Doja Cat confirmed a couple months ago that her fourth studio album would be released this year and that she’d be doing more rapping this time. Which tracks with the title of the album, Hellmouth, revealed yesterday. The promise, then, is that Doja will be running her hellmouth up and down the tracklist.
Considering the success she’s had over the last three years, Hellmouth will be one of the most highly anticipated drops over the next few months. Doja’s last album, Planet Her, was a commercial and critical success, including multiple bangers: “Kiss Me More”, “Woman”, “You Right”, “Need to Know”, and “Ain’t Sh-t”.
But Hellmouth isn’t the big headline about Doja Cat today. Before confirming the title of the album, Doja was on Twitter doing, well, what Doja does and being what she calls herself – a “messy bitch”.
She also responded to some questions from her fans, clarifying that she’d had her breasts made smaller (32C) and that lipo is not “fat transfer” and that she did not get any “fat transfer” which would imply that her lipo did what it’s supposed to do which is fat removal.
On the one hand, I appreciate the candour and the transparency. So many celebrities are so opaque about their cosmetic procedures – not that the public is owed any explanation but oftentimes, when they do talk about their beauty routines, a lot is omitted, or straight up lied about. Doja’s not playing that game. She’s sharing her business and it’s her body, she can do whatever she wants with it. Even talking about her body right now is probably veering into some offside territory as we all try to be more responsible with how we gossip and evolve from the mistakes we made 15, 20 years ago.
But the other piece of this is how influential celebrity bodies are, the impact they can have on the larger culture. That influence can definitely be positive as more body diversity has been encouraged and celebrated. But there are also harmful impacts of celebrity body trends – and, yes, it’s gross that bodies are “trends”, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true – and so I wonder if we can talk about Doja’s body choice in the context of the larger social and cultural implications.
With her breast reduction and liposuction, Doja is going smaller, and she was already on the small side. This tracks with a wider conversation over the last year about how fashion as a whole is also shifting smaller. British Vogue recently observed that “less than 1% of models at the AW23 collections were plus-size”. Dazed wondered if fashion is “making a worrying return to size zero”. Pop Sugar asked last week, “what will it take for the fashion industry to actually embrace body inclusivity”. The Guardian reported on “how fashion fell out of love with curves”. And of course there’s the Kardashian effect. Last July, The Toronto Star noted that “Kardashian bodies are shrinking. What will it mean?” This, obviously, was after Kim showed up at the Met Gala in Marilyn Monroe’s dress and talked about how she had to lose 16 lbs or whatever to fit into it.
On top of all this, there’s the Ozempic thing. Nobody can stop talking about Ozempic…and the fact that so many people are on it and so many people are talking about who’s on it, tells you, well, that there’s definitely a move to go smaller.
To go back to Doja, over the last year especially, she’s emerged as a high fashion star and basically took over Paris Haute Couture week in January. I think we all remember the looks she was serving, having shaved her head and elevated her style game.
And now on the heels of that, she’s making changes to her body – which, again, is her choice, she’s entitled to that choice. My point here isn’t just about HER body, but about bodies in general, and our complicated relationships with our bodies, made even more complicated by cultural imagery, by those who shape the culture, no pun intended, by an industry that has claimed to be about progress but that might be regressing. And the consequences are pervasive, amplified in these times by social media and how much more inundation there is in the palm of our hands. Clearly an issue we can’t solve today, and I’m not sure we can ever solve it. But Doja’s revelations, as appreciated as they are with respect to transparency, go way beyond just her and her body.
