YOU MAY NOT be thinking of getting into a bikini any time soon but you may have heard of the latest ‘weight-loss craze’, the bikini bridge.
Like the thigh gap that came before it, it’s an unhealthy ideal of a woman’s body that is feared could provide even more pressure around body issues and eating disorders.
According to Urban Dictionary, the phenomenon occurs when bikini bottoms are “suspended between the two hip bones, causing a space between the bikini and the lower abdomen”.
Like this:
While many mainstream media outlets have published articles warning about the dangers of the trend, it seems it’s all just a bit too hysterical.
The Daily Dot discovered that the trend can be traced to the pranksters on the infamous message board 4chan. Users of the /b/ sub-forum figured there just wasn’t enough of these photos in their lives and made it their mission to make it a thing.
In order to make the trend go ‘viral’ /b/ users planted doctored celebrity tweets and a subsequent backlash against it through areas and communities of the internet that are biased on the subject of weight. Lists on the community sections of Buzzfeed and CNN were also written to spread the word. The Daily Mail and Yahoo even reported a Harry Styles tweet as legit but deleted.
With a Reddit r/BikiniBridge being around for three years, the bikini bridge is not a new phenomenon by any stretch. However, it was 4chan that created the recent hysteria that it was a dangerous craze. They had #bikinibridge and #bikinibridge2014 trending using a variety of faux-outraged accounts to spread the hysteria, with the phrase tweeted over 5,000 times in three days.
Ireland got wave of the new trend through newspapers such as the Sun and the Mirror reporting on Irish celebrities like Rosanna Davidson and Georgia Salpa seen to be “taking part” in the phenomenon by posting beach photos.
For the most part though, we’re ‘meh’.
