Lighting up a Fridge Cig: The Politics of Diet Coke Culture
Sia Madden, BA Politics and Africa and Black Diaspora
The it-girls of the digital void are cracking open a cold one, so to speak. They’re having what they call a ‘fridge cig.’ But they’re not actually drinking or smoking. Their vice is something else completely. They’re doing coke. Diet coke, to be exact.
Really, it’s the perfect beverage to wash down the huge bite out of conservatism we seem to be taking as a culture. It exists within the wider lifestyle of the clean girl who doesn’t drink or smoke, goes to bed early so she can make it to pilates, is ‘allowing herself to be feminine’ (read: she’s embracing the benefits of misogyny). It’s difficult to take the high road when you realise that the patriarchy does indeed reward conventional beauty standards. But the clean girl can only glean these benefits on the basis that she remains neutral, a tabula rasa we can project our aspirations onto. This idealised lifestyle is dependent on a minimalism which is fundamentally rooted in whiteness and classism. It relies on a subject willing to remain apolitical. And that’s exactly what fascism relies on too. Not just active participation, but docile subjection. To be too skinny to fight back, to be too aesthetically focused to care about its undertones. I don’t think it’s irrelevant, either, that it’s very specifically the diet version of the drink. It’s not original coke. It’s not coke zero. It’s certainly not Gaza Cola, which it definitely should be. It’s chrome silver Diet Coke™. It’s all a little too reminiscent of the early 2000s diet culture which relied on actual class A substances as a means of looking as good as skinny feels, or whatever Kate Moss said.
Coca-Cola is a conglomerate actively contributing to the genocide in Gaza and no one with internet access can pretend not to know – certainly not anyone building a career off an online presence. We are witnessing the most actively documented genocide in history, and while there are many still boycotting, it seems that the majority are operating as usual, acting as if nothing is happening at all.
This is not to mention the attacks on women's rights globally which are occurring simultaneously. There have been recent recirculation of the iconic mid-2010s images of Iranian women burning photos of Ayatollah with actual cigarettes in light of the latest wave of anti-government protests. These are still aestheticised depictions of rebellion under repression, but it’s not for nothing.
Actual smoking is obviously bad, but we’re obfuscating the real reason behind our obsession with health and wellness. The appearance of cleanliness, steeped in its own politics, is nothing compared to the metaphorical cleanse, the relief, of letting go of the physical and getting dirty as we crawl through the trenches in the name of our basic rights. We are reproducing increasingly unattainable standards of beauty and lifestyle for women, crystallising individualistic insecurities at a time which demands collective action and looking outside of ourselves, all for aspartame-flavoured sparkling water and a matching workout set.
