Jorja Smith — not for your consumption & Fannita Leggett — when unspeakable truths are spoken

Beauty and desirability in recent digital news.

— Not for your consumption

In April this year, Jorja Smith dares us to ask her about her again in her new single Try Me. She describes the single as “putting yourself out there, in front of a world that has many opinions as it only ever used to be me really being my own critic.” in Clash. Understanding the insatiable demands the industry and its consumers have of oneself, the song is addressed to the world, with its many “opinions out of my control”, she further states. The songstress leads the percussion of the melody to tell us that she will not hide and she knows herself.

Jorja Smith has always garnered the attention. Whether it was for her talent as a singer and a songwriter, her rise in the music industry or for her looks, an audience has always gravitated towards her. While being a mixed-race woman in the entertainment industry has its challenges, the added societal expectations to thinness have plagued every content associated with Smith. Tiktoks or Tweets showcasing her live performances are flooded with comments or retweets regarding her weight gain and she is aware. In a recent interview with NET-A-PORTER, Jorja Smith explains the following: “if I’m on TikTok, I’ll see comments, and they won’t be all negative but… [for example], I’ve put on some weight, which is normal because I’m not a child.” With a career that has granted her access to the fixation others have had on her body in the past and in the present, I cannot help but think of the ways Jorja Smith has been talked about like she was for our consumption.

From enthusiastic observations to vulgar and salacious comments, admirers’ voices on Jorja’s beauty have almost overshadowed hers. They grasp onto her body, onto her personhood, onto her beauty like toddlers fighting for their turns to play with their newest toy. Smith has been objectified and has been subjected to digital sexual harassment almost from the very start of her career, at 18, 19 years old. Now, with her recent weight gain, those same admirers complain about their inability to sexually harass the vocalist. Online, presumptuousness is no stranger and here, it materializes through misogynistic remarks, with people rating, commenting and questioning Smith’s appearance. People associated with weight gain and/or fatness are at high risk of experiencing fatphobia: “the implicit and explicit bias of overweight[/fat] individuals that is rooted in a sense of blame and presumed moral failing”. Angela Alberga, an assistant professor in the department of health, kinesiology and applied physiology at Concordia University, details how “exposure to weight bias triggers physiological and behavioural changes linked to poor metabolic health and increased weight gain.” She then expresses that fat shaming is linked to depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, eating disorders and exercise avoidance, in addition to spikes in cortisol , drops in self-control and the risk of binge eating increasing.

And while earlier in Jorja Smith’s career, her name was linked to terms like pretty privilege, it is now linked to her weight gain and to comparisons to her 18-year-old body at the age of 26. Though claims about the vocalist benefitting from pretty privilege as a light skin woman in the entertainment industry were legitimate observations, dealing with such dehumanizing and objectifying commentary on oneself when perceived as desirable opens up the conversation to the harms of prettiness and the adequate terms of desirability politics.

Pretty privilege out, desirability politics in

The privilege in pretty privilege only allows us to speak about physical attractiveness as “a social commodity, with personal and professional value attached to it.” Our implicit biases of pretty people lead us to think that because they are pretty and/or attractive, they also are more productive as employees or smarter students. However, when Black women talk online about how their prettiness and their desirability has been perceived at work, the treatment is different. It is the very recognition of their prettiness and their desirability that makes them victims of harassment, disrespect and judgment because of their Black womanhood, because society cannot conceive Black women as pretty or desirable. Thus, the Black women expressing their grievances online understand that they are being punished for defying societal expectations. Psychologist Huberta Jackson-Lowman describes it as the globalization of Eurocentric standards of beauty, which “has resulted in the development of industries that support it, the marketing of images that reify it, the structuring of policies that reward it, and the enactment of interpersonal and personal behavioral routines that emulate it”. Again, though the Black women mentioned above may be deemed attractive or beautiful, the harassment they will endure is due to the globalization of standards of beauty that never factored them in which manifests through misogynoir.

I think that when we approach desirability as politics, we are granted the capacity to speak away from the subjectivity in beauty (e.g. beauty is in the eye of the beholder) and speak closer to understanding that beauty/prettiness and desirability are exclusionary and they have always been. As described by the writer and organizer, Da’Shaun L. Harrison, desirability politics is a politic that determines those who gain and hold “social and structural power through the affairs of sensuality often predicated on anti-Blackness, anti-fatness, (trans)misogyny, cissexism, queer-antagonism, and all other structural violence.” Furthermore, prettiness can be objective, desirability politics isn’t. Additionally, since pretty privilege cannot eliminate gender-based violence, is it truly a privilege (inquires @Jaded42O in the comments of this video done by Fab Socialism - a video that has tremendously inspired this article)? Desirability politics informs us that no matter how beautiful someone might be considered, they can still be victims of anti-Blackness, anti-fatness, misogyny, etc.

— when unspeakable truths are spoken

Fannita Leggett has been known for her forwardness and her wit on TikTok and this past week, the content creator has sparked controversy on the notions of beauty. On the Allegedly Speaking podcast’s TikTok, a clip is shown of Leggett expressing candidly that she doesn’t think everyone is beautiful (externally) and that not everyone is meant to be, assuring that ugliness is ok.

This was certainly received negatively, with people coming for her looks and questioning her position to admit this. I’ve thought about if this was a messenger issue. Had it been a white woman saying this, I still doubt it would’ve been received well. However, don’t we all know that beauty is intentionally exclusionary? That our insecurities, our fear of ugliness are the perfect outlines for business models? Capitalism convinces us that through specific steps, we too can be beautiful and it requires us to chase beauty. Through trends (e.g. the clean girl aesthetic, latte makeup, strawberry makeup, etc.), through cosmetic enhancements, through diet plans and through hair transplants, we refine ourselves, pull here and suck in there, to escape ugliness, only exacerbating the idea that ugliness might be. As stated in

Jessica DeFino

’s 2020 article in Teen Vogue, “‘The bottom line is always to sell products,’ Phyllis Ellis, the documentarian behind 2018’s Toxic Beauty, tells Teen Vogue. ‘If we think the beauty industry is about anything else, that’s a mistake’”.

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PS: I think Fannita’s statement bothered many people because of who she is becoming externally. The content creator speaks honestly about her weight loss journey, and some have suggested that her perception of self might’ve been altered. Through the numerous replies that clip has received, people hint that Fannita might think of herself more highly now that she is of a smaller size, which would allow her to think that what she said was appropriate. I doubt her perception of herself has changed in that way specifically, as she has always prided herself in saying controversial things and literally calls herself the “#1 menace in the nation,” but I know that others view her differently and struggle with her positionality in relation to her social identities.

Fat people are often seen as comic reliefs, superficial and lacking substance. So, as she is losing weight, people are starting to project the ways they feel about how she should feel about herself. People want to put her back in her place (ever since that clip, she has been harassed digitally on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok) because our society denies space for fat people or those still associated with fatness. In essence, I believe that ugliness can exist and that you should not be abused, discriminated against, harassed or bullied because of it. I want to believe that ugliness doesn’t come in the way of one’s worth.

I recently had my own poot moment and was humbled, to say the least.