The year in bodies: How women told their own stories in 2024

While social media thrived on hyper-surveillance and vitriol, cinema had a few delicate rebuttals

KARACHI:

2024 was a strange year for women and their bodies. The Victoria's Secret fashion show, scrapped in 2019 over a lack of diversity, plummeting ratings, and mounting criticism, returned without fanfare — or reflection. Its revival barely registered, generating more indifference than buzz.

Social media remained as cruel as ever, sharpening its claws on women's bodies. Margot Robbie's pregnancy weight became fodder for the internet's ugliest corners, denounced as "tragic" and "revolting." In India, Deepika Padukone's baby bump was picked apart for being "too small," while closer to home, Hiba Bukhari was branded "shameless" for making no effort to conceal her pregnancy.

Meanwhile, 2024 saw a surge in dermatologists, cosmetic surgeons, and self-proclaimed beauty experts flooding Instagram and TikTok feeds. These specialists, who typically offer skincare tips and rank trending products, became part of a larger internet obsession: exposing the supposed cosmetic procedures of celebrities. With meticulous zoom-ins and side-by-side comparisons, these videos dissect famous faces, labelling them "natural" or "suspicious," often in tones more punitive than educational.

While social media's ever-expanding platforms continued to host a culture of hyper-surveillance and vitriol, women in cinema offered delicate rebuttals to the pressure to conform.

 

 

 

 

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Trendsetters, naysayers

In many ways, body positivity is still a novel reckoning, often at odds with a sprawling image-fuelled economy and the very concept of fashion. Especially one where influencers and content creators have social currency and microstardoms, trends are not just born on the runway. TikTok has given us major beauty fads from looking like old money to "demure" makeup routines. Courtesy of online influencers, 2024 also had a long brush with myths such as cortisol face (your stress is to blame for that double chin allegedly) and mouth taping (a scientifically unbacked way to breathe right).

For all the scrutiny they endure, it bears repeating: bodies themselves are fashion, not just the hangers for what's marketed as such. Corsets and bustiers have long stood as symbols of society's obsession with moulding the body into an ideal. Kim Kardashian's "slim-thick" curves ushered in an entire economy of implants and Brazilian butt lifts — though she continues to deny having undergone the latter. More than a decade earlier, Kareena Kapoor Khan's size-zero transformation had carved out its own, convoluted fanbase.

In a candid appearance on Ranveer Allahbadia's podcast, Kareena reflected on the intense dietary supervision and more than a year of work it took to achieve her famously waif-like look for the 2008 action film Tashan. Would she do it again? "I think, today everyone and anyone can do what they want to — I don't need to be a size zero."

Kareena's optimism, though hopeful, may be hard to fully embrace. The much-touted cultural shift toward inclusivity might well prove to be another fleeting trend. Yet Bollywood, for all its long history of glorifying slenderness, has occasionally departed from its narrow ideals of beauty. One of the most striking cinematic moments of 2024 came from Sanjay Leela Bhansali's lavish and divisive Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar, where Aditi Rao Hydari's spellbinding "Gajagamini" walk in the song Saiyaan Hatto Jaao captivated audiences.

 

The elephant walk

The term "Gajagamini" translates to "majestic like an elephant's gait." In the Mahabharata, regal figures such as Draupadi are described as "mada-gaja-gamini" — a woman whose walk evokes the commanding elegance of an elephant in heat. By modern standards, the phrase may seem inelegant, even jarring, but its essence points to a past where beauty was defined differently, though not necessarily inclusively. History, after all, offers no era where "beautiful" truly describes everyone. In Saiyaan Hatto Jaao, Hydari channels this archetype with a sultry elegance, her deliberate, voluptuous movements rolling to the beat.

Bodies, however, take time to become. Transforming them to mirror Hydari's curves or Kareena's size zero demands more than just a wardrobe overhaul or a binge-watch of red-carpet highlights. And scepticism remains vital when encountering media's seemingly earnest departures from the norm. Whether Hydari's Gajagamini walk signals a recalibration of cinematic ideals or is merely a one-off anomaly remains a futile question. But her magnetic performance this year is a reminder of the ever-shifting — and often volatile — parameters of desirability across time and culture.

 

Images and promises

Desirability is a thorny subject for feminism. For starters, the notion that beauty is "for the self" is hard to assert without suspicion. If beauty isn't for the self, then who is it for? And how does it avoid indulging the male gaze? Modest wear and revealing clothing alike have been criticised for sexualising women, and in the chorus of voices critiquing an economy that prizes exposed bodies, there lingers the spectre of the "undesirable feminist": the one who shuns makeup, shaving, and dressing up, rejecting the very tenets of desirability.

Few cultural artifacts encapsulate these tensions between empowerment and objectification quite like the item song. Regardless of one's politics, an item song is never neutral. The formula is familiar: a woman performs for a room full of men, her body framed for their gaze and gratification. The spectacle is always misogynistic, shaped by patriarchal fantasies of beauty — most commonly, the ultra-thin, stick-like figure.

Aaj Ki Raat, from the horror-comedy hit Stree 2, is a partial outlier. As one of 2024's most talked-about songs, it featured Tamannaah Bhatia draped in emerald-green, her waist creasing and arms fleshy, her body unapologetically alive. In times when everything begs to be photographed and shared, images can be powerful, if only because they appear in a gallery. Just like Kamala Harris and Barack Obama are temptingly different in a political carousel led by men or white people. Images are promises, often unfulfilled but promises nonetheless.

In Aaj Ki Raat, Tamannaah promises she is sexy precisely because she is not thin and that upends at least one rule of the genre. An actor performing an item song cannot claim to not care about what men find attractive. She can, however, "reveal" that men do find thick women like her attractive after all.

Tamannaah fulfills her promise, insofar digital reception is concerned. The song has spawned a wide fan base, raking in over 200 million views on YouTube, with many on Instagram and TikTok replicating her choreography, a languid and uninhibited routine that becomes most women with curves to flaunt.

 

The item song

Reflecting on the song's impact in an interview with Instant Bollywood, Tamannaah revealed how it reshaped her own relationship with her body. "I somewhere feel that maybe Aaj Ki Raat helped me accept my body also," she said. She recounted a moment at a party when a woman approached her, visibly moved by another of her performances, Kaavaalaa from Jailer. "One lady walked up to me and said, 'Thank you. You know, because of you, we curvy women feel accepted. You were so big and fat, and yet you were enjoying yourself.'"

The comment stunned Tamannaah. "For the first time, I registered that, according to this lady, I was fat," she admitted. "I didn't completely understand that until I heard it from someone else." She also touched on the growing pressures of body image in the digital age. "Today, everyone has a phone. Everyone has this pressure. Earlier, it was just me, as an actor. It was part of my job to look at my body. But today, every young girl is doing that."

The epithet "curvy" itself is an exercise in moderation. It is a caution against bodies that spill in the wrong way. The ones that do not curve when and where they should. To celebrate Aaj Ki Raat as a win for representation is also textbook postfeminism — an attempt to polish a deeply patriarchal institution instead of dismantling it. But an outright dismissal will rob the present moment of some necessary insights. Is the world today really that different and all for the better when it comes to body positivity? Can slightly better, bigger, and askew ever pave the way for a fundamentally different entertainment industry?

Not for men

Perhaps, the biggest reinforcement 2024 offered was that there's a market for everything and everyone. On more than one occasion, it meant addressing an audience that's not men.

Dark, glossy, and unapologetically bold — assertive makeup trends under the banner of the "female gaze" surged this year. Influencers drove the point home with side-by-side comparisons: the female gaze as smudged, smoky eyes and sleek lines, the male gaze as fuller lips and doe eyes. This visual commentary set the tone for a year when women reclaimed spaces in genres that have long commodified their bodies.

In Hollywood, two films in particular captured women reclaiming the screen space in two very graphic genres notorious for objectifying women's bodies: Coralie Fargeat's visceral body horror The Substance and Anna Kendrick's directorial debut, Woman of the Hour.

In The Substance, Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a former Hollywood starlet desperate to reclaim her youth. Turning to a back-alley drug, she creates a younger, "better" version of herself: Sue, played by Margaret Qualley. What ensues is a grotesque spectacle of jealousy and bodily disintegration as Elisabeth's envy manifests in blood-soaked, visceral eruptions — hunched backs, rotting fingers, and grotesque appendages brought to life with prosthetics and practical effects.

Elisabeth watches Sue with a toxic mix of admiration and self-loathing, and we watch Elisabeth, reminded that women, too, watch women - others and themselves. And sometimes men watching women are simply collateral damage, not the goal.

 

Reworking true crime

Woman of the Hour is a promising take on serial killer Rodney Alcaca who famously appeared on the TV show The Dating Game in 1978 between murders. Genre-wise, the film resembles true crime but Kendrick refuses sensationalism without compromising on terror.

The film unfolds as a nonlinear narrative, following Alcaca's victims and near-victims as their ordinary days are upended by his charming façade. Kendrick's deliberate restraint is what sets the film apart. There is no gratuitous gore, no lingering shots of bodies subjected to violence. Instead, the horror lies in what isn't shown, captured in tight close-ups and meticulously edited sequences. The dread is palpable because every woman watching the film understands that fear — without needing to see it spelled out.

It is both technically impossible and questionable to exclude men from the audience but this year certainly makes a case for ignoring them. Tamannaah in Aaj Ki Raat may not be able to escape the male gaze in a song genre premised on it. Given body horror's propensity for nudity, Margaret Qualley's sexualised foil to an aging Demi Moore in The Substance may be guilty of the crime it condemns. But like it or not, these figures on screen expand the definition of desirability to include non-conforming bodies. It may be a fad, a desperate negotiation with patriarchy. Or maybe, just maybe, it's an acknowledgement that women, too, want to see themselves reflected on screen — big, ageing, and unconventional.

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