Celebrity skinniness is a gruesome arms race

The first time I met Victoria Beckham I heard the breath whistle through my teeth when I saw how skinny she was. It was the winter of 2004 and I’d flown out to Madrid to meet her because a book publisher thought I could help her write a book. I was then working as a fashion journalist, so I was very accustomed to being around women who teetered on the fine edge between “fashionably thin” and “perilously malnourished”. And I was good at spotting the difference because, a decade earlier, I’d spent several years in hospital for anorexia. So I knew slender from scrawny.

I’d assumed that Beckham would fall on the former side of that equation, just because she was so in the public eye, and who could hide a problem like that, in that context? But as she walked into the room, her skinny jeans flapping around her thighs, her phalanx of PRs acting as if it was totally normal to be around a grown woman who looked like she weighed less than a pre-teen, I realised I’d assumed rightly and wrongly: no, you can’t hide a problem like this. But in the celebrity world you don’t need to, because you get rewarded for it.

“I suppose I wanted to control my weight and I was controlling it in an incredibly unhealthy way. When you have an eating disorder, you become incredibly good at lying. I was never honest about it with my parents. I never talked about it publicly. It really affects you when you’re constantly being told you’re not good enough, and I suppose that’s been with me my whole life,” Beckham says in episode two of her new Netflix documentary. The only surprise about this admission is that she makes it, because it was always obvious, if you looked, that she had an eating disorder, suddenly morphing from slim Posh Spice to skeletal Wag. And everyone was always looking at her. Could we not see it?

It feels absurd in retrospect, but even I wasn’t always clear about what was going on during the year we spent working on her book. And yet everything about her was textbook: being told as a child that she was too fat by her dance teachers; life suddenly feeling out of control; her rigid exercise schedule; her even more rigid eating patterns — never oil on her salads, just balsamic vinegar. Yes, I knew all those tunes, and so did every girl and woman I’d met in hospital. And yet all the anorexics I knew — me included — wore baggy clothes and hid from the world. Beckham wore hotpants and posed for photographers.

• Anorexia nearly killed me — by Hadley Freeman

She says in the documentary that in the immediate aftermath of the Spice Girls — which is when I knew her — she was anxious to stay “in the conversation”, by which she means famous (“I remember thinking, is anyone going to want to put me on a plane and do a photoshoot again?”). Being skinnier than everyone else ensured that she got all the photoshoots she wanted and was eventually embraced by the fashion world. When she — very sweetly — took me as her date to the Met Ball in New York in 2006, I wore a long, shapeless party dress, and she wore a strappy and corseted gown, which got her on all the front pages the next day. Maybe she was just playing the celebrity game, I thought. I was too young and dumb to understand that we were both, like all women with an eating disorder, trying to be good. It’s just that my version was to disappear and hers was to be centre stage. And we both achieved our goals.

The so-called body positivity movement insists that talking about people’s weight is cruel. But we are now in a situation where a whole vocabulary has been invented to silence those who dare to say a female celebrity — Ariana Grande, say, or Miley Cyrus — suddenly seems to have lost half her body weight. “You’re skinny-shaming!” they say to anyone who vocalises the obvious, however sympathetically. “Concern trolling” is another term, as if only bullies can see how hollow-eyed a woman has become. How is any of this different from enabling?

“She’s always had a small appetite,” a Beckham PR breezily said to me when I ventured that she looked very different from the Posh Spice I remembered. We’ve gone from openly sneering at people’s weight — Chris Evans weighing Beckham on national TV in 1999 to see if she’d lost the baby weight, say — to pretending, out of good manners, that it’s normal for an adult to subsist on edamame and grilled fish so as to maintain a body weight of seven stone. Both of these extremes are unhealthy, for all of us, because weight isn’t really about appearance; it’s about health, physical and mental. And with Ozempic now in play, when it comes to celebrity skinniness, we are in a gruesome arms race.

The documentary doesn’t ask Beckham if she still suffers from an eating disorder, presumably because such a downer of a question would go against the triumph-over-adversity, you-go-girl vibe. A similarly awkward question would be: why would any celebrity recover from anorexia, given how high the rewards now are for extreme thinness? Whole careers can be forged from it. “Do you wanna Wispa?” David Beckham asks in one scene. “I haven’t touched chocolate since the Nineties. I’m not gonna start now,” Victoria replies. Is this comment for him (does he not know anything about his wife?) or the audience, so we can marvel at her enduring self-denial?

She stayed in the conversation, just as she wanted. But what a sad conversation.