Hunger and sexual desire are regulated by the same system of norms

Diet culture controls not just what you eat and who you are – from Naomi Wolf’s Beauty Myth to algorithmic surveillance on Instagram and TikTok, the body is always on trial

Diet culture, clean eating, and the algorithmic surveillance of appetite

Just a few seconds of scrolling through TikTok or Instagram is enough to find profiles posting about breakfast, snacks, lunch, or dinner. The recipe looks easy and healthy, calories are counted, nutritional values are measured, and portions are photographed with impeccable lighting. This format — known as Clean Eating — has taken over both platforms, generating tens of millions of posts and increasingly specific subcategories: #weightloss, #highprotein, #caloriedeficit, #thatgirl, #GymTok, and #wieiad. Rather than staging pleasure, this content makes visible the continuous moral labor of regulating appetite, appearance, and, by extension, sexual desirability.

On social media, the idea of a controlled diet culture has become such a moral imperative that digital wellness culture now functions more as a form of self-surveillance than as a health practice. Content analyses (Food Culture & Society, 2023) of the hashtag #whatieatinaday on TikTok show that these videos consistently link diet culture to external indicators of health and morality — such that the disciplined body ends up signaling not only physical virtue, but also social and sexual legitimacy. Since the moral body and the sexually desirable body are governed by the same cultural grammar, the regulation of appetite naturally extends to the regulation of desirability itself.

Fitspiration, TikTok diets, and the rise of algorithmic body surveillance

A 2026 cross-country study found that visually driven platforms transmit messages about physical appearance as a precondition for desirability (British Journal of Health Psychology, 2026), making the management of one’s body on screen indistinguishable from the management of one’s perceived worth as a sexual and relational subject. Exposure to “fitspiration” content reduced self-esteem in 37% of participants, with significantly stronger effects among women — indicating not only aesthetic insecurity, but also the internalization of a system in which appearance governs the legitimacy of one’s desire (PubMed Central, 2025).

According to a MyFitnessPal survey, 87% of Millennial and Gen Z TikTok users draw at least some of their health and nutrition advice from social media, despite only about 2% of nutritional content on these platforms complying with public health guidelines (The Guardian, 2025). The digital obsession with thinness has blurred the boundaries between wellness culture, fitness, and identity to the point where the body itself becomes a site of regulation rather than pleasure. Framing fatness as a health problem and thinness as its solution is fatphobia dressed in the language of wellness. Instagram and TikTok did not invent this logic — but they have industrialized it through gymbro aesthetics and diet culture content engineered for engagement, and then revenue. Specific algorithmic and interface design choices on these platforms contribute to body dysmorphia; internal documents leaked from Meta in 2021 revealed that the company was aware Instagram worsened body image in teenage girls — and chose not to act (PubMed Central, 2025).

The body as a field of regulation: how culture shapes hunger and desire

Hunger and sexual desire are shaped by more than biology. From the earliest stages of life, we are influenced by cultural and social expectations, aesthetic standards, and gendered codes that dictate what we are permitted to desire — and through what rituals of justification. Even before we eat or experience erotic pleasure, the body must first determine whether it has the right to do so.

This sensory education permeates every aspect of daily life. What we consider physiologically desirable or excessive is already understood as a mechanism shaped by a system of norms that has modeled our sensibilities long before any conscious reflection comes into play. Smell, taste, touch, sight — all bodily experiences reach us already hierarchized and split between what is appropriate and what must be controlled.

Sigmund Freud observed that eating and sex operate according to the same logic: both are acts of consumption, possession, and incorporation of the other. What he described as instinct, systems of power have long transformed into norm — and in the age of diet culture and algorithms, that transformation has found its most efficient infrastructure yet.

What we eat and how our bodies look are now public performances, subject to algorithmic amplification and social judgment. The mechanisms through which systems of power regulate food, the body, and desire — including sexual desire — have become so pervasive that they are increasingly difficult to recognize. What we perceive as “naturally” attractive reflects structures of domination that shape bodies of all genders into objects of consumption under regimes of control. Sensuality itself is socially conditioned. What we want, and what we deem legitimate to feel, are the distorted results of an aesthetic authority functioning as a disciplinary system.

Foucault, biopolitics, and the moralization of the female body

In Discipline and Punish (1975) and later in the three volumes of The History of Sexuality (1976), Michel Foucault referred to biopolitics as the mechanism through which modern power governs the body. Rather than acting primarily through prohibition or force, the system produces norms that establish what is normal, healthy, and desirable — allowing subjects to internalize those invisible criteria and monitor their own behavior, enabling them to judge themselves in advance.

In today’s consumerist culture, where social media platforms, the wellness industry, and the fashion industry operate as interconnected regulatory authorities, this form of governance has found its most effective expression through the internalization of ideals that are virtually unattainable. The female body has historically been one of its primary sites of operation, as sexual and gender norms converge into a single disciplinary project — governing not only how women look, but what they are permitted to want.

In 1990, Naomi Wolf published The Beauty Myth. More than thirty years later, within Western culture, women are expected to define themselves through “beauty,” which places them under continuous observation and subjects their self-esteem and capacity to act to public evaluation (Wolf, 1990, 14). The promotion of ideals centered on thinness and fair skin has long functioned as a mechanism of bodily control, embedded in systems of power rather than grounded in women’s own autonomy. The emphasis on these traits in constructing the ideal of “female beauty” has never been evenly distributed. Thinness and whiteness are deeply intertwined, operating together as instruments of racialized control that have historically determined which bodies are deemed desirable — and which forms of desire are cast as transgressive.

The insidious nature of this system becomes clearer when applied to its digital infrastructure. Algorithmic platforms do not neutrally amplify content; instead, they encode and reproduce existing racial and size-based bias, systematically suppressing non-white, non-thin bodies while rewarding those that conform to a narrow normative ideal. This design choice processes bodies through the same logic of whiteness and thinness that has governed beauty, appetite, and sexual legitimacy for centuries — now automated and scaled.

Wolf had already identified the underlying logic decades before the algorithm existed: as women gain ground socially, the pressure on their bodies seems to tighten in response, as if every space conquered must be counterbalanced by a new form of surveillance. What makes this mechanism effective — whether imposed through social norms in 1990 or through engagement metrics in 2026 — is its ability to present itself as something natural, as a preference based on free choice. Beauty and sexual norms overlap and reinforce one another to the point of dictating that the normative feminine ideal must be simultaneously slim, white, able-bodied, available, and sexually appealing, yet never overly lustful. Women are expected to invite desire without expressing too much of their own; to remain pleasing without becoming demanding; to appear natural while in fact being the outcome of rigorous daily discipline and countless other performative acts shaped by social gender expectations. For Wolf, “naturalness” is the central myth of the aesthetic-sexual regime — one that conceals the labor required to sustain it:

Algorithmic bias, whiteness, and the standardization of beauty online

“Women were expected — and expected of themselves — to conform to freedom effortlessly, with superhuman resilience. But freedom is not easily learned overnight. One generation is not long enough to forget five millennia of learning how to endure being hurt. If a woman’s sexual sense of self has centered on pain as far back as the record goes, who is she without it? If suffering is beauty and beauty is love, she cannot be sure she will be loved if she does not suffer. It is hard, because of such conditioning, to envision a female body free of pain and still desirable. Even aside from the biological pain of women’s gender, modern women are just recovering from our long experience of man-made punishment for pleasure.” (Wolf, 1990, 219)

The moral and political project that imposes the standardization of bodies determines how women experience desire — and what they believe they must endure in order to be loved. The equation identified by Wolf — in which suffering, beauty, and the right to love and pleasure go hand in hand — produces bodies that have learned to distrust their own pleasure and to interpret appetite as excess. Restraint, whether in eating or desire, signals discipline. Women who overindulge in food or sexual pleasure attract a stigma that is fundamentally ethical. Gluttony and promiscuity collapse into the inability to control oneself, into the failure of self-regulation. Desire itself becomes suspect. Wanting too much, in any register, is to expose an excess that this moral grammar interprets as a failure of character — one that carries real consequences, from social stigma to the withdrawal of permission to freely feel and to be seen.

Reclaiming appetite: sensuality, desire, and the politics of pleasure beyond the algorithm

The algorithm knows what you clicked on, how long you lingered, and what made you come back. It probably knows what you felt, too — but you still have a little leeway: your senses. The regulation of pleasure operates on a precise confusion: between sensuality and sexuality, between the body as a site of experience and the body as a site of performance. To reclaim one means to disentangle it from the other — and to recognize that both the disciplinary system and the algorithm have always had more to gain from that confusion than from any explicit prohibition.

To reclaim sensuality means rejecting the logic of consumption that has governed both food and the body — choosing to enjoy the experience of presence rather than the impulse to possess, grounded in relation rather than appropriation. It means embracing desire as something fluid, erratic, relational, and collective that cannot be commodified, and rejecting the idea that our desires must conform to a single cis-heteronormative model.

Sensuality versus performance: reclaiming pleasure beyond algorithmic control

Sensuality and sexuality are intertwined — it is difficult to imagine sex without sensuality — yet they are not the same thing. A ripe fig that breaks under the thumb, its juice spilling onto the palm before it reaches the mouth: these are images that speak to experiencing the body in its fullness. For some, this experience may carry erotic potential, but it is, first and foremost, about being in the body and being with the senses — without needing to classify it into well-defined categories like “sexy” or “acceptable.” Desire is expansive and recognizes no limits of gender, structure, or normative frameworks.

We desire because we feel. Through the intentionality of feeling that precedes desire, both hunger and erotic longing prove decisive in the expression of our human life. The simple act of feeling — without immediately translating sensation into something measurable or productive — is already a way out of the disciplinary system. This is not a search for individual escape, but a collective practice of reclaiming what the system has always moved first to regulate: the freedom to want, on one’s own terms.