Starving
Ariana Grande, the poisonous princess
Imagine you wake up and you are filthy rich. You have it all. Your bed costs more than what most middle class families put as a down payment on a house. Your sheets are the purest white linen, washed daily by your team of servants. You are woken up by the pain in your cheeks where your buccal fat used to be. You had the fat deposits below your cheekbones removed in late 2020. You were never conscious of that area of your body before, but ever since having that surgery, your face has ached in the mornings. The pain is somewhere between the feeling of a sinus infection and a rotted tooth. You no longer feel hunger pangs, thank the Dark Lord, and you can finally count your ribs even when you are still wearing your lace bustier. They jut out prominently, and though you have been hammered in the press about promoting anorexia, you love every second of scrutiny. You worked hard in order to be a walking anatomy lesson on the stage, and starving yourself wasn’t the half of it.
The above paragraph could be from the standpoint of Ariana Grande . . . or not. There are dozens if not hundreds of celebrities who fit the profile. All of them live lives that are a constant barrage of publicity events, flashing cameras, and fielding both love and animosity from their handlers, fans, and haters. They have all run the gamut of dazzling celebrity, horrific abuse, and increasing desperation as they cling to the last vestiges of unearned wealth as the reaper closes in with one bony hand extended for his inevitable fee and the other behind his back. We are told over and over that we should want to be the celebrity and that fulfillment (especially artistic fulfillment) is a zero sum game that can only end in a binary of winners and losers. Those of us who believe it either fall in line and worship celebrities, happily taking our place as cucks and simps, or we join the other race of losers in the form of wanting to beat the celebrity and take her place. The third way and the road not usually taken is a road that includes both utter indifference and a nasty little tendency to call out celebrities and their handlers on their bullshit. Celebrities and more importantly their handlers depend on almost nobody taking the third path.
Ariana Grande is starving to death. The singer/actress is touring at the time of this writing, strutting across the stage in a state of alarming and visibly painful emaciation. She is being compared both to Eugenia Cooney and Karen Carpenter. Grande looks like she should be in hospice. She has reached such an advanced state of starvation, she needs an IV. It is too late for a cheeseburger.
I highly doubt Grande is entirely conscious of what she is doing. She is handled, managed, and puppeteered. Perhaps it is because she is addicted to fame, drugs, Ozempic (if you think diet drugs are not being abused by violent anorexics like Grande, you are naive) or more likely it is because her handlers are working her until she dies. The handlers have celebrities by the balls. Just ask Frankie Valli, who is currently touring himself to death at age 92. His concerts look like a LARP of Weekend at Bernies. His band does most of the heavy lifting and he goes through the nostalgic motions. He obviously owed somebody in the System a great deal of money that he will not be able to pay off in this lifetime.
Once a celebrity makes their deal, they are not allowed to stop. They are also not allowed to deal with their trauma, which ends up written in their behavior, their flesh, or some unfortunate combination of both.
Ariana Grande has been anorexic since at least 2013, but more likely since she was 10 years old. I speculate that anorexia, orthorexia, and the bitterness that accompany them have been features in her life since at least the Dan Schneider era. Anorexia has been a way for her to deal with that abuse — that is my hypothesis. She does not have recognition of the way she has been abused and has unwittingly become an abuser. Her creepy Creative Artist Agency handlers hate her more than they love her, and that is why they have perpetuated the current shock and awe campaign to promote lasting images of anorexic self-torture that are aimed like weapons mostly at women, girls, and gay boys.
For comparison’s sake, Madonna and Lady Gaga (who are nearly the same person) deal with their trauma differently, preferring their handler’s brash and openly satanic schtick. Their anorexia is not nearly as visible as Grande’s: make no mistake that it is still there. None of these women are allowed to enjoy a filling meal. Heaven forbid they should overeat. Gaga can wear a meat dress but Thanksgiving dinner or a summer barbecue is out of the question. They have money to afford the best food money can buy washed down with champagne that costs more than my annual gross income, yet they cannot enjoy a bite or a drop because that was not part of the deal.
Ariana's problem
At age 12 in 2006, Ariana Grande was thin and petite, her dark, curly hair one of her many Italian-American features. She was small but not emaciated. She looked like any average kid with a lopsided smile, not extraordinarily beautiful. She was mainly interesting for her disproportionately big voice. She was cute. As a teenager, Grande was part of a rotating cast of characters that starred on the Nickelodeon network. She played Racquelle on the show Victorious and Cat alongside co-star Jeannette McCurdy on Sam & Cat. Longer hair and clandestine orthodontics along with age transformed the singer into an emerging beauty, and the tragedy of this era is that she was likely abused on a daily basis by various old men such as Dan Schneider and Tom Hanks. (There are grisly rumors of what goes on at Tom Hanks parties, and we know for a fact that Grande was over the moon when she was invited to one of these soirees from Jeannette McCurdy’s memoir.) As would become Grande’s pattern, she swallowed any rational outrage or dismay she should have had in place of actual, nourishing food.
By 2013, Grande was in her 20s, a time which was also known as her Tumblr era. Tumblr is a photo blogging platform where most of the content is communicated via photographs, much like Instagram before it tried to become TikTok. Grande had an infamous blog that was full of photos of what she ate in a day — often a single piece of fruit despite being on tour or working long hours — and of what anorexics call body checks, such as fitting one’s entire body into a small beverage cooler or capturing the bony state of one’s own arms in profile. Anorexics are prideful creatures, and there is also a distinct homosexual element to anorexia that I will be discussing in a future essay. In it, I will argue that anorexia is a lesbian pursuit where women seek to please (and torment) other women. Though people compare photos of Ariana 2013 to Ariana 2026 and say “she was healthy then”, I would argue that No, she was not healthy then, she was merely younger and more equipped to handle her own severe anorexia.
By 2016, Grande’s body dysmorphia and trauma denial started showing up in alterations to her face. She became known for adapting whatever race was cool at the time, much like Gwen Stefani’s appropriation of Harajuku culture in 2005. Grande appropriated black culture first, and arguably did this before the Nickelodeon era as one of the many white/Hispanic singer-actresses of the time who were determined to sound like black gospel singers. In 2021, she would appropriate Asian culture much like Stefani did in 2005, whereupon she was accused of Asian-fishing.
Experts speculate that Grande had multiple procedures done while she was still in her 20s: a nose job, a revision to the same nose job, filler in the cheek and jaw, a possible jaw implant, brow lifts and revisions, eyelid lift, mini-facelifts, and multiple lip fillers. By the time Wicked began filming in late 2022, Ariana had ricocheted through three skin colors and sets of vocal mannerisms, finally landing on Galinda the Soft, Extremely White Princess of Oz. She was not, however, done with surgery. Sometime between 2020-2022 she seems to have had another nose job, and not a revision. Her nose looks like it is about to disappear. She also seems to have had buccal fat removal, a procedure that is as stupid as medieval trepanning. During the early 2020s, it was a trend for celebrities (mostly women) to have the fat siphoned out from beneath their cheekbones in order to look more gaunt and aquiline. The result ages very badly, resulting in a Cryptkeeper hollowing of the cheeks as if the victim is perpetually sucking on lemons.
Grande had finally found her home in Galinda, the most toxic archetype of all: the Princess. Ariana’s vibe has always been docile, compliant, and quietly ruthless and cruel. In the 1994 Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction, Bruce Willis’s character is married to a character played by Maria de Medeiros. Maria’s character Fabienne is soft, childlike, feminine, and forgettable, going along with whatever the men are doing without understanding what is going on. Ariana Grande embodies Fabienne despite proclaiming herself a feminist warrior. Her main flex is pretending that everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. The current tour, Eternal Sunshine, embodies denial energy.
Dead of anorexia at age 32: Karen Carpenter
Karen Carpenter, unlike Ariana Grande, tried to get help before she died. Known as one of the greatest singers of all time, Carpenter was also known as a great female drummer in a male-dominated field. She used dieting to handle stress, beginning in high school. She adhered to strict regimes that involved drinking 8 glasses of water a day. In a world where Ozempic did not yet exist, she abused thyroid medication, assuming a fake name to get a prescription that sped up her metabolism. She also abused laxatives, taking up to 90 pills a day. Carpenter actively tried to heal and allowed herself to be hospitalized after spending time in intense, live-in psychotherapy. With the help of IV while in hospital, she gained 30 pounds, which put a great deal of strain on her anorexia-weakened heart.
Determined to get her life back, she spent only one month in the hospital, taking the weight gain to be the sign she needed to resume her career. Her heart failed a few months later. Paramedics found her collapsed on the floor from a heart attack. She died at age 32. Keep in mind, however, that she had been hospitalized because even though she was living with Steven Levenkron, a psychiatrist who was known for healing anorexics, she was probably still abusing laxatives and thyroid medication. Anorexics cannot help the urge to make themselves thin any more than a heroin addict can resist the needle in front of them.
Grande is still in denial that she is anorexic at all and has no qualms about it. She often tells the public at large that she is the best health and body of her life and that we should all shut up and not talk about people’s bodies. In other words, let the handlers continue to piss on our legs while they tell us it is raining. If they joined us in our condemnation of visible anorexia, they would be preventing semaglutide drug sales.
Ariana Grande is evil in a way that Karen Carpenter never was because Grande is more detached from the damage she is doing than Carpenter. Karen Carpenter recognized she had a problem and perhaps more importantly recognized that the images she was presenting to women and girls were a problem. Despite being horrified by gaining weight, Karen Carpenter underweight IV treatment that caused a 30 pound weight gain. Carpenter was 5’4” and 30 pounds was not a small amount of weight for her. Grande is 5’3”.
The legacy about to occur
The reason I write about this at all is because people who are more impressionable than I am in my solid, Midwestern, middle-aged dowagerhood are being victimized by the images that Grande and her handlers are feeding out into the general public. It’s not just about the children, however, little girls are telling their mommies that they can’t eat a full meal because Ari, their idol, is thin and pretty and you cannot eat heartily if you want to be thin and pretty. Personally, I wince when I see Grande’s bag-of-bones fashion looks but I have had a lifetime of bullcrap filtering and the mercenary attitude that goes with it; they have not. Nevertheless, I don’t want to see pictures or video of Grande doing her skeleton danse macabre while foisted up by her backup dancers because she is now awful to behold and I never liked her voice anyway. As a singer and a voice teacher, I admit fully that she is massively talented as a vocalist. I am intellectually honest. I have never liked her style, which has always struck me as overly sexualized, pleading, male-centered, and whiny.
Grande will likely die before hitting 40 and possibly before the Eternal Sunshine tour makes its final scheduled stop. She may even drop dead onstage, and that is sickening and horrible. Even though I don’t care for her music or her fans, I do not want that to happen and I openly wish that she survives her tour and finds a way out of the public eye. She is another Karen Carpenter waiting to happen, and even more sad and more tragic because she is still deep in the throes of anorexic delusion.
To the trolls: I barely read your comments and I delete them and then block you after skimming, so go ahead and waste your time and write a damn novel instead of doing something that might actually help you out of your misery. Spin your wheels and then cry more — maybe also ask who is the common factor in of all your problems and then take a long, meaningful glance in the mirror. I am not your enemy and I do not want to be, because I would have to care first.
"You Don't Have to Be Pretty. You don't owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don't owe it to your mother, you don't owe it to your children, you don't owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked 'female.' - Diana Vreeland
I can barely stand to look at her, or Madonna, or many other female celebrities that are succumbing to this anorexia or surgical alteration. It looks sickly.
P.S. I've not heard or read about Tom Hanks' parties. I looked online (first page of results) and see only his colonoscopy parties with a couple other old guys.