Not a single insecurity we’ve ever had about our bodies has been by accident. As far back as the 1950s, advertising brought tiny waists into fashion, a beauty standard that would endure through the “heroin chic” era of the 2000s, in which tabloids dissected celebrities’ bodies with increasingly rigorous standards and new terminology for so-called flaws like “love handles” and “cankles.” In the late 2010s, Tumblr cultivated an obsession with thigh gaps among chronically online millennials. Soon after, “hip dip” insecurity emerged.
Earlier this year, we reached a full-circle moment in January when “legging legs” content began to trend on TikTok, complete with 2014-style thinspiration repackaged with a different name for Gen Z. The app has since banned that content, and searching for it now offers eating disorder resources for users—but that doesn’t change how TikTok’s fast-paced algorithm and cyclical trend culture have made way for a new type of manufactured self-doubt: the micro-insecurity.
Cortisol face. Bad facial harmony. Septum arms. Double lip lines. Myofascial imbalance. Each new micro-insecurity zooms in on a hyper-specific body part and cloaks it with unfamiliar terminology, re-introducing it as the latest iota of your body that must be closely analyzed if not fixed or dispelled. Due to the acceleration of the TikTok algorithm, the monikers for these so-called “flaws” rise in virality and fall faster than you can scroll, regardless if it’s being engaged with out of insecurity or, in the case of “legging legs” and “septum arms,” a wide influx of response content made in protest to that made-up flaw.
There’s a perpetually hellish seasonality to the virality of these alleged bodily flaws, to the point that it feels as if we are all mere spectators to a feverish trend cycle treadmill dedicated to insecurity all in itself. We’re now policing our own bodies at the whims of an algorithm—and therefore criticizing ourselves at a faster pace and maybe even to a greater degree than ever before.
The more the virtual world entangles itself with IRL living, the more legitimacy we grant all the aesthetically aspirational content on our screens. “Having the perfect face and body—or the perfect image of the face and body in the virtual world like the so-called Instagram face—is becoming key to identity, [the] key to being ‘good enough,’” says Heather Widdows, Ph.D, a professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick who specializes in the ethics of beauty culture. “We believe that if we have the right face and body, if we are thin, firm, smooth, and young enough, then we will be rewarded with the good life.” Our image-based culture predicates and affirms this type of content, Widdows says. “In this context, any perceived flaws, however minor, are going to appear huge.”