Good morning and Happy Friday! Thanks for starting your day with me.

I debated long and hard about how to broach this topic, because God knows I’ve been bodyshamed plenty by men online, and I don’t want to be part of doing that to other women. However, we need to talk about what’s happening in Hollywood and among a certain subset of influencers right now. I’m talking about this:

This is Demi Moore at Cannes. The image came along with the headline “Demi Moore’s Toned Arms Take Center Stage on Cannes Film Festival 2026 Red Carpet” via Page Six.

So let’s be clear. These are not “toned” arms. These arms are skeletal. You should not be able to see someone’s tendons and sinew when their arms are bare. There is no amount of “toning” that can get arms to look like that. This is obtained via a prolonged and severe calorie deficit — aka starvation. And the same goes for six-pack abs.

And Moore is far from alone. During the Wicked press tour, fans rightly pointed out that Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivio seemed to be in a competition to see who could be thinner.

Yes, I know both women are naturally thin. No, they are not normally that thin. Go look at their other performances.

And then we have women doing things like this over on TikTok:

Aside from the fact that 160 pounds is a healthy weight for many women, this kind of content is, sadly, all over the interwebs. “SkinnyTok” is real, and it is horrifying. And please let me clarify that I am not shaming these women in particular; I am shaming the cultural forces that have made them believe this is what they need to be to be attractive/successful/healthy.

I can’t remember a time when my weight wasn’t the main focus of my life. The first time I remember being concerned about it, I was five years old. I didn’t want to wear my snowpants because I thought all the padding made me "look fat.” That mindset was handed down to me by my mother, who learned it from her mother, and so on and so forth. In second grade, due to gymnastics coaches who insisted that we be as thin and tiny as possible, I recall hiding in the bathroom with my Cambridge Diet shake (the precursor to Slimfast), while all the other eight-year-olds ate their pb&js in the cafeteria. By the time I graduated from high school, I had no idea what a healthy diet looked like. All I knew how to do was crash diet. Rinse and repeat.

So many nights, I went from two hours of soccer practice after school to two hours of gymnastics or diving practice, without eating, or with eating as little as I could get away with. I cringe thinking about all the calories my body needed to be strong enough to endure those workouts (do you know how many times you climb a high dive ladder during a two-hour workout?), and how little fuel I gave myself. I wanted my hip bones to stick out. I wanted to be able to wrap my fingers around my upper arms. I wanted to be so small that I would disappear. The smaller I got, the more praise I got from the adults in my life. It’s a testament to my solid frame that I never looked like I was in as much of a calorie deficit as I was (thank you, robust Sicilian ancestry).

College was another ballgame entirely. No one was around to monitor what I ate, so restrictive dieting became the norm, along with walking all over campus all day and running in the evenings. In the 90s, with the overly thin cast of Friends as our models, no one ever suggested women should be strong. It was all about being skinny. Size zero became the new size four. Size double-zero started appearing in stores. One of my friends would survive for days on pretzel sticks dipped in mustard. Another would eat air-popped popcorn, lightly misted with water so salt would stick to it. We were all so exhausted and thinner than we had ever been. But not thin enough.

When I look back at photos of myself during those years, I’m shocked at how “normal” I looked. I wasn’t the heifer I had pictured myself as from ages six to twenty-two. While I was “enormous” compared to gymnasts in the 80s and 90s, I would have fit in perfectly fine with the stronger, more muscular gymnasts we see today. I wasn’t born to be a size zero, but I could starve myself down to a size six. And that’s what I did. I would have liked myself better if I’d been a size two, but my bones, muscles, and organs always seemed to get in the way.

What truly devastates me about those years is how much energy I wasted on dieting. I was always worried about being thinner, so I was always starving myself, and, consequently, I was always starving. I would daydream about food, then hate myself — hate my body — for wanting to eat. I went from class to activity to activity, then bar-hopped and danced all night, and I was disgusted with my body for demanding the fuel it needed to keep up.

It’s funny. When the Stoolies or incels were piling on me on social media, the first thing they called me was “fat.” As if it were the worst thing they could call someone. They couldn’t fathom a worse insult. They couldn’t think of a worse crime for a woman than being unattractive to men. But the joke was on them, because they couldn’t say anything to me I hadn’t already said to myself a thousand times.

But mostly, in hindsight, I wonder what I could have put into the world if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with not eating. If I’d put half the effort into well, anything, that I put into starvation dieting, I could have taken over the world. And that’s the point I want to make. The patriarchy conspires to weaponize women’s bodies so that we remain small, hungry, and preoccupied. Who has the energy to run for office, organize politically, or rise to the top of her career when she’s so focused on getting to or maintaining the perfect weight?

I lived through the supermodel era of the 80s and heroin chic in the 90s. I remember crying myself to sleep at night because I would never look like Elle McPherson in a swimsuit or Kate Moss in Calvin Klein underwear. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, just as women were entering the workforce and public office in larger numbers than ever before, the trend became for women to be as slight as possible. Slight in our bodies, slight in our voices, slight in our places in the world.

Neither do I believe it’s a coincidence now that, as women fight (again) for our reproductive freedom and equal say in the world, we’re being told, once again, to become small.

I refuse.

I refuse to become smaller, to become less, at a time when men are seriously claiming that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, should be submissive to their husbands, and should remain at home, in the kitchen, preferably barefoot and pregnant. We have so many more important things to worry about than what size we wear. We can’t win back the tradwives if we’re all too starved to argue.

For most of my life, I’ve been told I’m too much. Too loud. Too talkative. Too comfortable. Too big. I take up too much space. I interrupt too much. I speak my mind too much. Too much, too much, too much.

Despite what cosmetics companies tell you, aging is a gift. Along with the wrinkles and gray hairs comes an understanding that one can never be “too much.” Women are supposed to take up space. We were put on this earth to take up space. So let’s allow our thighs to spread out to their natural shapes, stop sucking in our guts, and expand into it, physically, politically, culturally, and spiritually. Otherwise, we just leave more space for the men.

And sure, there are plenty of women who are naturally thin, and God bless them and their incredible metabolisms. May they continue to enjoy all the tacos and truffle fries in the world. As I said, I don’t mean for this piece to body-shame thin women. But I do want to grab Gen Z by the shoulders, shake them forcefully, and tell them that this is all a scam. You will never be thin enough to make society or men happy. And one day you’ll be 50 and look back at yourself in your 20s and wish you could have that body again, and you’ll curse yourself for not loving yourself more. You might as well enjoy the food and the space you occupy. After all, you earned every bit of it.

I no longer long to be Princess Leia in the metal bikini, which made her so easy for Jabba the Hutt to control and enslave. I’d rather be General Leia Organa — the loudmouth, bossy, not quite-as-svelte leader of the Rebel Alliance.

What a badass. ‘

We no longer aspire to be skinny. We want to be strong.

In other news: We have seen the revolution, and it is Waymo; Kash is having a great time on your dime; The IRS is looking to “settle” with Trump; and the High Note.

Here we go.

Once again, all the ads beehiiv offered me this week were AI-related, which means I’m choosing not to run any of them. If you’d like to contribute to LMP and support independent media, you can become a paid subscriber, leave a tip, or even just share on social media or with your friends.

I’m sorry, I can’t stop laughing at this. Imagine going outside your house and seeing this in your neighborhood.

I would think it was the beginning of The Stand (which, by the way, has one of the best opening video compilations in TV history). That cowbell still hits hard. The rest of it kinda sucked, though.

Just when you think Kash Patel has done something normal and decent, like visiting the USS Arizona memorial in Hawaii, he has to go and make it weird.

VIP snorkeling. How is that a thing? I went looking for said VIP tour to ascertain how much it cost US taxpayers. Alas, turns out the “general public” can not snorkel at Pearl Harbor or around the Arizona. So, no snorkeling for you, peasant.

As you will recall, Donald Trump is suing the IRS for $10 billion, alleging that the IRS leaked his tax returns during his first term in office. Normally, this would be laughable (and Presidents are supposed to release their tax returns), but now that the DOJ has abdicated its duties entirely, this is sort of like Jeff Bezos suing the Washington Post. Who’s going to stop him?

Clearly, not the IRS.

So, basically, this is a slush fund that will either “disappear” the same way the Trump library fund has, or it will go to Trump’s cronies as a reward for their loyalty. What fun. Happy Birthday, America!

Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.

Stephen Colbert is determined to go out strong.

Hey, survive and advance out there today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down.

Follow Julie on Bluesky and Instagram so she can get another book contract.