Behind the Scrutiny of Ariana Grande’s Body Is a History That Predates Hollywood
The obsession with women's bodies has a documented racial origin.
She is considered one of the most talented voices since those of Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, and Mariah Carey, and her return to music was long-awaited. Yet Ariana Grande announced on August 3, 2026, that she was stepping back from the public eye. The statement from her team described what she called “endless, ongoing public scrutiny” following her recent appearances but offered no further explanation.
As if we needed one.
Ariana Grande is the latest victim of a violent pattern we know too well. Once a woman reaches a certain level of success and public attention, her body becomes the target of public comment, to the point of losing autonomy over the flesh she inhabits.
It all took place after the release of her latest video for the song “Petal,” which criticizes the violence of rejection inside Hollywood. However, instead of focusing on her message, her vocals, or the brilliance of the videography and costumes, people couldn’t stop staring and dissecting the evident and, yes, worrysome weightloss.
After years at the center of one of the most documented careers in contemporary pop, she chose to walk away from the visibility rather than keep absorbing the commentary, much of which was not genuine concern but a sort of collective license to tear her to shreds.
And she’s not the first woman in the industry to go through it.
Karen Carpenter, vocalist and drummer of The Carpenters, died on February 4, 1983, from cardiac arrest caused by anorexia. She was 32 years old, and her illness had been unfolding in public for years, visible in photographs and performances and interviews while the people watching did not see it for what it was, or chose not to. Since then, countless women have been ruthlessly scrutinized by the media, the industry, and the audiences while they were fighting their own personal demons in private.
The specific faces and decades shift, and now social media is a whole other monster. However, the conditions producing these stories trace to the same place.
When Ariana Grande Says “Scrutiny,” She Hits the Nail on the Head
Dr Vivienne Lewis, a clinical psychologist who has spent more than 20 years researching eating disorders, drew a distinction in The Conversation on the day Grande made her announcement. Scrutiny focuses on bodies. Concern focuses on people. Lewis explained that scrutiny begins with how someone looks, while genuine concern begins with how someone is doing. They read as similar from the outside. Alas, they function very differently.
Grande had not said her decision related to an eating disorder or to her weight, and Lewis was explicit that speculation about her health would be inappropriate. What Grande’s statement makes visible is how inescapable that scrutiny becomes, and how little the person at the center of it can do to redirect it or protect themselves from it. However, Lewis points to scientific evidence that shows that stigma surrounding eating disorders is a major barrier to people seeking help, with public speculation amplifying the shame and misconceptions that already make it harder for people to ask for help.
The clinical question of concern versus scrutiny is evidence that the commentary about a woman’s body has never really been about her health.
The Racist Roots Behind the Obsession With Thinness
Now that we’ve made clear none of the comments towards Grande’s body have anything to do with concern, let’s talk about the other force pulling the conversation: the obsession with thinness.
The first instinct is to think it’s a matter of trends: the Y2K comeback, the anti-woke narrative against body positivity. However, this would fall short as an argument.
Dr. Sabrina Strings, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, has spent years tracing exactly where the obsession with thinness came from. Her book, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, traces the modern ideal of thinness to the Atlantic slave trade and the ideology Europeans constructed to justify it, a lineage that has nothing to do with medicine or aesthetics.
During the Renaissance, as Strings explained in an interview with NPR’s Short Wave, fuller-figured women were the cultural ideal. The shift came with European colonialism. By the middle of the 18th century, she told NPR, French philosophers were arguing that Africans were “sensuous,” that they loved food, that they were “too fat,” and that Europeans, by contrast, exercised rational self-control. That self-control expressed itself in body size. This way, slenderness became proof of racial superiority.
The logic served as social control, and as time passed, it became more obsessive. Strings explained to NPR that after hundreds of years of proximity and racial mixing across the colonies, skin color alone was no longer sufficient to mark who was enslaved from who was free. Body size and eating habits became additional markers, used, as Strings told NPR, “to suggest these are people who do not deserve freedom.”
As journalist Briona Lamback reported for Push Black, the ideology filtered into European American culture as an article of faith: being as thin as possible demonstrated supremacy over Black people. The medical field absorbed and perpetuated these constructs rather than questioning them. As Strings has documented, the Body Mass Index, a statistical tool never designed to measure individual health, became one of the primary lenses through which medicine evaluates bodies, with effects that have been concentrated unevenly across racial groups. Research has shown, per NPR’s reporting on Strings’ work, that African American populations tend to be healthier at heavier weights than white populations, a reality the tool does not account for.
What began as explicit racial ideology permeated medicine, fashion, and entertainment so thoroughly that most people who enforce these standards today have no idea where they came from. Ideology survives by becoming the background assumption, and the explicit origins drop away.
But the demand remains.
Who Eating Disorders Actually Affect
The cultural story about eating disorders is so narrow, it costs lives. According to PBS NewsHour, almost 30 million Americans will have an eating disorder in their lifetime, and eating disorders are among the deadliest mental illnesses, causing over 10,000 deaths a year.
However, research cited by PBS shows that women of color carry lifetime rates of eating disorders at levels comparable to or exceeding those of white women. Yet Black women are 25 to 40 percent less likely to be diagnosed with an eating disorder than white women, according to psychiatrist Dr. Erikka Dzirasa, who spoke to PBS NewsHour.
“In the media, it’s always a thin white, middle-class, upper-class woman,” said Gloria Lucas, who runs Nalgona Positivity Pride, a support group for eating disorders in communities of color, in conversation with PBS. Lucas described the effect of that narrow image on people who do not fit it and are suffering anyway: they do not recognize themselves in the available language, do not seek help, and the illness advances.
“Eating disorders thrive in isolation,” Lucas told PBS.
The barriers for communities of color compound each other. Treatment is expensive, and insurance rarely covers it. All while culturally competent care is rare. Therefore, stigma around mental health in many communities makes seeking help feel like an unbearable exposure. The cultural belief that eating disorders belong to a specific demographic means that people who fall outside that image often do not receive a diagnosis when they need one most. And the research shows they need one: the illness is there, the treatment gap is the part that is not.
The Scrutiny Has Always Served a Purpose
Caleb Dunson, writing in The Politic, traces how American beauty standards have functioned as tools of racial and social control from the country’s founding. The Miss America Pageant stipulated that all contestants be “of good health and of the white race” until 1940. However, what many don’t recognize inside the timeline is that in the 1920s, as women began to exercise the right to vote, disordered eating exploded alongside a beauty standard which required women to be as slim as possible, according to Dunson’s analysis.
Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, as women pushed for political and economic rights, including the right to abortion care, the beauty standard shifted again to demand they appear young and physically fragile, a trope that satisfied one gaze only: the male one. In other words, the intensification of the scrutiny was directly proportional to the expansion of women’s power.
This is to say, social media has not invented this pattern. However, it has given it a delivery mechanism that reaches everyone at all times, allowing the scrutiny that used to arrive through tabloid covers and late-night commentary to find any woman (and girl) at any scale of fame, in any time zone, on any day.
Ariana Grande stepped back because she had that option, and because the alternative was to continue absorbing commentary that had nothing to do with her health. And, in the end, the scrutiny will continue whether she is visible or not; it will simply pivot its target. What we can do is be honest about what it has always been: a mechanism for keeping women small that predates every celebrity it has attached itself to and will outlast all of them if enough people keep treating it as a neutral observation rather than what it is.