Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - Welcome to the Cult of Skinny with EJ Dickson

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00:00:20.700 raven smith and rufy thorpe i hunter harris wrote and read the forward the audiobook's out now give

00:00:27.940 it a listen. Joe here, and you are listening to Under the Influence. Who's ordered the copy of

00:00:40.360 Everyone is Lying to You yet? The tradwife murder mystery that the internet can't stop talking about. 0.96

00:00:46.240 Seriously, they can't. I get DMs all day long. Order it now, and it will show up on July 15th,

00:00:52.400 maybe even July 14th, because sometimes Amazon sends them out early. And if you're ordering

00:00:56.440 from Amazon, that's okay. I get it. Everyone likes efficiency. So do I. No shame in that game.

00:01:02.940 Anyway, it's going to arrive and you'll have it before everyone else, which means you can be

00:01:06.940 smug about it. And I love being smug. It is one of my most favorite things in the entire world.

00:01:13.620 Last week, I went down one of the most terrifying rabbit holes on social media. That is saying a

00:01:18.600 lot because I go down terrifying rabbit holes on Instagram pretty much every single day. But this

00:01:25.080 one scared me in a way that none of the others have. And maybe that's because I have two girls

00:01:30.800 who, no matter what I do with regards to screens and phones, will eventually find all of this shit 1.00

00:01:37.780 on the internet. It's called Skinny Talk, and at the center of it is a 23-year-old influencer named 0.98

00:01:45.040 Liv Schmidt. Liv's built a subscriber-only Instagram group where thousands of women, 0.98

00:01:50.840 many of them teenagers, pay to be told how to eat less, weigh less, and want less.

00:01:58.220 She often calls it empowerment, and her followers call it a sisterhood.

00:02:02.840 But what it really is, is eating disorder content sold as a lifestyle brand.

00:02:08.280 My guest today is the brilliant E.J. Dixon. I'm sure you've read a ton of E.J.'s stuff.

00:02:14.100 She's a senior writer at The Cut, and she recently wrote a piece about skinny talk that led me down 0.98

00:02:18.880 this creepy ass rabbit hole. And it did not do good things to her brain. Today we're talking 0.99

00:02:24.160 about how the platforms like Meta and TikTok are really just often looking the other way

00:02:30.140 when it comes to this kind of content. We're also going to get into why so many women are hungry 0.83

00:02:35.460 for stuff like this, why women want discipline disguised as empowerment, and how this is just

00:02:42.500 yet another iteration of the same old messaging that being smaller will make us more worthy.

00:02:58.520 Hey EJ, how you doing? I am great. Thank you so much for having me.

00:03:03.460 Thanks for being on. So I just cold emailed you the other day after reading your latest piece

00:03:08.980 because it made my blood run cold as a person raising two girls in the world.

00:03:16.980 And I just, I want to talk all about it.

00:03:20.760 I knew that skinny talk and diet talk existed.

00:03:25.480 Of course I knew, but I didn't realize the extent of this rabbit hole

00:03:30.320 until I read your article and then I went deep into the rabbit hole

00:03:33.880 And then I had to take a bath for like an hour because I just felt gross about it and also wanted to make sure my daughters never go on the Internet. 0.98

00:03:44.700 Talk to me about this world. 0.85

00:03:47.060 Yeah, so Skinny Talk, it's basically this community.

00:03:50.780 In a lot of respects, it's very similar to just a standard weight loss community, right?

00:03:55.940 Like a lot of the advice that they're offering is very similar to what most weight loss influencers offer.

00:04:01.860 It's, you know, if you want to lose weight, eat less, exercise more, have smaller portions.

00:04:08.200 It's very much like old wine, new labels.

00:04:12.060 But what differentiates Skinny Talk is that there's this group of influencers who sort of takes this messaging one step further by adopting a very, I would classify as Trumpian approach toward weight loss and wellness and fitness.

00:04:30.620 sort of this very blunt, tell it like it is approach. You're overweight because you don't

00:04:39.680 have the willpower to lose weight. You need self-discipline, a lot of fat phobic language, 0.92

00:04:45.580 a lot of body shaming language. So in that sense, Skinny Talk is sort of, I would say,

00:04:54.340 the midway point between weight loss communities on social media, like standard weight loss

00:05:01.240 communities and diet culture communities, and old school pro-ana culture on Tumblr and Twitter,

00:05:11.360 kind of veering more toward the pro-ana space. Yeah, it felt like it was veering towards the

00:05:17.300 pro-anospace and that's the pro-anorexia space, right? Yes, the pro-anorexia space, which I would

00:05:25.540 sort of define as like prioritizing thinness and weight loss above anything else. Right, exactly.

00:05:31.560 And it seems, I mean, it's not, it doesn't even seem to be prioritizing weight loss as much as

00:05:36.680 intense superficiality around one's body and weight loss is merely the vehicle to get to thin,

00:05:44.380 If that makes sense, like that's that's how I took it. And I love that you said Trumpian because I have an episode coming up where we're talking about the intense focus on the way it seems the Trump administration believes a woman's body should look.

00:06:00.580 It does seem as though a lot of women in the administration and in the party are getting very similar faces these days.

00:06:09.420 And it is really pushing an idea of a woman's body that I haven't seen pushed since the 90s. 0.83

00:06:18.220 I mean, really just this intense skinniness to the detriment of women's health, right? 0.97

00:06:25.180 Absolutely, yeah. 0.78

00:06:26.200 And when I said Trumpian, I mean, I think you're absolutely right that there is this 0.99

00:06:31.560 very conventional feminine beauty aesthetic that's being pushed by the right wing.

00:06:35.340 Oh, but you also meant like the in your face.

00:06:36.720 I'm going to tell it like it is.

00:06:37.920 Exactly.

00:06:38.480 Yeah, I was more I was more referring to the style of speaking, the the approach that these 1.00

00:06:45.120 women take toward their content. 0.98

00:06:46.860 Like there's something there's something about the way I think there's a lot of similarities

00:06:52.520 between why Trump resonates with his base

00:06:55.840 and why these skinny talk influencers 1.00

00:06:59.360 resonate with female audience. 1.00

00:07:01.620 And it's the sort of frustration 0.96

00:07:03.260 with the traditional body positivity movement,

00:07:06.640 traditional millennial feminism, 0.61

00:07:08.860 this traditional language of self-acceptance

00:07:11.460 and self-empowerment.

00:07:12.460 I think that a lot of women are really frustrated with that 1.00

00:07:16.100 and are sort of veering in the total opposite direction, 0.99

00:07:19.480 so to speak.

00:07:20.440 of they want to be you know they want to be told this is why you're fat basically uh is like a very

00:07:26.580 blunt way of of putting it um and this is what you can do to be skinnier right right they want

00:07:32.900 that kind of blunt language they're they're kind of they're kind of sick of i mean in the same way

00:07:37.340 that we've seen this in so many different places and so many different pockets of culture they're

00:07:43.140 just kind of sick of the pc language parsing word place and they're like i do want to be skinny

00:07:50.340 So tell me why I'm fat, how to fix it, and how I can get skinny like you.

00:07:54.240 Yeah, exactly.

00:07:54.960 They find it refreshing.

00:07:56.260 They find it refreshing.

00:07:57.180 Yeah, and I get that.

00:07:58.240 I mean, it is a pendulum swing.

00:07:59.600 But I do, as someone who did feel like the world had gone so far in our PC-ness and our word policing, I understand this.

00:08:11.200 I understand this.

00:08:12.440 Yeah, I get it too.

00:08:13.560 To an extent.

00:08:14.680 To an extent, I get it.

00:08:16.980 To an extent.

00:08:17.920 And would I prefer that no one ever call a 13-year-old girl fat? 0.99

00:08:22.360 Yes, also true. 0.99

00:08:24.900 Also a thing that is true.

00:08:26.380 So you focused on a couple different characters in this story.

00:08:30.020 And I loved your piece in the cut because it just came off as such great narrative journalism,

00:08:35.660 which is my favorite kind of journalism.

00:08:37.600 I felt like I was really absorbed just with these people's lives.

00:08:41.320 And you talked to Emma, who's a 37-year-old teacher.

00:08:44.780 And she decides to do what a lot of us have done after breakups, which is she's going to she's going to lose weight.

00:08:51.100 She's going to get in shape. 1.00

00:08:51.980 She's going to get a hot ass revenge body. 1.00

00:08:54.480 And so she ends up spending a lot of time scrolling through skinny talk. 0.99

00:08:58.940 And that is where she found Liv Schmidt, who is the kind of guru in this skinny talk community, a 23 year old model in New York City.

00:09:09.720 What do we know about Liv Schmidt? 0.62

00:09:11.160 it. So Liv Schmidt is kind of the queen of skinny talk. She is, as you said, she's a 23-year-old 1.00

00:09:19.140 model. She recently signed with Elite, which is a modeling agency based in New York. And she

00:09:25.500 started out as sort of a standard wellness influencer. Her content was much more generic.

00:09:33.200 She had like getting ready with me videos and fitness videos. She was very much like a garden

00:09:38.060 variety lifestyle influencer. And then our content sort of veers toward this very aggressively

00:09:45.120 pro-skinny, pro-thinness, pro... I would classify as pro-Anna space or borderline pro-Anna,

00:09:56.820 where she starts using a lot of satphobic language, saying, you know, you're fat because 0.99

00:10:02.580 you eat too much. You're comparing women to vending machines, shaming women for, you know,

00:10:09.120 being lazy, being undisciplined and sort of prioritizing thinness as kind of the ultimate 1.00

00:10:15.600 goal for women. And she's very controversial. You know, the content doesn't resonate with 1.00

00:10:22.960 everyone. She was kicked off TikTok last year for violating their guidelines regarding eating 1.00

00:10:28.920 disorder content. But it resonates with a lot of people, especially because of her aesthetic and

00:10:35.980 the way she looks. She kind of packages her weight loss messaging, her pro weight loss messaging in 0.86

00:10:45.020 this very like glamorous, through this very glamorous lens. She kind of lives like the

00:10:50.560 prototypical 23 year old New York City influencers life. Like she's always running around to modeling 1.00

00:10:55.960 shoots and drinking green juice and going to Pilates classes and going to all these 0.97

00:11:00.040 really expensive restaurants. And she's she's very much, you know, positions herself as an

00:11:04.720 aspirational figure for her young female audience. So her following just explodes once she moves to 0.53

00:11:11.540 Instagram. Totally. Yeah. I mean, she's intensely aspirational for a certain group of women. I get 0.99

00:11:17.680 it i do and i i do want to note that the skinny society uh is skinny with an s-k-i-n-n-i and

00:11:27.940 society um with with uh with many accents on it so i shall always call it society uh but yeah i i

00:11:36.160 get it she's positioning herself like a celebrity she's really aspirational and therefore she's

00:11:41.780 really persuasive too um and yeah digging through her content it does seem like she made this big

00:11:52.140 like pivot from and look i am a 44 year old perimenopausal woman i get served weight loss

00:11:59.140 content every 10 seconds except mine because the algorithm knows me is very gentle it's very like

00:12:06.900 let me just help you have some protein so you can be very strong because I know you don't want to

00:12:13.780 talk about weight loss but you want to be strong mama right but I think that when I was in my 20s 0.99

00:12:19.200 I kind of wanted someone to be like I'm gonna kick your ass until you get in the shape that you want 0.98

00:12:23.860 even though in my 20s I look so freaking hot so I understand the celebrity-ness of her and the 0.99

00:12:29.580 aspirational quality and why she's doing so well getting kicked off TikTok is no small feat though

00:12:36.060 right? The interesting thing about Liv and the other skinny tuck influencers, and this is

00:12:39.700 something that I talk to the platforms about quite a bit and reporting out this piece, is that they

00:12:48.300 do have guidelines prohibiting eating disorder content, right? Like their language ostensibly

00:12:54.320 is explicit about that, but they also allow weight loss content and they also allow diet culture

00:13:00.680 content. And in fact, it's like one of the I would venture to guess like one of the highest

00:13:06.360 engagement genres of content on the platforms. So I think it must be. It must be. Yeah. So where

00:13:14.120 is the line here? Like where is the line between saying eat less and eat nothing? And I think that

00:13:20.140 the platforms really struggle with deciding where that line is and figuring out what content passes

00:13:27.160 muster under their guidelines and what content is toxic and harmful. Well, and I totally agree

00:13:33.660 because I have spoken to a lot of the folks over at Meta about how they're trying to protect

00:13:38.660 children, teenagers from this kind of content, you know, and they keep saying they have guidelines

00:13:44.720 and that they're parsing these profiles. And yet I go on and I see content every day that I would

00:13:52.020 characterized as very pro-Anna that feels like it's targeting young girls. So I just don't think

00:13:57.420 those guardrails are doing enough at this point. I completely agree. And you haven't asked me about

00:14:02.260 this yet, but one of the reasons why I have been interested in the way that platforms moderates

00:14:08.600 eating disorder content, and one of the reasons why I was interested in this story, is because

00:14:14.560 I have a history of disordered eating. And I spent a lot of time in my late teens and early 20s on

00:14:20.120 ed twitter ed tumblr uh you know i was very i'm very familiar with the vernacular that's uh a lot

00:14:29.320 of these social media spaces use uh so i can see that dog whistles when they arise and i think that

00:14:37.360 anybody who sort of spent a lot of time in those spaces is kind of uniquely attuned to them but

00:14:43.000 I don't think the people making these content moderation decisions at Meta or at TikTok are at all.

00:14:52.560 That's just conjecture on my part.

00:14:54.920 I think you're right, actually.

00:14:57.160 I have to say they do not seem tuned in at all to anything about this culture.

00:15:06.560 I'm trying to think of the way to say it correctly, because what happens is you do get a kind of warning.

00:15:12.340 you do get like information about eating disorders like instagram serves that to you

00:15:17.140 but if i were a young woman i'd be like whatever i get it i know this i'm going to where i want to

00:15:24.000 go now show me these low calorie diets that i came for stop it mom stop it boomer but it's not even

00:15:31.460 just that like it's not even the fact that they and like kudos to them for having those guys you

00:15:37.400 know resources up there and and including that warning with hashtags like skinny talk like i do

00:15:42.100 think I don't think that's doing nothing but it's the issue to me is more you get past that and then

00:15:50.860 you see all this content and it's stuff like I remember I saw one of the reels that um that I

00:15:59.200 sent to insta because part of my reporting was kind of trying to figure out like what passes

00:16:03.640 muster here like where is the line here and so I was looking at stuff beyond like Schmidt's content

00:16:08.220 And one of the reels that I saw that they allowed under the Skinny Talk hashtag was sort of this collage of various pro-Anna memes, basically, right?

00:16:18.240 Like cocaine, Kate Moss in the 90s, cigarettes, a tiny can of Diet Coke.

00:16:26.640 Those three things are all what kept me thin in my 20s.

00:16:29.000 It was drugs, cigarette and Diet Coke.

00:16:31.700 And they are like not very subtly pro-Anna coded.

00:16:35.900 You know, this is this kind of stuff that, like, I repinned on the pro-Anna tumblers all the time. And it had, and even more tellingly, there was the slogan, nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, which is, like, consummate pro-Anna slogan.

00:16:49.740 And I sent this to them and I was like, this is all like very popular pro-Anna visual messaging

00:16:59.200 and iconography and language in pro-Anna social media communities. Can you explain to me

00:17:04.120 why this is allowed on the platform? And they didn't really have a good answer. And I think

00:17:10.260 it's because they don't really have like the context, like the contextual awareness for

00:17:17.200 like the history of these images or how how off how how much they've been used right and how

00:17:22.160 powerful those those are they're powerful images it's powerful messaging i want to take a quick

00:17:27.660 break and when we get back i want to talk about the community and the empowerment aspects of this

00:17:33.360 because i do think that these groups help women feel like they're building community around this

00:17:41.020 which I think people are so fucking hungry for right now, but then also are very good at making

00:17:47.340 you feel like they're empowering you when you may have felt like you had a massive pain point before 0.77

00:17:53.380 and that's why you came to them. You want to impress them on a first date, but also play it

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00:18:53.900 And we are back with EJ Dixon of The Cut,

00:18:56.880 talking about how easy it is for some influencers

00:18:58.800 to co-opt the language of empowerment and feminism

00:19:02.020 in order to restrict women further. 0.77

00:19:04.820 I would say this is kind of one of the most, if I were to say something as pretentious as like the unifying theme to my work. 1.00

00:19:12.580 Oh, please do. I love a unifying theme. I come up with my own unifying theme every day. I'm like, I write about badass women trying to take down the patriarchy in a fun way.

00:19:22.940 I guess if I were to say, like, there's a major unifying theme to my work or types of stories that I'm drawn to, it's the ways in which right wing forces co-opt the language of empowerment and feminism in order to restrict women further and restrict their rights further.

00:19:43.620 And I think that the Skinny Société, which is how it's written, by the way. 0.61

00:19:48.860 So, like, I don't think you're wrong in pronouncing it that way.

00:19:51.220 Like, I don't think the way they pronounce it, but I don't know.

00:19:54.760 That's literally how it's written with the accent.

00:19:57.880 But I think that the Skinny Société is a very good example of that because, yeah, it uses this language of empowerment,

00:20:07.480 of, you know, badass women taking their bodies into their own hands, taking their diets into 0.75

00:20:15.600 their own hands, escaping the restrictive patterns that were keeping them enslaved to 1.00

00:20:23.100 hunger and food and breaking. The word that Liv uses a lot is shutting off, turning off the food

00:20:31.200 noise, the food noise, as if hunger is something that can be ignored and not like, you know, a

00:20:39.160 major biological cue. But it's all framed in this language of empowerment. And that's very much by

00:20:48.460 design because there's nothing like on its face. There's nothing empowering about getting a bunch

00:20:54.200 of women in a group chat and telling them to starve themselves. No, no, there's not. There's 1.00

00:20:59.660 not, but they're making it seem very empowering. And I love that. I love your unifying theme for

00:21:06.720 you because you're also right. You're completely right. That is your unifying theme. Because it

00:21:11.200 makes me think of the trad wife movement as well, which we know has been seeded by the right 0.69

00:21:18.220 in order to take away women's agency, but through images and media that claims this is empowering

00:21:26.520 them to make choices for themselves. So, yeah, I feel I feel I feel exactly the same way. I think

00:21:32.540 this this smells exactly the same to me. It is exactly the same. And the thing that's really

00:21:37.800 interesting to me is that weight loss is so often given this framing. I about five or six years ago,

00:21:45.220 I covered the NXIVM trial. I don't know if your listeners are familiar with NXIVM. Give them a

00:21:49.560 short TLDR. I mean, I know everything about NXIVM, right? It was the cult, the cult run by

00:21:56.480 keith ranieri uh that had uh the lady from smallville was in it like all these hollywood 0.95

00:22:03.320 actresses and the seagrams heiress like all of these very powerful women in their 20s and 30s

00:22:11.500 who were and kind of the unifying thing that drove them all to this cult was that keith ranieri um

00:22:21.100 sort of sense that they were unhappy with like the current options that were offered by contemporary

00:22:27.280 millennial feminism and offered them this out basically in the form of this sex cult where he

00:22:34.580 was like, listen, I the I will empower you. You know, you can gain empowerment. You can gain

00:22:41.420 self-discipline. You can gain control. But you have to eat these diets of 800 calories a day

00:22:47.680 and starve yourself to a point where like i will want to have sex with you and also engage and 0.99

00:22:54.460 group sex with all these other women and be branded with my initials right like these are 0.99

00:22:58.140 all things that that the women at the top tiers of this cult willingly did um and that keep 1.00

00:23:04.640 ranieri successfully sold to them under the guise of female empowerment and obviously like when i

00:23:10.720 describe it now these are all things that just further the goal of like you know the goals of

00:23:15.980 like one specific guy and the perversions of like one specific guy. These are all things that but

00:23:20.660 they're also things that like women are told to do every day, basically. Every day, every day, 1.00

00:23:25.080 not just by this one specific guy. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. There are parallels between

00:23:31.560 between the NXIVM trial and NXIVM cult and and Liv Schmidt's brand of weight loss feminism,

00:23:38.880 I guess. Well, totally. And, you know, Liv has also been very embraced by Evie magazine,

00:23:44.840 which we know is the Cosmo of the right with her piece talking about how she claims that body

00:23:51.340 positivity was essentially a failure right yeah and I think this is honestly lives if you can call

00:23:59.740 it her genius like I think this is sort of the crux of her genius I think it's fair to call it

00:24:03.920 her genius okay like in the same way that I say Steve Bannon is and Charlie Kirk are evil geniuses 0.70

00:24:10.240 every fucking day like this is her genius she is a branding genius much like a lot of people on 0.93

00:24:14.740 the right right now. Exactly. Exactly. I think that's very true. I think that's sort of the 0.99

00:24:19.320 crux of her marketing wisdom here is that she is exploiting like a very real frustration that a lot

00:24:29.660 of women of my generation and I think we're probably like the same generation. Yeah, I'm 44.

00:24:35.620 I think everyone is my age. Yeah, I think everyone is my age, too, or older. So like women of the

00:24:41.280 millennial generation, like she's exposing a very potent and real frustration that I think a lot of 0.99

00:24:45.960 women of our generation had with the body positivity movement. Like, I don't think she's wrong

00:24:50.900 entirely. You know, I think that. I don't know if you felt this way, but when I, you know,

00:24:59.820 10 years ago when I was seeing dove ads and constant spreads of.

00:25:05.100 women of various sizes in Cosmo magazine or whatever. My reaction was very, and all these

00:25:15.920 messages saying, love your body, love your body, love the skin you're in. My reaction was highly

00:25:20.880 skeptical. And not because I disagreed with the message, not because I feel like there shouldn't

00:25:26.760 be diverse representation and because there should be, or that we shouldn't love the bodies

00:25:31.620 that we're in because of course we should it was more just that it seemed like those messages were

00:25:39.420 running so counter to everything else that our culture tells us to do all the time you know so

00:25:46.420 literally everything else yes yeah none of it none of it felt well first off body positivity

00:25:52.200 did not have good branding whatsoever but also yeah we're constantly we're watching tv shows

00:25:58.320 with actresses who continue to be a size zero negative essentially and i was i was thinking 0.64

00:26:05.260 about this so hard when i was watching white lotus with the three 40 something girlfriend 0.72

00:26:10.540 all of them drink their faces off all the time and were teeny tiny teeny tiny with no bellies

00:26:17.240 that's what we're being served so don't don't give us like these these ads saying it's totally okay

00:26:22.300 and then have the rest of culture serve us, stick thin figures all the time.

00:26:27.280 Exactly. And I think that you and I were not alone in feeling this way. I think a lot of

00:26:31.860 women felt this way and correctly interpreted the body positivity movement to be largely

00:26:36.940 a byproduct of cynical branding. And I think that Liv is capitalizing on that frustration.

00:26:44.700 I think she's basically saying, you know what? You're right. Like, this isn't real. This is

00:26:48.800 bullshit. This didn't work. Thinness is actually the key to self-empowerment, not embracing the 1.00

00:26:56.700 body that you're in. And I'm going to show you how to do it. And she seems to be making good

00:27:01.680 money off of it, from what I can tell. I mean, her following is very large. And is she doing

00:27:07.920 subscriptions to Skinny Societe and then charging for them? She was, yes, until she was demonetized 1.00

00:27:13.940 by meta uh she was charging 20 a month and she had about 6 500 members in the skinny society so

00:27:22.180 she was she was making pretty good money yeah yeah it's not nothing it's not nothing um and

00:27:27.080 she's not you know we're talking a lot about schmidt here but she's really she's i think she

00:27:33.940 probably might be one of the best at this there's probably thousands of many live schmidt communities

00:27:41.200 out there on skinny talk and skinny gram right oh yeah absolutely and so do you think that young

00:27:48.040 women are flocking to these and there are there any guardrails from that you've discovered that

00:27:52.720 actually work to keep young women away from them uh no i bet i agree i agree right i mean that's

00:28:00.040 just like i just don't think there are yeah no there aren't um and i was talking about this

00:28:07.000 yesterday with somebody. I was thinking a lot about how a couple of years ago before

00:28:11.980 Musk brought Twitter, there was all this conversation about like proclutching about

00:28:16.380 deplatforming. Like does deplatforming work? Like if you take bad actors off of a major platform

00:28:22.500 and they just go to like another smaller social media platform, they're still like gaining

00:28:27.440 visibility. Like, does it actually do anything? Is it just a game of whack-a-mole? And I think

00:28:31.700 what we've learned in the past year or so, not only from what a hellscape platforms like Twitter

00:28:36.760 have become, but also from like the election of Donald Trump and the fact that all of these

00:28:42.240 people who were previously deplatformed are flooding back into the mainstream is like,

00:28:46.780 yeah, like it did work. You know, it was it was very successful. I think that a lot of us can

00:28:52.780 agree that our culture at large was better as a result of deplatforming. And I think that this

00:29:01.200 message can be applied to skinny talk as well. I mean, something that was constantly going through

00:29:05.940 my head was like well why why do these women have a platform these women who are telling people to 1.00

00:29:11.280 walk 18 000 steps a day and which is just bananas to me because i can i barely hit 5 000 steps a 1.00

00:29:19.900 day and i am a person who walks places oh it's impossible it's impossible right i'm like i think

00:29:26.140 they must have they must have the treads right they have like the walking treads in their house

00:29:30.440 because I'm like, are you just always walking around the city?

00:29:33.520 Yeah, they were recommending, like, what are they called?

00:29:36.880 The thing you stick under your desk?

00:29:38.440 The under the desks, yeah, the under the desks,

00:29:40.620 which I feel like I would fall on my face.

00:29:42.580 I'm just like, I can barely walk not while doing something else.

00:29:47.760 So I would just face plan on my desk.

00:29:50.760 Yeah, and I looked it up, and it's like $500.

00:29:52.820 They're so expensive, yeah.

00:29:53.780 Why are you paying $500 to, like, fall on your face, on your desk?

00:29:57.320 I don't know. 0.90

00:29:57.980 But, yeah, I mean, that was the question that I was constantly asking myself is like, well, why not take these women off these platforms if they are ostensibly violating your guidelines by offering advice that is pretty clearly coded as like disordered eating and disordered exercising? 0.62

00:30:15.900 And I didn't get a good answer for that. 0.98

00:30:17.900 yeah i mean because i think that the the answer is that these accounts drive engagement probably

00:30:26.760 more than more than the majority of accounts i would say they're probably in the in the top

00:30:30.420 three and you know they make the platforms a lot of money at the end of the day and keep people

00:30:36.760 coming back and they're not going to give up that that revenue yeah absolutely i kept hearing from

00:30:42.220 people over and over again after our story published that they had warned meta about stuff

00:30:48.460 that was going on in the skinny society and reported live many many many times and nothing

00:30:55.540 happens um until this story was published because unfortunately that's the one thing that one of the

00:31:02.760 very few things that actually motivates platforms to act against bad actors is one of the very few

00:31:07.380 things that still works which is amazing which is why the work that you do i think is so powerful

00:31:11.260 Okay, let's take one more quick break here, and when we get back, I want to talk about what it was like to be someone who has a past history with disordered eating, diving headfirst down this rabbit hole.

00:31:41.260 couples that met on Hinge. The stories are written and read by Tembi Denton Hurst,

00:31:46.060 Nicola Dinan, Curtis Garner, Raven Smith, and Rufy Thorpe. I, Hunter Harris, wrote and read

00:31:52.120 the foreword. The audio book's out now. Give it a listen. Chew on this bold question from Dentine

00:31:59.280 Gum. Is it ever okay to compliment a millennial on their skinny jeans in 2026? Dentine,

00:32:11.040 Chew Bold.

00:32:15.740 Okay, we are back.

00:32:17.760 As someone with a past in disordered eating, with disordered eating,

00:32:22.440 what was it like for you to dive into this story?

00:32:24.820 You wrote that you thought you'd be immune, but that didn't really happen, right?

00:32:29.220 It was horrible.

00:32:30.620 It's hard to express in words.

00:32:35.080 Yeah, so I said earlier that I had spent a lot of time when I was a teenager

00:32:39.940 and in my 20s on eating disorder Tumblr and eating disorder Twitter, which is basically

00:32:44.880 communities of women who share very aspirational images of thin women and share their diets and

00:32:52.240 their before and afters and weight loss tips. So I was familiar with a lot of this,

00:32:57.900 the stuff that I was seeing. What was different to me and what was so uniquely terrifying

00:33:07.280 was just how constant and unrelenting this messaging was when you are actually inside

00:33:16.500 the group chat. So basically, Liv monetizes access to these private group chats as part of

00:33:25.480 your membership for the Skinny Society. And there are about 200 to 250 young women in these group

00:33:31.100 chats. And the goal ostensibly is for them to sort of hold each other accountable and support

00:33:37.460 each other in their weight loss goals. But in practice, it's just constant, constant DMing,

00:33:44.260 texting about how many calories they eat, how many steps they've walked in a day,

00:33:50.420 bragging about how they avoided eating a cupcake at a work event or a school event,

00:33:57.120 students showing photos of themselves losing a massive amount of weight in a very short amount

00:34:03.360 of time just the constant presence of that in my dms i found was so frightening and i just kept

00:34:15.260 thinking if i a person who is in their 30s and has been in therapy for a very long time

00:34:22.860 and is very self-aware and knows sort of the mechanisms of what goes on in my head when I am

00:34:29.100 tempted to lapse back into this behavior. If I am so vulnerable to this, then I cannot imagine

00:34:37.480 how vulnerable a 17, 18, 19-year-old girl is to just seeing these messages over and over and over

00:34:45.380 and over again. No, no, I can't at all. And the fact that she's monetizing these DMs brings me

00:34:53.940 back to what I was saying about community, which I think all of us are hungry for community these

00:34:59.480 days. Everyone's looking for their village. And she's creating and capitalizing on these villages.

00:35:06.180 I don't think that teenage 20-something me could have handled this level of kind of group coercion 0.97

00:35:14.120 And, yeah, I think it would have been really fucking hard. 0.95

00:35:18.620 No, absolutely not. 0.96

00:35:19.440 I mean, I couldn't handle it.

00:35:21.260 I don't know.

00:35:21.820 I don't know if grown-ass me can, right?

00:35:24.520 Like, I'm still figuring out how I feel about my postpartum body after pushing out these three kids in eight years and being a 40-something woman who, like, can't lose weight without taking a GLP, right?

00:35:38.080 Like, yeah.

00:35:39.680 I mean, I think about this stuff every day. 0.98

00:35:42.660 and I thought that I had my shit together. Yeah, that was that was how I felt, too. It consumed 0.98

00:35:48.200 me. I mean, I thought about it all the time. I still think about it. I last night I woke up in

00:35:53.420 the middle of the night because I really bad insomnia and I was hungry and I went to the

00:35:57.320 fridge to get like something to eat. And I immediately my mind just flashed like the

00:36:01.900 kitchen's closed because that's something that she always tells her. It's something she says

00:36:04.900 to her followers, right? She's just like the kitchen's closed. Yeah. 7 p.m. The kitchen,

00:36:10.580 the kitchen is closed. And it had been like a week since I published the story. And I was just

00:36:17.000 thinking, damn, she is in my head. I think it's very easy for these influencers to worm their way 0.99

00:36:23.080 into people's heads, too, maybe even more so than anything on Tumblr or Twitter did in the early

00:36:31.760 days because of how we use our phones, too. And I talk about that with all kinds of influencers,

00:36:37.420 And I just definitely discovered it with mom influencers because these people live in the palms of our hands. 0.98

00:36:42.540 Our parasocial relationships with them are so fucking intense. 0.83

00:36:46.600 Yeah, I think that's definitely true. 1.00

00:36:49.220 I think that's definitely true.

00:36:52.460 So where where is skinny talk?

00:36:55.420 Where is skinny society at now?

00:36:57.740 Meta has has shut it shut down the group.

00:37:01.760 Meta has demonetized the group.

00:37:03.380 Demonetized the group.

00:37:04.240 OK.

00:37:04.400 So a couple hours after our story published, Meta reached out to me and told me that they demonetized the group, meaning that Liv cannot make any money off of the Skinny Society.

00:37:15.140 Okay.

00:37:16.420 So she blocked me.

00:37:19.280 So I don't know.

00:37:21.320 You can't see what she's up to? I can.

00:37:23.360 I don't know how much I can answer that question.

00:37:26.200 I do know just from screen grabs that people have sent me that she's kind of going nuclear on Instagram.

00:37:34.400 her stories um she frames the piece as like a personal vendetta against her which is absolutely

00:37:41.520 ridiculous and uh i think last i saw she was saying that she was gonna start another skinny 0.87

00:37:51.060 society off of meta and charge like three thousand dollars a month for it but it would be application 0.64

00:37:57.900 only you'd have to fact check like the details of that but that's that's what i seem to remember

00:38:03.260 Fascinating. 0.99

00:38:03.920 Well, you know, there's also no lack of platforms for her to do that these days. 0.75

00:38:09.080 She'll be fine.

00:38:10.300 I'm not worried about Liv, okay?

00:38:12.360 Not worried about Liv.

00:38:14.760 I am worried about all of her followers.

00:38:16.740 So I'm glad.

00:38:18.200 I'm so glad you're doing this reporting.

00:38:20.300 Keep it up.

00:38:21.060 I know how hard it must have been, but you're doing all of the things, all of the things

00:38:27.640 that journalism should be doing.

00:38:29.480 Thank you.

00:38:30.020 yeah I was I was very I was very happy with how the piece came out and I was very proud of it it

00:38:35.360 started out being like the the the intention of the piece wasn't so much like I did not want to

00:38:42.520 join it at all um that was never part of the plan the I believe the original assignment was

00:38:50.000 just talking to former skinny society members saying anybody would talk but it was sort of

00:38:55.900 after I did that, then I realized I had to join to sort of kind of figure out like the mechanisms

00:39:01.780 of the group and how it worked and just verify for myself that the things that they were telling me

00:39:06.200 were true. And unfortunately, they were. This is the story of my reporting life, though. I'm like,

00:39:12.220 I'm just going to report and I'm just going to interview. And then I'm always just in the thick

00:39:16.440 of it. And that is how I ended up trying to become a mom influencer. Yeah, it happens.

00:39:21.940 It happens. A failure of a mom influencer. Thankfully, I have never tried to become a trad 0.98

00:39:27.160 wife. But if it's something that'll increase book sales, I'm here for it.

00:39:31.780 I think it would.

00:39:32.960 I actually think it would. So, I mean, it's not not on my list, okay? Not not on my list.

00:39:37.420 Thank you so much. Tell everyone where they can find you and more of your incredible writing.

00:39:41.160 I am a senior writer at The Cut at New York Magazine, and I am also on Blue Sky and Twitter

00:39:49.200 at EJ Dixon X, I guess, is what you have to call it. And Instagram.

00:39:55.800 Lovely. Thank you so much for coming on today.

00:40:19.200 I want to date with wars, Carty says.

00:40:49.200 Rawls? Rucker asks.

00:40:51.480 This is the love story of real hinge couple Carti and Rucker.

00:40:55.540 Written and read by me, Nicola Dinan.

00:40:58.300 Listen to the free audiobook now.

Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - June 05, 2025

Welcome to the Cult of Skinny with EJ Dickson

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