“The Grass is Really Like Me” – The Fragility of Female Identity in the Emerging Era of the “Ballet Body” Aesthetic

By Meera Mohankrishnan

Kishwar Naheed’s, “The Grass is Really Like Me”, offers unique comparative symbolism for understanding how external pressures reshape women’s identities. Naheed was a pioneering Pakistani feminist author and activist. Within the poem, “The Grass is Really Like Me” she uses pathetic fallacy to portray women in their purest personal form as grass, before inserting a variety of poetic devices which limits their freedom and realisation of self. 

In the poem, grass, which is something organic and essential, is repeatedly cut and redirected by forces such as a lawn mower and the imposed structure of a footpath. What remains is not grass, with its natural vitality, but straw: which has been drained and stripped of its inherent energy. As Naheed writes, “That is how they make way for the mighty… they are merely straw, not grass, the grass is really like me”. 

Through this imagery Naheed captures how systems of control do not simply restrict women but gradually transform them. The oppression is not always overt; it is embedded in everyday structures that dictate how women should grow, move and exist. 

The relevance of this message feels particularly urgent in the context of contemporary beauty, health and wellness culture. Marketed as empowerment, wellness has increasingly become a space of regulation that subtly reasserts damaging ideals under the language of health and self-optimisation. After a decade shaped by body positivity discourse, recent cultural signals suggest a shift back toward thinness as the dominant ideal. The New York Times has reported findings from institutions such as the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and Vogue Business to point to the resurgence of a “ballet body” aesthetic. This echo of early 2000s standards, has now been repackaged as attainable and, concerningly, as healthy. 

What distinguishes this turn towards thinness from earlier eras, is not just the ideal itself but the means of achieving it. Weight loss is no longer framed as reliant on discipline alone, but as a biomedical possibility. Drugs such as Ozempic, originally developed to treat Type 2 Diabetes, have entered the mainstream discourse as tools for effortless transformation. By mimicking GLP-1 hormones, the medications suppress appetite and prolong satiety, making thinness appear not only desirable but effortlessly accessible. However, medical evidence suggests that this accessibility obscures a more complicated reality. The side effects of these drugs range from gastrointestinal distress to reported mental health complications such as anxiety and depression. More significantly, despite price fluctuations and unpleasant side effects, their popularity reveals how deeply entrenched the desire for thinness remains. 

This is why academics argue that the logic of the male gaze has become difficult to ignore. The renewed fixation on thinness does not emerge in isolation. At an initial level, the popularity for female thinness is widely encouraged by conservative media outlets, which are largely male dominated. Yet, the deeper argument they peddle, automatically disenfranchises female self-subjectivity as it supports the narrative that women’s bodies are objects to be viewed, evaluated and disciplined, based on the observations of others. 

The result is, a feedback loop: gaze, internalisation, obedience. Over time this loop erodes subjectivity, replacing self-defined identity with externally validated norms. Much like Naheed’s grass, women are not simply constrained, they are reshaped. What begins as individuality becomes uniformity; what begins as vitality becomes something closer to straw, fragile and easily broken.

Crucially, this encouragement to conform is not neutral. As Virgie Tovar highlights, by drawing on the work of the sociologist Dr Sabrina Strings, the idealisation of thinness is deeply entangled with racial histories. In Fearing the Black Body, Strings traces how curves and fatphobia were directly associated with Blackness during the transatlantic slave trade, while thinness was recorded as disciplined and implicitly white. This, she contends, was not incidental but tactically ideological and was utilised to discriminatorily map value onto bodies. 

This history does not sit in the past. It continues to shape which bodies are celebrated, which are marginalised, and which are required to transform in order to be seen as acceptable. The contemporary “wellness” framing on beauty ideals, while trying to overtly present as individually neutral, reproduces these exclusions with remarkable consistency.

This contradiction is evident across digital culture and social media dissemination. Social media operates as both an amplifier and critic which circulates beauty standards while simultaneously exposing their inconsistencies. Scholarship has documented how young women in particular are acutely aware of these dynamics. They recognise the racialisation of beauty; the appropriation embedded within it and the ways in which certain features are only legitimised when they are detached from the bodies they originate from. Sociologists, Professor Johnston and Dr Foster, used Kylie Jenner as an example for this frame of analysis. Despite recognising that the beauty standards Jenner presented were malleable to trends and could at times be culturally inappropriate, young girls felt a need to buy into that model beauty, for fear of not being widely accepted themselves otherwise. 

What consequently emerges is what researchers have described as a “beauty bind”. This is a state in which young women can clearly articulate the cultural inappropriateness and even harm of certain standards yet still feel compelled to participate in them anyways. The issue therefore extends beyond discourse of hypocrisy in beauty ideals and reveals a darker notion of structural entrapment within them due to societal pressure. 

The same logic carries over to the current resurgence of thinness. Even as it is recognised as restrictive, historically loaded, and uneven in impact, it continues to be pursued – now reinforced by the language of health and the infrastructure of medicine. 

This is how Naheed’s transformation takes place. Not through overt force alone, but through accumulation: of narratives, technologies and expectations that reshape how women understand themselves. The danger then is not that standards exist, but that they become indistinguishable from how women individually frame their identity. 

Grass does not become straw all at once, it is cut and redirected until its original form is no longer recognisable. Comparably, in a culture that increasingly frames conformity as care, that transformation becomes even harder to resist, and even harder to name.