Don’t Comment on My Body, Do Not Reply
Opening night of the Eternal Sunshine Tour in Oakland produced one of the best vocal performances of Ariana Grande’s career, and the replies from the deranged stans still went to her body.
The house lights came up at Oakland Arena on June 6, on a crowd who’d waited nearly seven years. Her last full run finished up back in December 2019, pre-pandemic, pre-Wicked 1 and 2, pre-marriage and divorce that took over headlines she wasn’t consulted on. Halfway through the set, Ariana Grande took to the circle at the end of the walkway, stood on a loop station and asked if everyone was nervous, but maybe not nervous, but could you please just stay really quiet for one part. The room complied. She built up a wall of harmonies from one line, then offered up a thumbs-up and let the room carry the rest to “eternal sunshine.”
Earlier that night, she’d opened on “yes, and?”, during a dozen-dancer moment in the bridge with “Don’t comment on my body, do not reply.” She’d penned that in response to people who’d been reading since she was a teenager, and had debuted it first and foremost at the beginning of her first tour in seven years. It kicked off, through all her hits and deep cuts and the live debut of a single from an album still months from July release, ending on “supernatural.”
By the next morning, the clips had clocked numbers, and the room’s roaring sound had nothing to do with how well she sang. A user typed that anyone who watched knew for certain she wasn’t doing ok, even before she would have to preempt accusations of editing. The looking is the engine of it; one second with someone’s phone turns someone into a certified diagnostician whose diagnosis depends on no interaction or examination with its subject. Nobody commenting on a tour clip knows what it’s like to see the person standing there, to ask if she’s ok, or to see anything that didn’t get filmed. The look reads itself out from there, and her stans are the absolute worst, lacking any type of empathy. None of you deserve Ariana Grande.
She’s been clearer about it than the people speaking on her behalf, and it isn’t a new realization for her; in a 2023 TikTok, Grande called the shape others kept pointing to as healthy as “the unhealthiest version” of her body—from a period when she was heavily on antidepressants and drinking on them while “on drugs and at the lowest part of my life.” Nostalgia had it backwards. Her 2023 ask had been relatively small and direct: for people to be “kinder and a lot more comfortable NOT commenting on people’s bodies no matter what.”
So many replies are framed as care, started with hate talking about your body, but still saying “this isn’t okay,” someone wrote, while another said to just listen to the singing. These all keep her body center, all operate on the presumption that a clip is the whole story-a presumption she has herself already debunked, in a November interview which she had recirculated in November as a “loving reminder,” calling herself “a specimen in a Petri dish” since the age of 16 or 17 and identifying the same sting whether asked at any scale, from relative at Thanksgiving to what her father called “chubby.”
There is a relatively recent, and non-hypothetical, example of what that certainty costs. On April 15, 2020, Chadwick Boseman posted an Instagram video where he addressed and discussed the distribution of protective gear in Black communities at the beginning of the pandemic. The responses were centered on his weight; he had visibly shrunk, and he had “let himself go,” or worse, the judgment that, after he went through a number of jokes, including a slur, “Crack Panther,” it was decided. He had secretly been battling stage IV colon cancer since 2016, and the people laughing did not know—and that knowledge did nothing to slow them down. They found out he had been battling cancer the same in his untimely death, which was August 29, 2020. The people who mocked him had since apologized when the news came out—and it never reached him.
Grande is still on tour. This single that she debuted in Oakland is in the set list every single night; the tour runs through summer, and at every show the story will unfold in precisely the same way-the singing and then the discussion of her body, after she began this show by saying she did not want to be commented on it, in a song, on the first night of the tour. Whoever she is and whatever is going on with her, those most confident that they are reading it correctly off the screen have no context at all. Nobody beyond the people involved can read her health on a clip. We’re already seeing what it costs on the outside to be sure of anything.