Don't SKINNY SHAME women like SJP - we can't help being SLIM! (2024)

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Just as women are attracted to men of particular body types, Anya knows she won’t be to every man’s taste. A single mum, she recently had what she describes as a horrible experience with a chef she met on a dating app.

‘On our second date he took me to a restaurant and being a chef he took over the ordering. When I tucked in he said he was relieved because he thought I was the type who wouldn’t eat anything and was probably anorexic. He was relieved, but I was furious.’

Being slim and coming of age in the late 1960s was a golden age for girls like me. But, despite being plenty slim enough by normal standards, there was always further to go. So I tried the fad diets of the day, from the grapefruit diet via the Atkins and Scarsdale diets, and at one particularly naive point started to drink noxious teas as purgatives. I had started working on Cosmopolitan magazine and my behaviour was pretty much the norm.

Every month we ran a column called Dieter’s Notebook. No one questioned that models should be anything other than skinny, and that pretty much went on in the same way for several decades.

Even when we promoted Susie Orbach’s Fat Is A Feminist issue in 1978, and dropped the diet features, we continued to believe that skinny, albeit with boobs, was best when it came to models. And even when we started to promote the fitness craze of the 1980s, and Jane Fonda-style workouts, thin was still the gold standard.

I am somewhat ashamed now that I subscribed to the skinny aesthetic, barely questioning it until the body positive movement really took shape in the early 2000s.

Yet although I believe the movement has gone too far, because it rarely recognises obesity as a major threat to health, it’s universally accepted now that women of different shapes and sizes are not only worthy of being seen and being celebrated, but beautiful as well.

What is unacceptable is that thin people are now victims of a skinny-shaming free for all. If we are thin then we must be bulimic, anorexic, body dysmorphic or mentally unhinged. When, in fact, it all comes naturally.

It even seems that skinny models are being discriminated against in some quarters. A young, successful model told me recently that she hardly gets any work in the UK any more because everyone wants different body types from the one she naturally has. So she goes to Paris, where skinny still rules.

One thing I didn’t expect was that the issue of being skinny would become more, rather than less, of an issue as I aged. At 72, while I can still fit into the same size jeans I wore at 22, my thinness means my wrinkles are way more noticeable than on my plumper-faced friends. My bottom has almost disappeared and I am thinking of trying M&S’s recently launched bum fillets.

We now know that being thinner as we age is not good for our bones, as it increases the risk of fractures. Even Anya was shocked to be turned away from giving blood because she weighed too little and it might cause too much stress on her heart.

And while I rather suspect SJP was more in thrall to her skinniness in her Sex And The City days than she lets on, like many lean beans, at 59, she is rethinking the joys of being super-thin.

To replace fat-shaming with skinny-shaming is not justice, nor deserved retribution. It’s a failure to recognise that, like being large, being naturally skinny is just a part of being human.

ParisJane Fonda