Too fat, too thin, too old, too sexy

What the SI Swimsuit Runway Show reveals about our beliefs around beauty, aging, and women’s bodies.

We just can’t win.

That was my overwhelming feeling reading through the reactions to this year’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Runway Show.

But first, the good. It feels like SI is moving toward greater inclusivity at a time when the broader culture seems to be moving backward.

While our social media feeds are littered with hyper-thinness, cosmetic procedures, and increasingly narrow beauty standards, the SI runway featured more body diversity than we’ve seen in decades. It felt like true size inclusivity from fat to thin, broad to narrow. It even included a woman who was six months pregnant.

But I think what’s even more interesting is the larger conversation the event generated. It’s like a giant cultural Rorschach test for our beliefs around bodies and beauty. We aren’t just looking at the women on the runway, we are looking at our own beliefs about women’s bodies. And it isn’t always pretty.

Some people saw Lizzo and thought, “too fat.”

Some people saw Bethenny Frankel and thought, “too old.”

Some people saw the traditional swimsuit models and thought, “too thin.”

Some people saw confidence and thought, “too much.”

For every person who saw a woman owning her space, there was another person wondering why she was there at all. And honestly that’s where these conversations get complicated.

For a brief period, it felt like we were genuinely broadening our definition of beauty. Then came Ozempic, the return of extreme thinness, and this algorithm-driven feeding frenzy around appearance that fuels an endless quest for optimization. Now it’s like we don’t know when to stop. And it isn’t just that we expanded beauty standards and then pulled back. We never went far enough.

We’ve regressed, not just in our acceptance of women’s bodies, but in our acceptance of women, period. When the standards are this narrow, women spend far too much time chasing impossible ideals, achievable only by a sliver of the population, even with the explosion of GLP-1 use. Why do you think our celebrities are thinner than they were just two years ago? The goal posts moved again to preserve the narrow ideal.

But the real kicker is this: We’ve never been quicker to judge one another.

And I’m going to be the first to admit I was guilty of this watching the SI runway clips.

Because I follow Olympian Ilona Maher, who regularly talks about loving the body you’re in, I’ve been seeing her prep and promotion of the event for weeks. She regularly rocks a bikini and talks about normalizing bodies that don’t fit the traditional mold. Having spent most of my life with a broader, muscular shape, I relate to her body more than most.

It made me so happy to see a body like hers on that catwalk and then almost equally as disappointed by the white and blue-striped one-piece she wore. And I wasn’t the only one. So many people took issue with that suit that she ended up addressing it.

“In terms of ‘it’s not very flattering,’ okay, I hear ya. I don’t think it was my best look I’ve ever worn, or the best suit I’ve ever worn, for sure,” Maher said.

But then she got to the real truth of the matter.

“Is it unflattering, or is it just like a bigger body existing in a suit?”

It took me a while to untangle my own reaction, and it most definitely wasn’t about the swimsuit. It was about years of conditioning around what bodies are supposed to look like. And it was fed by the complicated relationship I’ve had with my own body.

To be clear, I want people to love Maher’s body. To see it and celebrate it as much as they would the so-called norm, and the reason is simple and selfish: her body looks closer to mine than the bodies I’ve spent most of my life aspiring to. I want acceptance for her body, because I want acceptance for my body and for all the other bodies out there that have never fit. My knee-jerk reaction came from fear, that bodies like ours are only acceptable in their most flattering states.

I didn’t arrive at that conclusion right away, but it feels most aligned with my truth.

And I think if more of us turned inward, we’d see that our reactions to the SI runway say more about us and how we feel about our own bodies than they do about those on display. Viewed through this lens, the event becomes an opportunity to examine our own beliefs around size, beauty, and expectations for women, and to identify where there’s still work to be done.

Take the reaction to Frankel.

From my corner of the internet, it looked like her presence on the runway was the most polarizing, with most of the criticism centered on her being too old to be on that stage, as if it wasn’t okay for her to be wearing a bikini.

What fascinated me was how quickly the conversation became a referendum on what women aren’t allowed to do after a certain age.

Like we’re supposed to stop focusing on looks.

Like we’re supposed to stop wanting to feel attractive.

Like we’re supposed to stop trying altogether, because there’s a point where effort becomes desperation.

The headline that stopped me in my tracks was from Allure: So, when exactly can we stop being hot? It was paired with a pic of Frankel’s mid-catwalk strut in her crochet string bikini, complete with bored pout.

The headline hinges on you thinking you were once hot. Which, for the record, I did not. Or, if I did, it was in some alternate universe where unconventional was acceptable.

At 51, I’m not really concerned with being hot. Yes, I’d like to be considered attractive, but I’m more concerned with how I keep this blessed body functioning through the remaining days of my life. Maybe my bar is too low.

Here’s the question I keep coming back to:

Is there a way to care for myself without treating my aging body as something that needs to be fixed?

These days, I spend a lot of time thinking about this. I still want to look good. I just don’t want to kill myself or drive myself insane doing it. More importantly, I want to feel good doing all the things I enjoy doing.

I’m not actively pursuing thinness, but I am pursuing fitness, because I’m looking at what’s going to sustain me for the long haul. It’s a more balanced, whole-body approach to health and fitness. But I’m also not ready to completely stop caring about appearance. While I stopped dyeing my hair five years ago, I’m still getting Botox, a habit I picked up during my divorce days. When I told my aesthetician on my last visit that I might not be back again, she looked at me like I had lost my mind.

But I’m not here to pretend that I’m not 51, that I’m not aging, that I’m not going to die. I want to be beautiful in my own skin, in my own body, and I want to take care of myself. I’m just still trying to figure out what that looks like.

Seeing those runway pics also forced me to confront how much we continue to conflate thinness with health.

Maher, who is easily one of the strongest and fittest people to walk that catwalk, doesn’t display many of the markers we’ve been trained to associate with fitness. She doesn’t have the most visible abs. She doesn’t have the lowest body fat.

Most of us are more likely to associate fitness with women like Frankel or fellow Bravo star Stassi Schroeder, who had an entire Daily Mail story devoted to the traditional 600-calorie-a-day diet she followed to get runway-ready. (I’m throwing up in my mouth writing this.)

There’s little question that Maher is more physically capable than almost anyone standing beside her, yet we’ve become so conditioned to equate thinness with fitness that many of us no longer recognize the difference. Which makes this conversation all the more important.

We’re at a point in time, where our standards appear to be narrowing in real-time, which is what makes SI’s parade of diversity so much more important. Let’s face it, many of us aren’t gonna do the work the moment asks of us. Many of us are simply making a snap judgment and then moving on to the next thing in our feed, without stopping to question why a certain body might make us feel a certain way.

If you’re uncomfortable, if you’re having a strong reaction, it might be worth asking why. It might be worth digging a little deeper.

I’m a full-on believer in just wearing the swimsuit, of just getting in the photo, of being a full participant in this thing called life, and not letting how I look—or rather how I feel about myself—dictate what I do. For me, this is the only way to face this never-ending barrage of images and messages about how I’m supposed to be.

This year’s SI Swimsuit Runway reminded me that there are many ways to inhabit a body, many ways to age, many ways to be beautiful.

All of those women knew their bodies would be dissected online.

They showed up anyway.

Maybe that’s the message.

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Now it’s your turn …

If you had complicated thoughts watching the SI Runway clips, I’d love to hear about them. What body, beauty, or age beliefs did the runway challenge for you?