If Ultra-Skinny Heroin Chic Becomes Trendy Again, I'm Going to Go Live in a Bunker

Please, fashion, spare the children the unpleasantness of the 1990's

Since Keeping Up with the Kardashians premiered in 2007, Kim Kardashian’s body has predicted (or reflected) what other women – especially young women– want for their own bodies. For the last 25 years, that body has been thin but curvy, sort of soft and wrangled by shapewear. Something that some women pursued surgically, since that sort of figure isn't exactly something that comes naturally to, well, anybody.

But maybe I should have counted my blessings reading about BBL hotels and Instagram influencer-hawked waist trainers. Kim is skinny now, and because as Kim’s ass goes so go all of our asses, I’ve seen some chatter over the last months that 1990’s “heroin chic” aka "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels" is on its way back.

If that coincides with the time that I will be raising a daughter: Fuck it, I’m out.

I will not be passing “go.” I will not be collecting $200. I will abandon my hope to eventually own a home and instead refocus my efforts on locating a bunker where my family can live until girls are allowed to take up space with their bodies again.

The first round of heroin chic absolutely sucked ass. I would rather step on glass than go through it again, and I’d rather gargle tacks than watch my daughter go through it with the added accelerant of social media.

I graduated from high school in 2001, which means that most of my childhood formative years occurred in the 1990’s, when it was very trendy for women to be very thin. Celebrity magazines featured concern trolling covers about whether there was such thing as “too thin” and if, perhaps, our collective body image problem was due to these celebrities. That’s how the magazines were able to both perpetuate the normalization of Hollywood-thin bodies to vulnerable audiences and demonize thin women who “successfully” followed the trend at the same time. Like almost all mass media aimed at getting women to feel bad about themselves and buy things, it was insidious.

By the time I’d entered college, America collectively decided that butts were okay again. It was okay for a woman to have fat there and perhaps a bit on the back of her thighs, but no other part of her body could have fat on it, especially her stomach. It was the height of the low-rise jeans-exposed thongs years. My freshman year, there was a rumor that one of the sections in one of the girls’ dorms had to shut down all of the bathrooms during two hours in the early afternoon, because the toilets were getting clogged with all of the post-lunch vomit of the section’s many bulemics. The pro-ana internet was basically a Silk Road for girls suffering from eating disorders helping other girls suffering from eating disorders get more efficient at disordered eating. It was an absolute nightmare.

“Heroin chic” may have come and gone in the mid-1990’s, but it had a long tail, well into the mid-2000’s. To this day, I don’t know a single woman my age who made it through that time period without having a somewhat troubled relationship with their own body. And for what? In service of chasing the look that invisible capitalist forces need you to chase in order to sell the most stuff. It was a totally unnecessary type of suffering.

If my kid is inundated with wall-to-wall images of idealized mega-thinness, I do not know how I’m going to handle that as a mother. I want her to be a happy, active, and healthy child. I don’t want her to become anxious about whether or not she has a thigh gap or visible ribs. I don't want her trying to "diet" when she's still growing.

Most mothers of small children remember at least part of the 90’s-to-Y2K body image nightmare. I do not want that for my daughter. I can’t think of a single mom I know who has been waiting with bated breath for thin to be back in. I’ve already driven myself to the brink of crazy worrying about every other aspect of raising a good human in an entropic world. This is the last thing I need.

Anyway, if you know a good bunker realtor, please get in touch.

Image via Shutterstock