This move away from food being just for the “dumpy” best friend to drown her sorrows in is a positive one (yes, television, please normalize women eating — we do eat, often in large quantities and with a shimmer of glee in our eyes). But the sad downside is that the female characters who were shown to have healthy appetites, for a span of almost two decades, still looked just like the ones who could only eat on screen for a laugh, and the implications of that on body image are real.“There are so many expectations put on us as women, and this is just one more adding to the unattainable standard that we’re held to,” Yuko says. “I like that these shows are destigmatizing eating for women, because that should never have occurred in the first place. But in some cases, they are holding us up to a standard that most of us will never be able to reach.”So what led us to the gorgeous glutton? Was she created to taunt women or to purposefully tear down our collective self-esteem? Probably not. At the end of the day, a lot of what we see on television is unattainable, whether it’s the impossibly spacious and amazing NYC apartments of Carrie Bradshaw and the cast of Friends, or the sappy-but-we-still-kind-of-want-them family moments on shows like Full House, or the outright fantasy of Khaleesi surviving fire and “birthing” dragons on Game of Thrones. And, in part, we want to watch the unattainable because it provides some vicarious wish fulfillment.“A lot of shows, especially those that are geared toward women, are aspirational in some way,” Yuko says. “This particular archetype is aspirational in that it’s a best-case scenario for some of us. I don’t like exercise; I love to eat and sit around and do nothing. That would be my best-case scenario, but that’s not how things work.”And the wish fulfillment of watching someone who fits into narrow, conventional beauty standards eat and eat and never gain weight isn’t just limited to fiction now. As Shin points out, the gorgeous glutton archetype has crossed over into the real world, thanks to the muk-bang trend. As CNN explains, “muk-bang” is Korean for “eating broadcasts” and the trend involves beautiful thin women (and some men) eating copious amounts of food for a live internet audience.