The Body Police Are Back

On Instagram last week, Anne Hathaway addressed the conspiracy-minded comments: “Fake hair, real bump,” she wrote.

Pregnant with her third child while on a press-tour spree, the actor wore one of many belly-baring ensembles at a red-carpet event—and a flood of questions (and implications that it wasn’t real) ensued. Hathaway is just one of many celebrities facing overwhelming body scrutiny online within the last month. Kate Beckinsale was accused of having an eating disorder by commenters who claim her grief-fueled weight loss had gone too far. Jenna Ortega is facing backlash after appearing in an Esquire video, as viewers say she looks too thin. And of course Ariana Grande announced plans to step back from public life amid intense public scrutiny, including widespread commentary about her appearance.

The 2000s were filled with sometimes-anonymous conversations about women’s bodies, which seemed to momentarily quiet with the body-positivity and #MeToo movements. But body talk has once again taken center stage with the rise of weight-loss medications that have made thinness more accessible than ever.

But it’s not just celebrities whose bodies are under the microscope: The rise of body scrutiny is one element of a growing sociopolitical environment where women’s bodies are being constantly surveilled, threatening everything from our conceptions of health and beauty to our careers and our very freedom.

Weight bias has long been present in both work and romantic settings. Research has shown that women with obesity earn about 6% less than thinner women for identical work and that people in larger bodies may also face discriminatory termination and negative stereotypes that can hinder hiring and career advancement. We don’t need a study to know that weight stigma can shape dating and romantic relationships, but they exist anyway. New research found that GLP-1s might level the playing field—but it comes at a cost (if not to our bottom line) to our understanding of our inherent value. According to the study, after a year and a half on a GLP-1, unemployed women’s likelihood of landing a job increased by 26.9%, while single women became up to 28.6% more likely to marry or move in with a romantic partner. It wasn’t that women who lost weight felt better about themselves or had more energy for work or dating, researcher and economist Rebecca Diamond concluded. Their newfound success seems to be a direct result of how women were perceived after their weight loss—a stark reminder that women’s appearances seem inextricably tied with our success. The body police, in these cases, aren’t a horde of nameless Instagrammers but our bosses, our Hinge dates, our peers.

Too much or too little weight isn’t a woman’s only crime in the court of public opinion, though. Beauty standards have a long history of functioning as a form of social control, helping police how women are expected to look and act in public. “Beauty has always been a tool of fear and respectability politics, a language of ‘passing’ in a system of surveillance and judgment,” Arabelle Sicardi, author of The House of Beauty, explained to Dazed. “[It’s] a way to keep us desensitized, hypercritical, and focused on individualism rather than collective response and community building.” In this case, we’re wrapped up in criticizing celebrity bodies while the right to govern our own is taken away.

During her confirmation hearings, new CDC director Erica Schwartz committed to continuing abortion surveillance, calling it “absolutely a critical component” of the agency’s work. Her comment comes amid years of growing restrictions on abortion and reproductive rights, from the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022 to expanded efforts to criminalize abortion-related conduct. As of 2025, more than 31 million women of reproductive age lived in states where abortion was banned or under threat. And while many abortion bans primarily target providers rather than patients, more than 21 million women of reproductive age live in states that have proposed bills that would criminalize people for having abortions, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families.

Abortion surveillance is what the CDC calls tracking abortion data, a longstanding public-health practice that helps researchers understand trends in abortion care. Schwartz’s promise seems to extend beyond simply collecting data, though. “I also want to make sure that certain states are not conflating emergency services and hiding abortions in that emergency services case definition,” Schwartz said. Even states with near-total abortion bans allow exceptions when an abortion is necessary to save the pregnant person’s life. Schwartz’s suggestion that some of this emergency care might be code for an abortion by choice goes against what we know: Women have died waiting for emergency abortion and miscarriage care as doctors scrambled to figure out whether their case was serious enough to be classified as an exception to their state’s abortion law.

As critiques of women’s bodies grow louder, so too do the consequences we face for not conforming to the increasingly strict regulations around what we are and aren’t allowed to do with them. But while the body police showed up virtually to criticize celebrities, we’ve left the door open for the literal policing of women’s bodies—the kind that could end in jail.