“Is Ariana Grande’s body any of our business?” asked Monica Hesse in The Washington Post. Facing a deluge of commentary about her apparent weight loss, the 33-year-old pop star and actress recently announced that she’s stepping away from public life after her current tour concludes. Her “emaciated” appearance in a new music video for her song “Petal” escalated years of speculation that she has an eating disorder. The camera shows sunken cheeks, a protruding clavicle, arms that look like “sinew on bone,” and spindly legs. A former child actress and superstar, she has “defined beauty standards” for young women for years. But Grande has experienced trauma even beyond the pressure cooker of youthful stardom: A suicide bomber killed 22 fans at one of her concerts in 2017. Should we explain to kids and teens that “this is a body born of deprivation?” Do we tell them that “most women’s bodies will not naturally look like this unless something is very wrong?”
“The images of Grande really are alarming,” said Emma Camp in The Wall Street Journal, but “all this concern starts to feel like rubbernecking.” Grande’s early celebrity and her various “romantic entanglements” have made her a hate object for some online critics, and her skeletal frame enables them to portray her as a bad role model while enjoying “the thrill of watching someone self-immolate.” But “sharing another scary screenshot” of her bony body “won’t stop others from starving themselves”—and indeed, the public attention “might encourage those with eating disorders to keep going.”
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