How a well-intended term produced unintended consequences
Earlier this month, the Associated Free Press released an article on a dangerous new fad among teenagers in Western culture: the “thigh gap.”
The thigh gap is exactly what it sounds like: a gap in between one’s thighs, even when one’s legs are close together. It is achieved by the most obvious of channels – namely poor dieting, malnutrition and eating disorders – and the term is growing in popularity.
A simple Google search produces countless Tumblr accounts, Wiki pages, Yahoo! answers, and blogs dedicated to the coveted successor to cleavage. Scrolling through the countless posts of confused and curious teens and images of Photoshopped legs, it is hard to forget that two years ago, the thigh gap had nothing to do with eating disorders and size zero jeans.
The fraternity over at the now über-famous website, The Chive, began praising the sorority of thigh gaps in early October of 2011 when they began a weekly post title, “Mind the Gap Monday;” which featured pictures submitted by female fans of the site. It undoubtedly began as a homage to women who were able to achieve a thigh gap, but at no point did the pictures show women who were dangerously underweight, and it certainly didn’t just praise thigh gaps in “skinny” women. Some pictures featured women with wide spread legs, some women were skinny, and others were just very fit and healthy women who – because of their affinity for squatting and weight training in general – were able to produce a diamond shape between their thighs and pelvis.
It wasn’t long after The Chive began praising the thigh gap that it became a success on 4chan; an image board on the internet. Again, many of the posts were displaying athletic women who were able to achieve the coveted diamond gap.
Somewhere down the line, it was decided by the internet that the thigh gap was best expressed as a synonym for “skinny.”
“Together we can lose weight. Together we can be skinny,” raves one Tumblr user. “Together we can be a size zero with a beautiful thigh gap and flat stomach. Together we can be happy and finally say that we love our bodies.”
The craze is explained by clinical psychologist, Barbara Greenberg, as being a “pipe dream via extreme dieting and exercise.” Greenberg continues, “Most women are not built that way to have that space between their thighs…It is a matter of bone structure [which] the majority of women do not have.”
There is a backlash to this trend happening across the internet though – a simple Twitter search reveals that young males and females are using satire, recognition of the beauty of different body types, and a strong dose of common sense to point out the flaws in the messages sent out about the modern thigh gap.
The phenomenon of the thigh gap needs to end. Its reputation is now laden with the self-loathing, depression and even suicidal behaviour by young women who place stigma on themselves for a trend that, in most women, is genetically impossible. Teenagers who look to adults for cues on fashion, health and lifestyle is not a new trend, but it is one that must be paid more attention to by the parents of children. They must to be privy to the fact that the internet knows no regulation and possesses wealth of information – information that in this case, can be detrimental to their teenager’s health.