Valerie Gorham: And welcome back to another episode of more than you think.
Valerie Gorham: Yes, this is a podcast, as you might have already guessed, but it's also very political.
Valerie Gorham: Ooh, we're gonna get political.
Valerie Gorham: We always get political.
Valerie Gorham: But if this is your first time listening, then welcome.
Valerie Gorham: This is a podcast about how political, economic, and social events are intertwined with pop culture, music, movies, entertainment, all of that.
Valerie Gorham: And today, as I said last episode, we are going to talk about female beauty standards and how everyone is super skinny.
Valerie Gorham: All the girls are skinny again.
Valerie Gorham: Well, not all of them, but slim.
Valerie Gorham: Thic is losing its power.
Valerie Gorham: We're losing our power.
Valerie Gorham: I'm just kidding.
Valerie Gorham: I'm not.
Valerie Gorham: But women in Hollywood are getting scarily thin, and it's apparently misogynist or something to point it out.
Valerie Gorham: So a few examples of this that I've seen recently are Emma Stone, Lily Collins, Maude Apatow, Demi Moore, and Kaia Gerber.
Valerie Gorham: Now, I know what you're thinking, girl.
Valerie Gorham: Kaia Gerber's always been skinny.
Valerie Gorham: Yeah, she's always been skinny.
Valerie Gorham: She's a model.
Valerie Gorham: She's the daughter of Cindy Crawford.
Valerie Gorham: Cindy Crawford is obviously also skinny.
Valerie Gorham: And these people are naturally thin, right?
Valerie Gorham: But then you see her show up on the Oscars red carpet half the size she was before.
Valerie Gorham: And when you're naturally thin, you can eat and you'll still be thin, but you don't look unhealthy.
Valerie Gorham: Like, for example, someone that comes to mind is Zendaya.
Valerie Gorham: She's obviously naturally thin, but you can't see all of her bones, and you cannot almost see the veins.
Valerie Gorham: And her.
Valerie Gorham: You know, she looks.
Valerie Gorham: She looks nourished.
Valerie Gorham: She looks like she's glowing.
Valerie Gorham: She's healthy.
Valerie Gorham: She looks happy.
Valerie Gorham: And with Kaia Gerber, as beautiful as she is, because it's not okay to call someone ugly because of these things are so okay, she doesn't look healthy.
Valerie Gorham: And same thing with a lot of these other people that I named.
Valerie Gorham: They just look like they are starving themselves.
Valerie Gorham: And the same thing always happens when you see a woman who is, like, rapidly losing weight and you start to see all of her bones.
Valerie Gorham: Bones that you know that, like, anatomically, biologically, you're not supposed to be seeing those bones, right?
Valerie Gorham: You see these women and you say, okay, that doesn't look right.
Valerie Gorham: That looks unhealthy.
Valerie Gorham: And then people reply to you in comments, and they're like, don't talk about women's bodies.
Valerie Gorham: Stop talking about women's bodies.
Valerie Gorham: Let me tell you something right now.
Valerie Gorham: Women's bodies need to be talked about more.
Valerie Gorham: But not by men.
Valerie Gorham: That's the problem.
Valerie Gorham: All the women that I named, none of them were fat.
Valerie Gorham: None of them were ever fat, probably in their whole lives.
Valerie Gorham: And then they show up to these red carpets, like, 1% body fat, right?
Valerie Gorham: Like I said, you can see bones that you know that it's not okay for you to be seeing.
Valerie Gorham: Like, if you can see those bones, that person needs to go to the hospital, right?
Valerie Gorham: Like, if you look like you could lose to Eugenia Cooney in a fight, you need to go to the hospital.
Valerie Gorham: And, like, for example, there was, like, this recent clip of Margot Robbie going around on Twitter that I saw, and people were, like, retweeting, quoting, being like, why does she look skinnier?
Valerie Gorham: Like, why.
Valerie Gorham: Why would she need to lose weight?
Valerie Gorham: And sometimes, you know, things go on behind the scenes that we don't know, and that's fine.
Valerie Gorham: But the thing is that it's being glamorized.
Valerie Gorham: It's being, like, shown as, like, the standard.
Valerie Gorham: Like, like, that's what everyone should look like.
Valerie Gorham: But that's not the case.
Valerie Gorham: Like, we do need to eat food.
Valerie Gorham: Ladies, like, do eat a chicken nugget.
Valerie Gorham: A chicken nugget every now and then is okay.
Valerie Gorham: Like a.
Valerie Gorham: What else?
Valerie Gorham: A steak here and there?
Valerie Gorham: Well, yes, and a lot of what you see is, like, these women, they show up with their cheeks sunken into their faces on purpose.
Valerie Gorham: Because that's, like, the beauty standard.
Valerie Gorham: It's like you need to get rid of.
Valerie Gorham: What is it called?
Valerie Gorham: Buccal fat.
Valerie Gorham: I don't know.
Valerie Gorham: I don't know how to pronounce that, but it's like, buccal fat.
Valerie Gorham: Rama ball.
Valerie Gorham: And it's like, okay, your cheeks need to look, like, sharp.
Valerie Gorham: It's like, honey, why are we all trying to achieve the Cillian Murphy face?
Valerie Gorham: He was born that way.
Valerie Gorham: There's nothing we can do.
Valerie Gorham: Like, what are we gonna do?
Valerie Gorham: And of course, we all know what went down with the cast of Wicked.
Valerie Gorham: And the amount of videos that I saw of people saying they couldn't even enjoy the movie because they could see all of Ariana Grande's bones.
Valerie Gorham: It was a lot of video.
Valerie Gorham: There was a lot of people talking about it.
Valerie Gorham: When that happens and society is recognizing it, you know that something's wrong.
Valerie Gorham: But what was good that came out of that whole thing was that people were questioning it.
Valerie Gorham: Like, before, like, back in the early 2000s, she would have shown up to that Wicked premiere Skin and Bones, and the fans would have said, she looks amazing.
Valerie Gorham: She looks great.
Valerie Gorham: She looks healthy.
Valerie Gorham: Now in 2026, 2025, the whole wicked thing happened and everyone was like, that's not good.
Valerie Gorham: That's not right.
Valerie Gorham: She doesn't look okay.
Valerie Gorham: We're worried about her.
Valerie Gorham: And of course, you get the odd person here and there saying, don't talk about women's bodies.
Valerie Gorham: You don't know what she's going through.
Valerie Gorham: But when you say that and when you dismiss the fact that a woman looks unhealthy and that she's obviously trying to fit some sort of beauty standard that is unhealthy, you are perpetuating those unhealthy beauty standards and you're encouraging people to starve themselves and kill themselves in order to look pretty.
Valerie Gorham: To fit a standard that was not created by women for women.
Valerie Gorham: It was created by men for men.
Valerie Gorham: In recent sort of appearances or whatever, not.
Valerie Gorham: She hasn't been out that much.
Valerie Gorham: But Ariana Grande, as soon as the wicked whole thing ended, she.
Valerie Gorham: I think she went to some award shows, the Golden Globes, and she already started looking like she was healthier, like a healthier weight, like, immediately.
Valerie Gorham: It might have been makeup, it might have been hair, whatever.
Valerie Gorham: But I really hope that she's recovering because we cannot lose Ariana.
Valerie Gorham: We cannot lose Ariana.
Valerie Gorham: She's too precious.
Valerie Gorham: She's too precious.
Valerie Gorham: And that voice.
Valerie Gorham: Oh, that music.
Valerie Gorham: Oh, it's like supernatural.
Valerie Gorham: Well, yes, we need that.
Valerie Gorham: We need her now again, whenever someone comes out against a surprising weight loss, the classic let's not talk about women's bodies.
Valerie Gorham: It's either that or you're jealous.
Valerie Gorham: You wish that you were that skinny, you fatty.
Valerie Gorham: And you know what?
Valerie Gorham: I actually am skinny.
Valerie Gorham: So first of all, you can kiss my butt.
Valerie Gorham: And second of all, saying that we shouldn't talk about women's bodies is cowardly because conversations about women's bodies and women's health need to be had.
Valerie Gorham: Women's health is a mystery.
Valerie Gorham: And there are so many conditions that happen to women that we just have to endure because there hasn't been any effort put into understanding how our bodies work and how our health works and how we're actually supposed to be.
Valerie Gorham: For example, tell me why.
Valerie Gorham: I had a friend recently and she told me that she has no idea when her periods are going to come.
Valerie Gorham: And most days she feels like she's going to pass out at any moment.
Valerie Gorham: And her doctors just spam birth control prescriptions for that poor girl.
Valerie Gorham: Which, by the way, birth control is linked to various forms of cancer.
Valerie Gorham: Yes, according to cancer.gov.
Valerie Gorham: So when she tells the doctor, oh, I don't think that this one's helping.
Valerie Gorham: They Say, okay, well, let's switch to a new one, honey.
Valerie Gorham: I don't think it's working.
Valerie Gorham: But that's all that they know.
Valerie Gorham: That's all that they can give her.
Valerie Gorham: And tell me why there's no resolution for girls like me who bleed nearly to death every month and then feel like passing out every now and then.
Valerie Gorham: And then they go to the doctor and get told there's nothing wrong with them because they get their blood tested, they get everything else tested, all the vitamins seem fine, all the minerals seem fine, everything seems fine, all the levels.
Valerie Gorham: And it's like, okay, there's obviously something wrong with me.
Valerie Gorham: People don't just feel like passing out on a random Saturday evening and at the store.
Valerie Gorham: And tell me why we are just now in 2026, finding out that men's health, a man's health has an effect on the mother's pregnancy.
Valerie Gorham: The father's health has an effect on how healthy the mother's pregnancy is.
Valerie Gorham: Could it because nobody gave a crap that women were suffering throughout their pregnancies?
Valerie Gorham: Could it be that men were dominating the medical field and not actually caring about women's health?
Valerie Gorham: Could it be that we are just now women taking over the medical field and starting to do research on ourselves?
Valerie Gorham: Tell me why the lack of research on how pharmaceuticals affect women causes medications to produce adverse effects on women at twice the rate they do in men.
Valerie Gorham: What?
Valerie Gorham: And tell me why from 1977 to 1968, women were excluded from clinical trials by law unless they had life threatening conditions.
Valerie Gorham: And then not until 1933 did Congress pass a law requiring the inclusion of women in clinical trials.
Valerie Gorham: You know, presumably because were being left out.
Valerie Gorham: So yes, women were not only refused the opportunity to receive life saving care, but for those years, no medical treatments were tested on women.
Valerie Gorham: And as recently as 2019, women only still account for 40% of participants.
Valerie Gorham: So pharmaceuticals aren't being tested on women at the same rate they are being tested on men.
Valerie Gorham: So the effects that they have on women are not being observed the way they are in men.
Valerie Gorham: And then of course, there's medical bias that affects women of color more than it does white women.
Valerie Gorham: And female specific conditions make up for 5% of biopharmaceutical research spending, only 1% of which goes to non cancer related issues like, for example, endometriosis, which affects one in 10 women.
Valerie Gorham: But studies are being done on how it affects men.
Valerie Gorham: Mind you, men cannot get endometriosis.
Valerie Gorham: It goes severely underdiagnosed in women because of the lack of research and understanding of the female body.
Valerie Gorham: So we don't even know how it affects women, but we are trying to figure out how it affects men.
Valerie Gorham: Men who have relationships with women with endometriosis, we want to know how it affects them.
Valerie Gorham: What, what, what?
Valerie Gorham: The conversation about women's bodies always circles back to men.
Valerie Gorham: And that is why women need to talk about women's bodies.
Valerie Gorham: Because guess what's going to happen if we don't?
Valerie Gorham: If we stop talking about women's bodies, if we stop talking about women's health, who do you think is going to talk about it?
Valerie Gorham: Because men love to talk about women's bodies, but not in the context of health.
Valerie Gorham: No one is going to care about women's health if women don't.
Valerie Gorham: That is my point here.
Valerie Gorham: Okay?
Valerie Gorham: And no, it is not okay to shame anyone for the way their body looks because eating disorders are a psychological disease.
Valerie Gorham: It is not okay to disease shame people, but it is okay.
Valerie Gorham: And it is necessary to raise concern, especially when you start to see it trending, when you start to see multiple women who work in the same industry who are already slim to begin with, half the size that they used to be in such a short amount of time.
Valerie Gorham: So women need to lead the conversation about women's health.
Valerie Gorham: And I'll start by saying this.
Valerie Gorham: Patriarchy perpetuates eating disorders because men see women as objects to shape, to mold for their consumption.
Valerie Gorham: They like when our bodies are docile and malleable for their consumption.
Valerie Gorham: Men also love to perpetuate this idea of femininity being synonymous with weakness, fragility, silence, and like, smallness.
Valerie Gorham: Right.
Valerie Gorham: So of course they want our bodies to match.
Valerie Gorham: They want us to be thin, they want us to be fragile, weak.
Valerie Gorham: They want us to be barely able to think because they like power for some reason.
Valerie Gorham: I don't know what is going on with that gender.
Valerie Gorham: Like, I really don't.
Valerie Gorham: And I don't like it.
Valerie Gorham: And like, I don't like men.
Valerie Gorham: Like, yes, okay, I saw Jacob Elordi at the Oscars too.
Valerie Gorham: And I took a look, I took a second look, I took a third.
Valerie Gorham: Like, yes, of course I did that.
Valerie Gorham: Like, are you serious?
Valerie Gorham: But as a whole, I don't like that gender very much.
Valerie Gorham: I think they're kind of weird.
Valerie Gorham: I think they're kind of weird.
Valerie Gorham: I'm sorry, guys.
Valerie Gorham: I'm sorry.
Valerie Gorham: You guys make me uncomfortable.
Valerie Gorham: But yes, thinness is a cultural standard, especially in like European and Asian cultures.
Valerie Gorham: Like lighter skin type cultures is what I mean.
Valerie Gorham: I know this because I'm half Hispanic and Girl, let me tell you down South.
Valerie Gorham: South America, if you're skinny, that ain't good.
Valerie Gorham: It's like, girl, eat some soup.
Valerie Gorham: That's what my mom always says.
Valerie Gorham: She.
Valerie Gorham: She.
Valerie Gorham: She's kind of a judgmental person.
Valerie Gorham: But when she sees someone who's a little too skinny, she's like, dang, that girl needs some soup.
Valerie Gorham: Like, she has no.
Valerie Gorham: Like, she has no muscle.
Valerie Gorham: And it's like, yeah, like, some.
Valerie Gorham: Some of these people you see, you can tell that they have lost all muscle mass on their body, which, by the way, is unhealthy.
Valerie Gorham: Like, that's another issue.
Valerie Gorham: No shade.
Valerie Gorham: To my mom, it's not okay to, like, talk about it in a judgmental way.
Valerie Gorham: It needs to be a judgment free sort of space, because the more judgmental you are about people, the less likely they will be to listen to you and take your help.
Valerie Gorham: So, you know, you have to approach with love and with concern.
Valerie Gorham: Like, genuine concern.
Valerie Gorham: Okay?
Valerie Gorham: But since men don't care about our health, they don't care about how unhealthy it is for us to undergo such drastic weight loss.
Valerie Gorham: And then, of course, there's.
Valerie Gorham: There is a theory out there that I've seen a lot of women talk about online that they say men want women to look skinny and fragile because that makes us resemble young girls.
Valerie Gorham: And it's all, like, rooted in, like, Epstein type mindset, you know what I mean?
Valerie Gorham: Diddy type mindset.
Valerie Gorham: You know what I mean?
Valerie Gorham: Like, Dan Schneider type of mindset.
Valerie Gorham: If you know, if you catch my drift.
Valerie Gorham: If you're catching my drift.
Valerie Gorham: I don't know if I'm allowed to say that word.
Valerie Gorham: Did I say it last?
Valerie Gorham: I don't feel like I said.
Valerie Gorham: And here's one more thing that I want to add.
Valerie Gorham: No shade.
Valerie Gorham: Well, actually, you know what?
Valerie Gorham: Full shade.
Valerie Gorham: Full shade to Leo.
Valerie Gorham: Leonardo DiCaprio.
Valerie Gorham: Because I saw everyone after the Oscars talking about, wait, Leonardo DiCaprio looks hot again with that mustache.
Valerie Gorham: Did you see him raising his eyebrows?
Valerie Gorham: Honey, that man does not look good.
Valerie Gorham: I don't know what everyone's talking about.
Valerie Gorham: It's like, yes, for a while, everyone was making fun of him, being like, he just keeps getting wider and no one's doing anything about it.
Valerie Gorham: And he looks a little less wide facially recently.
Valerie Gorham: But it's not like he.
Valerie Gorham: They were all like, young Leo is back 90s.
Valerie Gorham: Like, no.
Valerie Gorham: Why is there no bar for men?
Valerie Gorham: Like, the bar is all Is underground.
Valerie Gorham: What's going on?
Valerie Gorham: It's like, women have to be three pounds and Leonardo DiCaprio starts looking like he stopped drinking, and now everyone is like, oh, okay, good.
Valerie Gorham: What are we.
Valerie Gorham: Okay.
Valerie Gorham: And wasn't he in the fi.
Valerie Gorham: Like, anyways, the.
Valerie Gorham: My point here is that we need to stop letting men tell us how to shape our bodies.
Valerie Gorham: The end.
Valerie Gorham: Yay.
Valerie Gorham: And I put a whole bunch of evidence.
Valerie Gorham: I have sources that are going to be linked, so you can check those.
Valerie Gorham: Like, just.
Valerie Gorham: Just vote.
Valerie Gorham: Just vote.
Valerie Gorham: I already know I'm gonna be out.
Valerie Gorham: But that is today's episode.
Valerie Gorham: That's all for today.
Valerie Gorham: And I think that the most important thing that we all need to be doing is just remembering that men don't care if we're healthy or not.
Valerie Gorham: Yay.
Valerie Gorham: Okay.
Valerie Gorham: But that is today's episode.
Valerie Gorham: I hope that you learned a little something.
Valerie Gorham: I hope that you felt a little something.
Valerie Gorham: And I hope that you can take away a little something from this episode.
Valerie Gorham: Until next time, I have been Valerie.
Valerie Gorham: I will continue to be Valerie.
Valerie Gorham: And you will hear me next time on more than you think.
Valerie Gorham: Thank you for listening.
Valerie Gorham: I love you, Sa.
Valerie Gorham: Sam.
