the girly wellness aesthetic as a white supremacist dog whistle – ava's blog

the girly wellness aesthetic as a white supremacist dog whistle

17 Jun, 2026

Since reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger and its parts about Covid and fitness influencer culture a while ago (especially the chapter "The Far Right Meets the Far Out"), I cannot help but see that “Pinterest clean girl fitness and fruit bowl gua sha yoga mat pilates in the forest” content as covert white supremacy and eugenicist ideals; dog whistles, shared far and wide by people who probably don’t know better and just think it looks good and want to be like that.

I cannot quote the entire book and how it adds it together and builds this narrative up, but I especially liked these parts:

"There are deep and healthy pleasures to be found in exercise, as there are in other aspects of wellness. For many of the evangelists in these worlds, however, both fitness and diet are intensely value-laden endeavors. Achieving goals means setting rigorous targets and displaying relentless discipline to meet them (a.k.a. "putting in the work"). That's how you reach your idealized body double. Which is all fine if it stays there. But the trouble is, it often doesn't. As Carmen Maria Machado draws out in her doppelganger short story, once the slim, perfect body has been achieved, the less controlled body that once was can persist as an ever-present shadow-self - and this discarded double is deeply loathed. [...]

And that is the trouble with this more private kind of doppelganger; when body mania sets in, the fit self may well not be satisfied with crushing its own unfit self; it may look for other targets, its self-hatred seeping out and projecting itself onto other people's less fit, less conventionally able bodies. These kinds of moralistic physical judgments deepened during the pandemic, especially when it became clear that obesity, diabetes, and some forms of addiction increased the risks posed by Covid-19, along-side other factors, including age. Much of the pressure to wear a mask and get vaccinated, meanwhile, was framed as a duty to care for those with greater vulnerabilities. It was then that wellness culture, and its barely submerged hostility toward less conventionally perfect bodies and less "clean" lifestyles, began to bare its teeth. [...]

The core Covid-era public health message - that we all needed to undergo some individual inconveniences for the sake of our collective health - enjoyed majority support. Yet it simply could not be reconciled with the wellness industry's own overarching message: that individuals must take charge over their own bodies as their primary sites of influence, control, and competitive edge. And that those who don't exercise that control deserve what they get. Neoliberalism of the body, in distilled form. [...]

On the contrary, the lesson they seem to have extracted from the race and class disparities of Covid's early death toll was "This virus is going to kill people who do not look like me.". [...] This willingness to write off huge swaths of humanity that are cast as lesser within supremacist narratives is the strongest glue that binds together the pastel-hued, self-loving world of women's wellness with the fire-breathing, immigrant-bashing world of the Bannon right. [...]

These are the histories currently being conjured up in mainstream wellness culture, which has adopted Silicon Valley's notion of self-optimization, itself a by-product of the personal-branding culture that torments so many young people today. Every step counted. Every sleep measured. Every meal "clean". And it is in this context that has prepared the ground for a redux of the 1930s fascist/New Age alliance. The very idea that a human can and should be "optimized" lends itself to a fascistic worldview - because if your food is extra-clean, it can easily mean other people's food is extra-dirty. If you are safe because your immune system is strong, it can flip to man others are unsafe because they are weak. If you are optimized, others are, by definition, suboptimal. Defective. Next door to disposable."

Together with a lot of quotes of fitness trainers, and the fact that the Lululemon founder donated his money to right-wing causes.

I used to enjoy looking at this stuff.

Since reading, I notice how monotonous the entire aesthetic is, all these social media profiles and suggestions; it’s always white or racially ambiguous people, always women with European beauty standards and highly genderconforming bodies and style.

Always the minimalist white beige pastel pink outfits and surroundings, always huge living spaces that look basically unused, always so clean and perfectly styled that it insinuates either lots of available time or paid household help. It goes directly against much of the color celebrated in other cultures, something I already read about in Chromophobia by David Batchelor, in which the author makes compelling arguments that certain groups...