"You Look So Thin": On the Violence of Compliments, the Politics of Appetite
When the Body Refuses to Be Quiet
There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from holding two realities at once.
Last night, I stood in Somers Gallery for the opening night of Becoming Through Pain, an exhibition I curated for Sensity Studio, featuring eight extraordinary women artists whose practices explore repair as a creative, political, and deeply bodily act. The show proposes that the wound is not the end of the story, there is the mending, the healing and the transformation that we go through. That women’s experiences of pain — historically dismissed, pathologised, rendered invisible — can be the very material through which something new is made. The exhibition insists that he body is a site where harm is registered, resisted, and reimagined.
I stood in that room, which hummed with the work of women who have made something from their suffering, and I greeted guests, answered questions, held the space. I was proud. I was moved. I was also, by the end of the night, quietly winded, not from exhaustion, but from something smaller and more persistent. A kind of friction I couldn’t immediately name.
At least three separate people told me I had lost a lot of weight. One said my face had shrunk.
They meant it kindly. I know that. And yet it bothered me…
There is a grammar embedded in weight loss praise that we rarely stop to examine. When someone says “you’ve lost so much weight” with warmth and approval in their voice, they are not simply making an observation. They are completing a sentence that began before you entered the room: you were too much, and now you are less, and less is better. The compliment only works if the premise holds — that the body before was a problem, and the body now is its solution.
I have been receiving this grammar my entire life. I grew up fat, bullied, shamed in the way that children are uniquely capable of, mercilessly and without context. My body was commented on before I had the language to respond, before I understood that the problem was never my body but the culture that had decided what a body was allowed to be. I have a family history of obesity and diabetes, which means my relationship to my own body has always been entangled with fear, with medicine, with the low hum of moral judgement that our society attaches to larger bodies. The message was consistent: your appetite is the enemy. Your hunger is your fault. Your body is a project, and you are failing it.
What those people at my opening did not know — what I had not announced, because why would I? — was that in the weeks leading up to that evening, I had been on a hormone treatment that had completely disrupted my appetite. For two weeks, I was simply not hungry. The sensation of wanting food, which for me has always been one of life’s most uncomplicated pleasures, had disappeared. I didn’t eat with joy. I barely ate at all. And my body, in response, had changed.
That is what they were complimenting. The absence of my hunger.
I want to be precise about the joy of eating because I think it matters: I am a person who genuinely loves to eat. Not performatively, not as consolation, but as one of the most sensory and social joys available to us. Food is memory and culture and pleasure and presence. To sit at a table with people I love and eat well is, for me, a form of fullness that goes beyond the physical. It is one of the ways I know I am alive and glad of it.
The feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote that “the body is not a thing but a situation”; a context through which we experience and move through the world. My appetite has always been part of my situation, part of how I am in the world. When it was chemically suppressed, something essential went quiet. And the cruelty was that the world looked at the result and said: this is better. This is the version of you we prefer.
There is a long tradition in feminist theory of treating women’s appetite as politically charged. Susan Bordo, in Unbearable Weight, traces the cultural obsession with female slenderness as a form of discipline — a way of making the female body manageable, contained, small. She argues that eating disorders are not aberrations but logical conclusions of a culture that has spent centuries telling women to take up less space. Thinness, in this reading, is not health. It is compliance. It is the body having learned its lesson.
I do not have an eating disorder. But I grew up in the same culture that produces them and yo yo dieted since an early age. And when my hormone treatment removed my desire to eat, the praise that followed felt like a confirmation of everything I had spent years trying to unlearn: that the body without appetite is the body doing it right.
Michel Foucault gave us the concept of biopower, the way in which modern societies exercise control not through brute force but through the regulation and surveillance of bodies. We are, he argued, the agents of our own normalisation. We internalise the gaze before anyone else applies it; we discipline ourselves so that the culture does not have to. The diet industry, the wellness complex, the casual commentary at a gallery opening — these are not separate phenomena. They are all expressions of the same apparatus, the same quiet insistence that the body is always a project under management. Weight loss comments, even affectionate ones, are an act of surveillance made social. They remind the recipient that their body has been observed, measured, and evaluated. They confirm that the body is not private. That it belongs, in some sense, to the room. Sonya Renee Taylor, in The Body Is Not an Apology, argues for radical self-love as a genuinely political position — not a self-help platitude, but a refusal of the systems that profit from our body shame. She is clear that this is harder for some bodies than others: that fatness, Blackness, disability, and queerness all attract particular forms of cultural punishment, and that learning to refuse those judgements is not a personal achievement but a collective, political act.
Standing in Becoming Through Pain, surrounded by work that insists on the political and creative power of women’s bodily experience, I felt the irony of my situation with unusual sharpness. The exhibition argues that women’s pain has historically been dismissed and rendered invisible, that the body is a site of both harm and resistance, that repair is not a return to something unbroken but a transformation — a becoming. And here I was, in the very space I had built to hold that argument, being reminded that my body is still legible to others primarily as a before-and-after.
The artists in the show through their practices of mending, marking, reconstructing, understand the wound as material. Not something to be hidden or overcome, but something to be worked with, made from, transformed. I have been thinking about what it would mean to apply that framework to the comments I received. Not to resolve them or forgive them, but to understand what they reveal: about the culture we are all swimming in, about the grammar we have inherited, about how much work there is still to do.
There is something almost unbearably appropriate about the fact that this happened at Becoming Through Pain specifically. As though the exhibition summoned the very experience it was designed to critique. As though the room itself had become a kind of proof.
I want to offer something practical here, not because I think the solution to body politics is a list of better phrases, but because language matters. Because the things we say to each other wether it is casually, kindly, without thinking, carry the full weight of the culture behind them.
When you tell someone they look like they’ve lost weight, you are not simply describing them. You are ranking them. You are telling them that you have a preference for this version of their body. You are implying that you were, on some level, keeping track. You are, however inadvertently, confirming the logic that the body is always subject to appraisal — and that thinner is always the right direction.
Ask yourself: why do you need to say it? What is the comment for? What would it mean to look at someone — a friend, a colleague, a person you admire — and say nothing about their body at all? To ask them about their work, their ideas, their life, maybe complementing what they are wearing the most without first appraising the container those things live in?
This is not about politeness. It is about what we choose to notice, and what our noticing tells both of us about the world we share. It is impossible to think about Becoming Through Pain without also thinking about the book that one of its artists, Dyana Gravina, published just a year ago. Embodied Histories: Medicalised Sexuality, Childbirth and Subversive Bodies (Wysewomen Publishing, 2025) traces the political and physiological connections between childbirth and sexuality through a transhistorical, somatic lens — from the Church's coalition with medicine, through Puritanism, to feminist and queer revolutions — reconciling two histories that have long been kept artificially apart. What Gravina's book makes legible is the mechanism behind so much of what this essay is trying to name: the way that the moralisation and repression of sexuality and the medicalisation of the female body are not parallel stories but a single, entwined history of disciplining what women do with their bodies, how they give birth, how they experience desire, and crucially, how they are permitted to take up space.
I am writing this because writing is one of the ways I heal; not to resolve. I am not interested in tidy resolutions, but interesting in transforming the sting into something I can think through, share, and make useful.
My appetite is returning slowly. I eat with pleasure again, and the return of that pleasure has felt like a homecoming. My body is not a before-and-after. It is a continuous, complicated, living situation — one that has survived bullying and shame and hormonal interference and an entire culture that would prefer it to be smaller and quieter and less.
The exhibition I curated is about becoming. Not about returning to something whole, but about making something new from the materials of damage and repair. I want to apply that to my own body: not a project, not a problem, not a subject for commentary. A site. A situation. A place from which I think and feel and eat and make and stand in galleries and hold space for the work of extraordinary women.
The body that refuses to be quiet is, I have come to understand, the whole point.
the word "violence" in the title is not hyperbole. the compliment that rewards shrinking is a command disguised as praise. it says: this version of you - the smaller one, the less one - is the version we approve of. keep going. and the body that receives this message learns that its approval is contingent on its disappearance. appetite becomes the enemy because appetite is evidence of wanting. and wanting takes up space the culture did not give you permission to occupy.
the politics of appetite is the politics of female existence compressed into a single act. who gets to be hungry. who gets to eat without apology. who gets to want without performing moderation. the compliment is the enforcement mechanism. it rewards the performance of not wanting and punishes the evidence of need.
A timely important and beautifully written piece.