By Selome Hailu, Alison Herman
Getty Images “It’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl.”
Over the past several years, there’s been an ongoing — and, in many cases, much-needed — conversation around pop stars and body image. In 2020, Taylor Swift disclosed to Variety’s Chris Willman that she would sometimes “just stop eating” and had developed an “unhealthy” relationship with food, a pattern she characterized as a Pavlovian response to constant feedback on her size from outside observers. In dialogue with Charli xcx on a remix of 2024’s “Girl, so confusing,” Lorde sang about a “war with [her] body” that entailed starving herself and then gaining the weight back — the latter seeming to cause her as much emotional pain as the former. She further elaborated in her 2025 album “Virgin,” admitting she got “sucked in” by bodily measurements like a “new waist-to-hip” ratio on a song aptly titled “Broken Glass.”
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