Revenge Is Best Served Hot

How Did the “Revenge Body” Become a Real Thing?

Per tabloids and Khloé Kardashian, you too can morph into your best self to show those who hurt you what they’re missing.
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By Jesse Grant/Getty Images.

First, there was the body. Then there was the “beach body.” And now there is the “revenge body.” Based on data from Google Trends, the concept has now reached its apotheosis, in no small part due to Khloé Kardashian’s new show, Revenge Body, which premiered on E! Thursday night.

What does “revenge body” mean? No, it’s not getting revenge on your body or anyone else’s. It also doesn’t involve the bodies of people who appeared in Golden Globe–nominated television show Revenge. Instead, a revenge body is something you strive to obtain after someone has wronged you. It’s turning your body into a super-sexy shiv and knifing an ex-boyfriend or mean girl from high school in back.

Kardashian herself explains on the first episode of the show, “a great body is the best revenge.”

Neither Kardashian nor E! gets credit for the term. It comes from tabloids, like most concepts of this nature do, and anyone with a body who had endured a recent breakup after 2010 or so, now had a “revenge body”—so Jennifer Aniston mostly. Kim Kardashian West and Britney Spears have had “revenge bodies,” too. Once the fitness magazines took hold of the term, there was no stopping it. Fitness named Katie Holmes “Best Revenge Body” in 2012 after her divorce from Tom Cruise. Holmes herself does not appear to have ever uttered the phrase. In 2014, Cosmopolitan launched a subscription-based fitness channel called CosmoBody, and it offered a video called “Revenge Body.”

By 2015 the phrase had appeared on Urban Dictionary, and now Khloé Kardashian has expanded the definition to include anyone you’d like to get revenge on, not just a lover scorned. A mother, for example. A mean high-school bully. Any stylist that wouldn’t work with you or any designer who wouldn’t send you dresses to wear on the red carpet.

Like getting bangs or revamping your wardrobe, getting a “revenge body” is a pretty transparent reaction to a painful life event, a way to do something and feel in control. Still, the tabloid usage makes those who have changed their appearance, usually post-breakup, seem to be both conniving and also not in it for genuine self-improvement.

In 2017, the term sounds outdated, a concept that takes away celebrities’ agency about something as fundamental as their bodies. Maybe a star’s makeover came after months of crying and the inability to eat; tabloids will never know. If you’ve made any visible change in your appearance in the 24/7 celebrity industrial complex, then a revenge body you must have.