Keira and Kate: Two Tales of 21st-Century Body Shaming

In the mid-2000s, Keira Knightley and Kate Winslet were two of the most obsessed-over celebrities in Hollywood. They were beautiful English roses who headlined wildly successful movies, got Oscar nominations, and were the faces of iconic beauty and fashion brands. After Titanic, Winslet was catapulted into a level of fame that few people ever reach, and she used it to establish herself as one of her generation’s finest actresses. Knightley became similarly famous after Pirates of the Caribbean shoved her into the limelight at the age of 18, leading to her being crowned her era’s corset queen in the vein of Helena Bonham Carter and yes, Kate Winslet. In 2024, both women are still famous, acclaimed, and able to grab the headlines, even as they’ve consciously pulled back from the harsh glare that defined their careers almost two decades ago. These past few weeks, Winslet and Knightley have been on the promotional trail with new projects - the biopic Lee for Winslet and the spy thriller series Black Doves for Knightley - and with it has come a reassessment of how the press treated both women. Two actresses who shared a lot of cultural DNA were also bound by a far nastier problem: the ceaseless barrage of body-shaming.

Kate Winslet has spent way too many years combatting the ways that the entertainment industry and press shamed her as ‘too fat’ to be pretty and successful. She was photoshopped on magazine covers to look markedly skinnier than she was. Producers told her she was too chubby for major roles. Her own acting teacher told her to settle for ‘chubby girl’ parts. Reviews of Titanic talked about her being ‘too fleshy to be convincing’ as someone Leonardo DiCaprio would fall in love with. In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, she cried while remembering how a red carpet interviewer told her to her face that she looked ‘a little melted and poured’ into the dress she wore to the Golden Globes.

Throughout the early years of Knightley’s fame, she was repeatedly asked highly loaded questions about whether or not she was anorexic. At one press conference, she had to deny the claim and note that anorexia ran in her family so it wasn’t something she wanted people to joke about. That sadly only further fuelled the fire of speculation about her health. In discussing these experiences in an interview with The Times, Knightley said, ‘In that classic trauma way I don’t remember it. There’s been a complete delete, and then some things will come up and I’ll suddenly have a very bodily memory of it because, ultimately, it’s public shaming, isn’t it?’

In 2014, Knightley told Elle that it was a ‘very strange thing’ when interviewers would tell her that ‘you’re anorexic and people hate you.’ This was a time when a lot of the narratives around famous women’s bodies were one of a supposed competition to be the thinnest. It was when many of us were first introduced to the idea of a size zero, and while the culture still fetishized thinness, it also wanted to have its cake and eat it by scolding those who may have felt the pressure to fit into this impossible mould. Women like Knightley were shamed not only for being thin but for apparently implicitly encouraging girls and young women to starve themselves to match their body types. This is not to dismiss the systemic sickness of fatphobia or the undeniable ways that we are culturally trained to prize skinny bodies over all else, but to put it all onto the shoulders of a 19-year-old with a family history of disordered eating was probably not the way to tackle the issue.

It’s hard to escape the sense that every woman’s body is a battlefield and that those troubles are greatly amplified when applied to celebrities. Tabloid tattle over such matters is seldom done with contextual empathy. It turns a decades-long societal problem into the squabbles of a few rich women who are solely blamed as the dictators of the ideal. Such tactics are very effective, to shove the responsibility onto those struggling with impossible standards rather than those who giddily reinforce them for profit and hate. In the 2000s, the decade I became a teenager, it felt like every magazine I saw on the supermarket shelves was polluted with images of famous women’s bodies with the ‘bad’ parts circled for us to mock. Bingo wings, muffin tops, fatty ankles, saggy knees, and back rolls were dissected with malicious eagerness. Any woman who got cosmetic surgery was to be derided with force. Skinniness was prized but ‘too skinny’ was always something to scold, especially if the culprits were women under the age of 25. This was the decade of Jessica Simpson wearing high-waisted jeans becoming a worldwide fatphobic panic from the same publications that pretended to care about Nicole Richie’s health.

With Winslet, it’s easy to fall into the trap of litigating how she was never actually fat, as though that’s the best defence for systemic hatred towards her body. Frankly, if she had been fat, it still wouldn’t have been acceptable to talk about her so inhumanely. That she was decreed to be unacceptably large for the screen despite being the size she was is just another reminder of how the goalposts never stop moving. The fear of fatness is so all-consuming that even defenders start talking about it in ways that reveal their panic of ever being seen as fat themselves.

None of this has improved in the 2020s. Thinspo is back with a vengeance. After years of appropriating Black womanhood with their dark contouring and BBLs, the Kardashians have reverted to whiteness with their concerted weight loss efforts. So-called wellness culture has become a platform for hard-right conspiracies and vaccine denialism. Ozempic is seemingly everywhere in Hollywood (except for the diabetic patients who desperately need it.) The unwinnable system has partnered with an overpowered capitalistic force that has found ever more niche and ludicrous ways to make us hate our bodies, whether it’s buccal fat or ‘cortisol face.’ Women’s magazines may not mock celebrities for being ‘too fleshy’ now but they certainly make a mint by regurgitating the same concern trolling lines about people’s health.

Winslet and Knightley were just two of the most prominent examples of a cyclical problem. There will always be women who are forced onto the platform of judgment and fake worry because their bodies are pushed to the level of State of the Nation-style concerns. It’s an issue with no end in sight, not as long as there’s money to be made and a stifling misogynistic system to reinforce by letting you know that you’ll never be good enough. And if you are “good enough”, that won’t last for long because there’s always another trend on the horizon.