Spend enough time on TikTok’s "For You" page, and you’ll likely find yourself scrolling through videos with the hashtag #WeightLossCheck or #WeightLossHacks or videos promising that this one workout with give your butt a lift. That I expected — people are always trying to change their bodies to look more attractive per the norms of the culture they live in, despite how unattainable our bodily goals have become. But what I did not want to see, and yet has been flashing across my screen, was a video describing how to achieve a look I thought had died along with Tumblr: the thigh gap.
Thigh gap was the true archnemesis of my teen years. Now that I'm in my 20s, it's been a while since I've seen the internet fall to such depraved levels of inauthenticity as encouraging women to shrink their legs into a shape that is biologically impossible for many of us — to have a gap between our thighs so they no longer touch. It brought back all of the horrors of the thigh gap movement that ran rampant through my high school. (I had one friend tell me my thighs touched because there were "too many minerals" in the well that sent water to my rural home.)
Although one could argue that all aspects of modern beauty are performative by design, the encouragement of a thigh gap is easily one of the more performative aspects of modern beauty. That's because, in most cases, the thighs you're striving to emulate don't really exist — it's a trick of light.
Stand in front of a mirror head on, with your feet hip-width apart. Engage your core, push your shoulders back and your neck up. Keep your legs in place, strong and flexed, as you lean your torso slightly forward. Keep your shoulders and hips back, forcing a curve in your back. Once you notice the slightest gap between your thighs, raise your phone with your right hand, and place it near your face. Place your left hand on your hip, in your pocket, hidden behind your back, or flung into the air with a peace sign. Snap the shot, and revel in the inhuman shape your body has created — long neck, big chest, small waist, big butt, toned legs, and, somehow, a thigh gap.
The cultural obsession with thigh gap is returning. But this time, it comes with the insufferable coolness of the 2022 internet. The mirror is dirty, the room is unclean, the snapshot looks random, but your entire body is tight and twisted into an unbearable knot that seems new but is instead tragically atavistic. And now, the trend is combined with the BBL physique — a look made famous by the Kardashians that relies almost entirely upon having a Brazilian butt lift surgery, which takes fat from other parts of your body to add to your butt. You need a thigh gap, but you need to have it with thick thighs on either side, which makes it potentially even more unlikely than before. One TikToker, @alexxxprincess, said she can capitalize on having thick thighs now — but having thick thighs as a young person in the 2000s didn't come with much social capital.
"I remember when the whole big thigh gap thing came out and everybody wanted a thigh gap," @alexxxprincess said on TikTok. "That was not a good year for me… Bottom line is it didn't matter how much I exercised, how much sports I played, or what I ate, I never even came close to having a thigh gap. It didn't matter how skinny I got."
The term "thigh gap" isn't nearly as common in our cultural lexicon today as it was from 2012 to 2016. While Google searches for the trend peaked in 2014 (and do with that information what you will) — around the same time searches for Kim Kardashian peaked (correlation is not causation, of course)— it has been ingrained in our collective consciousness as an unattainable beauty standard, and not just for the people who lived through it in its 2010s iteration; young people are talking about it online now, too. During the pandemic, as so many of us were pulled into the deluge of social media, doctors warned that a "tsunami" of eating disorders were headed for children and young adults, reminiscent of the pro-anorexia content that flooded social media in the early aughts. It has become nearly impossible to separate eating disorders from social media.
Despite the damage that trends like this cause to young people, social media is rife with them, with everyone from celebrities to influencers to casual users involved in their depictions. When you look at any of Dua Lipa's photos in her infamous Instagram photo dumps, you might notice the same outstanding signifier of beauty: the ability for wind to pass through her legs unencumbered by touching skin.
Influencers on TikTok give us tutorials on how to pose to achieve the thigh gap look. You'd think those shared secrets would make us less awed at their performance and therefore less interested in duplicating it. But it does nothing to lighten the burden of a now-vintage style that has regained such momentum. The variety of thigh gap hashtags on TikTok — #thighgaps, #thighgapgoals, #whereismythighgap — garner thousands of views and posts.
The rise of the thigh gap attention coincided with the the indie sleaze (or hipster) era between, roughly, 2006 and 2012, which was fueled by Tumblr blogs and an aesthetic led by "heroin-chic style idols" like Kate Moss, Alexa Chung, Sienna Miller, and Sky Ferreira. Indie sleaze glamorized eating disorders and encouraged binge drinking as a replacement for a genuine personality. Now, according to think pieces out of Harpers Bazaar, Vogue, and GQ, indie sleaze is making a comeback — and I fear that's going to coincide with a powerful push for the return of an unattainable thigh gap.
The trend — to shrink and stretch your body to proportions you weren't genetically predisposed to possess — has always been there. But as thigh gaps come back into the mainframe of our cultural consciousness, the trend is also shifting. Instead of starving yourself thin in hopes of reaching the goal gap, you need to find a way to somehow have thick thighs that still show off a gap in between, a genetic improbability at best.
People, particularly femme people, talk about living during the first iteration of indie sleaze with vitriol for the expectations set on their legs. Then things started changing, and the expectation for women's bodies shifted from the thinnest you could be to having fat only in the areas deemed attractive: hips, chest, and, occasionally, thighs. Even Kim Kardashian's thighs don't touch in some photos (which can be due to posing manipulation or photoshop), despite the curvy aesthetic she pushes with such enthusiasm. Given all that, combined with the resurgence of an era in which liking your body at any size above 4 was seen as a political statement, it would be reasonable to fear a stronger, and potentially worse, return of the thigh gap altogether.
But we are in a different world today than we were in the 2010s. We have lived through the great recession. We have streaming. The damage wrought by climate change is coming to roost. Beyoncé moved from 2003's B'Day to 2016's Lemonade. And some TikTokers are trying to fight the return of the thigh gap by sharing their experiences with bullying and educating their followers on thigh gap misinformation — God help them. We've been through this before, and it's too soon for us to repeat the failures of our past.
If you feel like you’d like to talk to someone about your eating behavior, call the National Eating Disorder Association’s helpline at 800-931-2237. You can also text “NEDA” to 741-741 to be connected with a trained volunteer at the Crisis Text Line or visit the nonprofit’s website for more information.
