasty snobbish girls ridicule the poor scholarship girl for her appearance, manners, upbringing, accent and shabbily dressed parents”.  These include: “‘what a dreary voice’, ‘look at how she walks’, ‘she shouldn’t put ketchup on her chips’, ‘she looks like a mousy librarian’… ‘your hair looks like an overgrown poodle’, ‘your teeth are yellow, have you been eating grass?’ and ‘Oh My God… she looks like a German lesbian’”. Put like that, it does seem McRobbie might have a point. 

And yet, viewed with the luxury of hindsight, more redeeming features of the programme emerge — especially when we think about what has come since. For one thing, it isn’t true that Trinny and Susannah were only savagely rude about working-class women. Middle-class and upper-class women would get the hose too; see the aforementioned vicar. The transgressively unrestrained jibes were equally distributed, it seemed to me.

Meanwhile the crudest caricatures, as the programme-makers plainly realised, were Trinny and Susannah themselves. Even McRobbie was forced to acknowledge the “degree of self-conscious irony” with which the pair lounged around, faces guarded and contemptuous, spitting out their damning verdicts in cut-glass tones with an air of pernickety feudal lords, assessing local girls with an eye to droit du seigneur. We were supposed to laugh at them rather than with them, and they knew it, hamming up the cold fish poshness to often hilarious effect.

But more than this: the conceit of the show was not that its hosts were perfect while other mere mortals were flawed. It was understood that every woman had “problem areas”, Trinny and Susannah included. Their big idea was that you didn’t need to change yourself by diet or exercise; all you needed was a bit of tailoring or strategically placed ruching to make the most of what nature gave you. Women are all in this together, was the underlying subtext, and every imperfection can be disguised with artful tricks. If you have big hips, relax; get a jacket that covers them and not a short one that cuts straight across. If you have massive knockers, lucky you; just step away from the polo necks and get something with a scooped front instead.

At base, Trinny and Susannah were exhorting women to face their fears about bodily imperfection and decrepitude, in the manner of psychoanalysts forcing a patient in denial to name out loud what scares her and so relieve it of its power. In later seasons, this tendency reached its peak with the concept of the 360° mirror. Before its pitiless gaze, some mortified woman would be unceremoniously deposited in bra and knickers, taking the hit for all of us as the hosts commented, poked, and prodded, before inevitably suggesting a trouser with a side zip.

I have no doubt that the women concerned absolutely hated it, but I don’t buy the wider complaint that the wrong message about size and shape was thereby sent to viewers. On the contrary — I think that most of us looked on with sympathetic fellow feeling, and came away with some relief and even hope. Instead of private, shame-filled self-chastisement about a particular problem area, perhaps we could just accept that everybody has one or two of the blasted things, then go shopping to celebrate.

Since then, officially sanctioned attitudes to female physiques have been revolutionised, with body positivity and self-acceptance the new bywords in places such as the BBC. For at least a decade, our progressive overlords have been furiously pretending that beauty standards for women are just radically contingent cultural norms; that if we all act like anything goes, then soon enough, it will. 

Yet strangely, this doesn’t seem to have made women any more content. Cosmetic surgery is a growing trend even in the young, and there has been a recent large increase in the numbers of hospital admissions for eating disorders. We have invented a whole new set of fashionable ways for women and girls to punish themselves in the quest to meet, or escape, standards of physical perfection: chopping old bits off as well as inserting new ones, chemically removing appetites, fasting for days, or doing CrossFit ‘til you’re sick.  

At the same time, evolving social mores have deprived us of the vocabulary to describe what it is we are running towards, or from: the basic knowledge that some faces and bodies are just more symmetrical, well-proportioned, and generally pleasing than others. Perversely, in well-intentioned attempts to deny this point, all we have managed to do is lose opportunities to cut its relative importance in life down to size.

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After the demise of What Not to Wear, the televisual theatre of cruelty didn’t disappear, it just changed tack. Instead of watching a woman’s appearance being bitchily appraised for the purposes of cathartic female team-building, we started watching more fundamental aspects of people’s characters being demolished. Delusional would-be pop stars with no talent would be humiliated to tears by a pompous Simon Cowell; desperate and chaotic restaurant owners were screamed at by a psychopathic Gordon Ramsay. Instead of the jolly, bawdy identification of relatively trivial problems, fixable by a side zip or a bit of clever fabric-gathering, we got vulnerable people’s deep-seated character flaws and weaknesses, mercilessly exposed. But that’s progress for you.

Knowing their time was up, Trinny went off and founded a make-up empire — apparently succumbing to the lure of the plastic surgeon in the end, and thereby negating the central message of her old programme in the process. Susannah, meanwhile, has become a fabulous all-natural dowager-type on Instagram, grumpily hawking supplements on the balcony of her Greek villa and delivering vaguely depressive rants from the bath about the poor quality of M&S pyjamas. Her followers plainly adore her. What with Jilly Cooper’s Rivals now in vogue, and outrageous toffs apparently in the ascendancy once again, she should be resurrected as a national treasure forthwith.

But still, to me her golden age will always be alongside Trinny in the early Noughties, forming a comic televisual duo to rival the great Fanny and Johnnie Craddock in their campy hauteur. Search it out now: the perfect refuge from the boredom and oppression of today’s What Not to Say.

Was a more humane approach possible? It was horrific to treat fatness as something shameful, I wrote, but also wrong to pretend that being fat doesn’t lead to serious health complications: “As an archetype of beauty, Holliday is no more and no less dangerous than a size-0 waif.” Somehow, a line had to be tracked between compassion and truth.

Two years later, I got an email in response to this article. My correspondent was young, female, fat (by her own account) and very angry. “I am wondering if your feelings about fat people have changed since writing it?” she demanded. “Do you perhaps have any fat people in your life? Though I am sure if you do, not by choice since you are so openly disgusted by the sight of us.”

She signed off with the words: “And to boot, honey… you’re no spring chicken. Take a look in the mirror before you spout off how gross fat women are.”

And so, I revisited the column (after spending a few minutes scowling at my own face and wondering, again, if it was time for Botox). Had I written that I was “openly disgusted” by fat people? No: I had written that I personally struggled with self-disgust when I was overweight, and had sometimes pursued thinness in ways I called “dangerous”. I was being honest. But, whatever women say or do, our physical appearance is used to dismiss us — by women as well as men, as my correspondent so graciously demonstrated at the end of her message.

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Returning to the email, I noticed that she started it by talking about “fat people” and ended it talking about “fat women”. More proof, not that it’s needed, that when discussing fatness, it’s always women who are really at stake — picked over, found inadequate, found excessive. Fat, as Susie Orbach wrote 40 years before that Cosmo cover, is a feminist issue. Men are attacked over their appearance, but they always get to be more than their bodies. A man who looks shabby or out of shape is an object of comedy, or even affection. “Dad bods” are lovably, huggably imperfect.

A fat woman, on the other hand, isn’t just unattractive. She’s a moral disgrace. Orbach wrote that, “the explanations offered for fatness point a finger at the failure of women themselves to control their weight, control their appetites and control their impulses.” The female equivalent of the “dad bod” is the “wine mom body”, and “wine moms” aren’t just overweight: they’re a symbol of dissipation and the neglect of proper feminine duty.

But, unlike the current generation of body positive feminists, Orbach still sees fatness itself as an undesirable state. It’s not a personal failing, but it is — in her view — a result of emotionally starved women seeking comfort through food, to the jeopardy of their wellbeing. Today, any attempt to pathologise weight is beyond the pale.

Novelist and activist Sarai Walker defines the movement in two statements, one to be embraced and one to be emphatically rejected. The first is “fat is beautiful”: fat bodies should be loved, appreciated, celebrated, just like all bodies. The unsayable second one is “fat is unhealthy”: fat people simply don’t need to hear this, says Walker. “The fat body is always on public display, open to critique and comment. Therefore, a fat body is routinely subjected to lectures, judgments, and insults — from family, friends, or complete strangers.”

Whatever you think you need to say about fatness, fat people have already heard it. In many cases, they’ve heard it repeatedly from medical professionals. Stories abound of clinicians ignoring serious symptoms and dispatching fat patients with some condescending advice to lose weight, and the bias seems particularly acute when it comes to women. In a world that treats fat women with routine contempt, body positivity is an appealing proposition, and has only grown more so since the Holliday Cosmo cover.

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Women have always been 'hysterical'

By Helen Carr

Some activists go further than saying health shouldn’t be talked about. They even deny that fat is a health issue at all, and so fall in line with a general progressive trend to treat politically inconvenient truths as grotesque lies. Before she appeared on their cover, Cosmo ran a story with the tagline, “Don’t question Tess Holliday’s health.” For this year’s January issue, the magazine ran a series of covers featuring various women, some of them fat, under the slogan “This is healthy!” In an article at Scientific American titled “Fat is Not the Problem — Fat Stigma Is,” authors Linda Bacon and Amy Severson concede that many diseases are more common in heavier people. “However, that doesn’t mean that weight itself causes disease,” they protest. “Blaming fatness for heart disease is similar to blaming yellow teeth for lung cancer, rather than considering that smoking might play a role in both.”

This is sophistry. When it comes to certain conditions, it’s undeniable that size makes a difference. Type 2 diabetes, for example, is associated with the amount of internal fat around the pancreas: even sufferers who fall within what’s considered a healthy body mass index can reverse their diabetes by losing weight. Yes, it’s possible to be fat and healthy, but the more you weigh, the worse your odds are. Pretending facts aren’t facts harms the very people it’s supposed to help.

But in modern progressivism, feeling good can mean more than doing good. Material improvement languishes a long way after psychological reassurance in the list of political priorities. The woman who emailed me in distress and outrage could not allow that I have my own complicated relationship with my body: by failing to always “feel beautiful,” I’d failed her. She belongs to a cohort that holds no distinction between the personal and political. What I’d written as analysis read to her as an attack.

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The empty promise of pop psychology

By Sarah Ditum

Body positivity sells itself as a feminist response to the overbearing demands that beauty standards make on women — a rebellion against the male gaze. But it can become just another set of demands to be carried. This atmosphere of judgement is even more acute for those at the heart of the body positivity movement. What’s pitched as a sisterhood of self-love can be as spiteful as any other community based on looks: when body positivity advocates lose weight (often for health reasons), they may be shunned and rejected by the people who once celebrated them. After the singer Adele went from plus-size to slim, Buzzfeed called it “Bad news for anyone who feels comforted by the sight of a celebrity larger than a size 8”.

Is there an ethical difference, really, between pressuring women to get thin and pressuring women to stay fat? In both, the female body is treated as a public object and not a person. So, I’m sceptical about the more expansive claims of body positivity, such as those made by Sofie Hagen, author of Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World That Wants to Shrink You. For Hagen, fatness is a challenge to both patriarchy and capitalism, which creams off profits from diet culture. But fat sells too. There’s money in insecurity at any size. That’s why clothing brands like Snag match their plus-size tights range with self-love branding. It’s why Cosmopolitan puts fat models on the cover. It’s why Victoria’s Secret has hired Paloma Elsesser as an ambassador. And it’s why Hagen’s book found a publisher.

After all, “you are beautiful” is still the key tenet — and a movement that makes beauty into a guiding principle was never going to be that hard for patriarchy to reconcile with. When Sports Illustrated chose rapper Megan Thee Stallion as one of its swimsuit issue stars, she celebrated in the language of body positivity. “Shooting the cover made me feel really empowered and happy,” she told CNN. “It made me feel good to know that women who have bodies like me can be celebrated. Not just the standard types that we have seen before.” True, she is not “the standard type” if that means skinny (the technical term for her I believe is “thicc”), but she absolutely is hot, and a hot woman in Sports Illustrated is hardly a radical proposition.

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What's wrong with lingerie?

By Kat Rosenfield

Tess Holliday, too, is unmistakably gorgeous — on social media, you’ll find pictures of her tagged #effyourbeautystandards, where she wears flirty lingerie and perfect makeup. Who, exactly, is she defying here? Because men do not seem to mind, and are happy to applaud the leagues of body positivity influencers, like Jonathan Ross’s daughter Honey, who show their self-love by showing their skin. Looking at tits while being praised as a good male ally? Bring it on.

Body positivity — the kind practised by cover girls and Instagrammers — isn’t anti-feminist, exactly. At least, it’s no worse than the kind of objectification that’s always gone on in the media. But it’s what I think of as feminism neutral: after the sloganeering, women as a class are no nearer to liberation than they were before. We are all still pitted against each other in the great hotness contest, measured by others and ourselves against the fuckability standard. Body positivity’s achievement is to expand the definition of attractiveness, not to remove attractiveness as the marker of value. Take away the hopeful obfuscation about health, take away the verbiage of resistance, and what’s left? Women like my emailer, desperate to be the one who counts as beautiful.