Since the 1980s, the idealized thin body has gradually become an expectation for Chinese women's figures. Women's internalization of the aesthetics of thinness and the negative psychological and physical consequences it triggers has received growing attention. In the past decade, idealized fitness has emerged and gained rapid momentum, self-labeling itself as positive, proactive, and female-empowering, compared to the thin body. Through a comparative analysis of two separate corpora constructed from online communities about the thin ideal and the fit ideal, the study found that the similarities between the two discourses outweighed the differences. The criterion of beauty was based on slenderness in both discourses. Further, in pursuit of the beauty ideal, women exhibit similar sustained, precise, and planned self-monitoring in their actions. Finally, the results of the emotional analysis of both corpora were heavily biased towards negativity. This study is a reflection regarding Chinese women's fitness aspirations, while presenting an East Asian viewpoint for introducing cross-cultural research on the female body, and a potential application of computational approaches to gender research.
Jinglan Hong (Mon,) studied this question.