TikTok has recently reminded us how deeply embedded body shaming is in British culture, not least when it comes to popular Noughties reality TV shows.
Titles like 10 Years Younger, Dating In The Dark and Fat Families have re-entered conversation many years after they first aired, and during a different time when it comes to how we talk about our bodies.
US TikTokker Julian Hagin has posted a series of clips from these shows, highlighting the direct, hurtful way that people’s bodies and looks were attacked – for the sake of entertainment. ‘This should be criminal,’ Julian says as he watches. The show’s description of one contestant Wendy, is that she ‘spends her life outdoors and has the looks to prove it.’
We see a male Dating in the Dark contestant openly admit to going for looks over personality in a romantic match, as well as clips of Steve Miller – former presenter of Fat Families, a show that depicts him moving in with obese families and shaming them about losing weight – on This Morning. The presenters look on uncomfortably as he refers to larger-size bodies hiding your ‘true beauty features’.
‘When a woman loses weight, she looks far more attractive,’ he adds, stressing that he will give no apology for these comments. Let’s not ignore the clear misogyny here – that it is female bodies that are subjected to the most scrutiny, expectation and pressure.
The TikTok series goes deep on the impact of 10 Years Younger, which sees contestants take to the streets of the UK, where strangers would guess how old they were. Seeing as this ritual was carried out at the beginning of their before/after transformation, we inevitably see many passersby guess that they are older than they actually are – and the subsequent hurt this causes the contestants. They are then subjected to various dieting, workouts and plastic surgery to make them look ‘better’, i.e 10 years younger.
Each episode sees a contestant completely stripped apart and shamed for the most basic (and normal) of bodily features. The show’s narrator cruelly describes her ‘facial hair that rivals her Grandma’s’, as well as ‘a belly that busted her trousers’.
One middle-aged woman is given extensive plastic surgery for what the show’s narrator describes as her ‘ancient, saggy face’. She also loses half a stone in weight, changes her clothes and apparently requires highlights for her ‘straggly’ hair in order to be viewed as beautiful.
Julian calls this assessment of women’s looks a ‘public roast’, and it was definitely viewed back then as a form of comedy – but in 2023 it feels more sinister, and complicated, than that.
Some comments on the show’s clips are sentimental in tone, demonstrating the power of nostalgia on our feelings around body image, even now. But others are looking more wholistically at how these shows might have affected their self-worth, and how differently we feel about these attitudes now.
One posted: ‘We grew up on these shows and didn’t bat an eyelash, watching it now I’m like rahhh’, while another tweeted: ‘Me: "It's a mystery why I've had body image issues since the year 2002" Channel 4:’.
The conversation about the horrendous treatment of women’s bodies during the Noughties, particularly when it comes to body image and beauty standards, has resurfaced recently on Twitter. Gen Z are appalled, while millennials are reflecting on the impact these internalised standards have had on them.
One tweeted: ‘early 2000s magazines taking pics of any female celeb over a size 2 at the beach and calling them a beached whale still lives in my head whenever i swim suit shop’.
These headlines, and the angles of Noughties reality TV shows like Fat Families and 10 Years Younger, were perhaps construed at one point as funny – but now we know that it makes light of a serious situation. It’s bullying and toxic. These contestants were exploited for the sake of likes, views and our entertainment, and only now can we see this more clearly.
That said, the situation is not as straightforward as us being passively subjected to these attitudes and soaking them up by osmosis. As Sirin Kale wrote in The Guardian about the toxicity of the Noughties for women: ‘There was an audience for cruelty, and we were it.’
One reason that these TV shows existed in the first place – not to mention the news stories decimating any bikini body that wasn’t a size zero – was because there was a public demand for them. People watched them. They were arguably a cultural institution in the Noughties, the show you watched when you got in from school or had on eye on when you ate dinner.
They joined the fat shaming movies Hollywood churned out to critical acclaim at the time – Bridget Jones’ Diary, where a woman who weighed over 9 stone was considered fat and Gwyneth Paltrow wore a fatsuit in Shallow Hal and played a woman that Jack Black was embarrassed to be seen with.
These contestants were exploited for the sake of likes, views and our entertainment, and only now can we see this more clearly.
What we then internalised was incredibly destructive. To be told that body hair is disgusting, that Botox is the solution to any hang ups, that wrinkles are to be avoided at all costs – all while your prefrontal cortex is still developing – means that you enter adulthood believing these things, at least subconsciously.
The conversation around these resurfaced clips shows that while our issues with beauty standards and body image expectations are by no means solved – the normalisation of both plastic surgery and weight loss drugs through celebrity culture and social media are just two symptoms of our ongoing problems – progress has, however, been made. However subtle.
It feels much more unthinkable, now, to parade a person’s physical form on TV and so directly criticise their looks – and this feels like a positive step forward.
However, we shouldn’t forget how intrinsically deep these fatphobic, misogynistic expectations go, and should continue to question and fight against them when they present themselves from both our past and in our present.