Rotund girls everywhere have officially felt more than mildly betrayed by an off-handed image Adele posted yesterday on her Instagram. One thanking fans and friends for birthday wishes (for Adele is just another famous British Taurus like the Queen), as well as the first responders and essential workers of the UK (or maybe California, it’s hard to know where Adele really is at any given time). But, more importantly to seemingly everyone who became instantly obsessed with the photo, was her increased (or, more to the point, decreased) body transformation. One that has been tracked since she put up an image of herself in October 2019 at Drake’s birthday party with the caption, “I used to cry but now I sweat.” A seeming allusion to a more intensive exercise regimen.
Whatever Adele’s method for slimming down, people’s scrutiny of the matter is not just a reflection of the societal obsession with a woman’s weight–particularly when she’s a female pop star–but with the mixed messages that abound in a society where it has long been just as Britney said, “I’m Mrs. She’s Too Big Now She’s Too Thin.” As Adele has fallen into the latter category for most people at present, she’s found herself in the eye of a storm fraught with triggering the gamut of body issues, from eating disorders to the hypocrisy of a media that claims to be fine with “big-boned” girls like Lizzo (is she next for a slim down?) when, in fact, the frenzy over Adele’s “new image” proves that they’ve been hoping and praying along, like Karl Lagerfeld, that she would shed her weight. That she would embrace being the “true beauty” they always knew she could be by ridding herself of the excess pounds (or stones, as the Brits call them, a word that connotes even more burden-centric contempt for weight than the American version).
As some speculate that the media analysis of her body over the years has led her to this point, Adele had been consistent in insisting, “I would only lose weight if it affected my health or sex life, which it doesn’t.” Maybe, finally, it did. Maybe Adele simply decided to make a change for the better as she gets older (for isn’t the other caveat of being a female pop star–or just a female–that you’re day old bread once you hit your thirties? So you ought to at least be lithe to make up for it). Maybe all this time in quarantine has just given her more opportunity to work out (god knows she has a gym and pool in all of her residences, or at least the L.A. ones). Whatever her “motives,” the decision is her business. Of course, the main (and only) drawback of being a celebrity is that the second you make any image of yourself public, it’s up for mass dissection.
That Adele’s childhood was peppered with the message and lyrics of a band she would forever admit her indebtedness to–Spice Girls–surely coincides with the mixed bag of communication women have been getting their entire lives. On the one hand, the iconic quintet espoused “Girl Power” and being yourself, on the other, each of them were media-manufactured constructs to appeal to a generalized trope of “every kind” of female. Yet nowhere in the bunch was anyone called “Voluptuous Spice,” “Zaftig Spice” or, full-stop, “Fat Spice.” Because the only bodily classification for women needed has been (and apparently still is): thin. Everything else is just an unnecessary “bonus” (like the fashion sense of Posh or the cuteness of Baby) when you’ve got the “anatomically correct” skeletal look that people want to see.
The point is, we’ve all been cyclically fucked up by representations of women in pop culture, the Spice Girls to Adele transference being a case in point of the vicious cycle. Thus far, Billie Eilish is actually the only person who has put a stop to any conversation about her body by covering hers up entirely (this, ironically, breeding further conversation about it still). A sad state of affairs, that. When, in order to be heard for her voice and not seen for her husk, a woman must essentially put on a burka. Burkas, actually, wouldn’t be an impossible new trend in the pop world. After all, if face masks are the new norm, can total body cover-ups be far behind? Alas, it would be the only way to stop making Adele’s figure the subject reflective of the world’s own collective body image issues.
