this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
1256 points (97.3% liked)

Comic Strips

12550 readers
3824 users here now

Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.

The rules are simple:

Web of links

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I see it in my wife too. The answer might be obvious, but why were the 90's so rough on girls?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

If you could make it out of the 90s and early 2000s without an eating disorder as a girl god bless you. I was an early 2000s girl and it was an era of if you can’t see bones you are too fat. You spent most of your formative years learning how little you could eat and still make it through your day.

It has taken a lot for me to actually believe my boyfriend finds me attractive naked I always assumed he just said it to be nice.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not OP but the 90s were about rail thin models and constantly being pushed products to lose weight and be "perfect". Clothes for larger sizes were harder to find as stores just didn't carry them and online ordering was in its infancy. Body positivity wasn't as much of a thing, if it existed at all.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The crazy thing is that a ton of men found the heroin sheik anorexic model thing totally gross. It seemed like media/corpos and women were in a feedback loop of profit/ self loathing that had next to nothing to do with what most people found attractive. Male portrayals during that age were equally gross, but even that seemed targeted at women. The corpo/male feedback loop was (and still is, to an extent) around embodiment and display of either quiet boy aesthetic or over the top and stereotypical masculinity. Seems like things are getting better but I’m sure my kid and her generation will suffer new variants of the same bullshit—maybe even more covertly through supposedly “independent” YouTubers etc.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

heroin sheik

Yeah those Arab drug lords were really setting the trends...

Sorry, I had to haha.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Chic. I see the word enough to correct myself without needing to look it up, but never actually use the word except the rare times when I talk about the monochromatic models of the 90s. Phononymochangomatic brain.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That's modern fashion in a nutshell. They thrive by making women feel insecure about bullshit no real person cares about.

Like, fucking Dove had an ad campaign that promised to make your arm pits more attractive.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I'm sure it must have been super isolating back then too. I grew up in the 90s and remember that any class would only have like 1 overweight kid. Parents probably didn't have a lot of empathy for it either, because they would have grown up in the 70s and were barely exposed to that at all.