One Body, Zero Agreement: Inside the Internet’s Divide Over Ariana Grande

The latest flashpoint in the ongoing conversation about Ariana Grande’s body is the video for “Petal,” the title track off her new album, released July 31. Directed by Christian Breslauer, the video casts Ariana as Pepper, an aspiring actor auditioning for a role she’s told she isn’t good enough for, before the narrative turns violent as she takes a chainsaw to the panel of executives criticizing her.

Stills from the video where she is slimmest are circulating on social media and causing outrage.

That video landed inside a conversation that was already heated. Ariana's health has been a live topic since her Eternal Sunshine tour opened in June, with fans openly speculating about an eating disorder that has never been publicly diagnosed or confirmed. Ariana has addressed the scrutiny directly and repeatedly since 2023, most recently resharing a clip to her Instagram Story as a “loving reminder” in which she says commenting on someone’s looks, health, or “what’s going on behind the scenes” is dangerous.

Three prominent voices in the body positivity space then took the debate in opposite directions this weekend. Tess Holliday, a plus-size model and longtime body acceptance advocate, posted that bodies aren’t public discourse and it’s time to retire the commentary era altogether. Days later, writer and eating disorder advocate Charlie Howard argued the opposite under recent tour footage, that the teams around Ariana, family and management included, are enabling her illness by continuing to release content and put her on stage.

Jameela Jamil waded into the same debate this weekend and drew immediate backlash of her own. The actress and activist, who has spoken openly about her own past struggles with anorexia, wrote online that Ariana “is possibly dying right in front of us,” and argued the styling in the "Petal" video was built to draw attention to her thinness.

She went further, calling it irresponsible for everyone around Ariana not to steer her away from an image she said risks glamorizing the look for young fans.

The reaction was swift, with critics accusing Jameela of body shaming under the guise of concern and arguing she was projecting her own history onto a woman she doesn’t know. Jameela pushed back on her Instagram Story, clarifying that she said “possibly,” not definitively, and said she felt for Ariana, having nearly died of anorexia herself.

She added that her real concern isn’t Ariana reading the comments, but the young girls watching who are.

Ariana's team has now weighed in directly. A representative told People yesterday that Ariana will be "taking a step back from visibility after she completes the Eternal Sunshine Tour."

"She looks forward to finishing the tour and ending it on a high note, both healthily and happily, and then taking a much-deserved break from public-facing work and appearances, which has led to endless, ongoing public scrutiny," the rep continues. "This tour has been a beautiful experience for her. She loves her fans and has loved every minute of this tour so much."

A source close to Ariana adds that the show itself is demanding proof against the speculation, not evidence for it: "She performs a very physical show, and there is a lot of athleticism involved. She performs healthily and successfully at a very high level night after night."

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: The mainstream press mostly learned, over the last decade, to follow Ariana’s guidance and stop commenting on women’s bodies. Most magazines don’t run “best and worst beach body” spreads anymore, at least not the ones still standing. But social media never got that memo, and if anything the discourse has gotten more brutal and clinical, with strangers now diagnosing eating disorders in real time under video clips the way they used to just call women fat.

Jamil, Holliday, and Howard are all coming at this from genuine concern and landing in three different places, with opposite theories of harm reduction: one says the industry needs to stay quiet and let women exist, one says naming it publicly is the only responsible thing left to do, and the other says silence has a body count too, and that looking away isn’t the same as being kind.

Ironically the video’s audition framing in “Petal” seems to be a meta commentary on the entertainment industry’s physical scrutiny of women, with the panel’s notes in the video, including “could stand to lose a few pounds,” so it doubles as a dig at the exact commentary Ariana has spent years asking people to stop making.

And from following stories like these for years, some of the stills already circulating look doctored to me, sharpened at the waist and hollowed at the face beyond what's in the source footage, the same pattern that followed her Wicked press tour and last year's viral photo comparisons. Even a video built specifically to critique this scrutiny gets run back through the same distorting machine.

There's something a little uncomfortable about writing a story whose entire subject is other people's takes on someone else's body while trying not to add another layer of commentary myself, but that tension is the story.

Right now, a woman is telling audiences directly, in her own music video, exactly how she experiences this scrutiny, and the response has been to debate her body some more rather than her point.

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