This post is a follow-up from my last post on buccal fat. Oana called my attention to the newish weight loss drugs Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro, which apparently have been taking New York, Hollywood and everywhere people are ‘professionally thin’ by storm. These drugs are appetite suppressants that are indicated for type-2 diabetes or obesity, but they’re being prescribed off-label to people who don’t medically need them…including, according to Matthew Schneier writing for The Cut, people who are already thin.
If you liked my last post on buccal fat, you really should check out Schneier’s article. As with the injectables and the buccal fat removal, there is a link between the trend and technology. Schneier, describing an actor friend of his that he meets after she’s gone on one of these drugs, says, “She looks like an Instagram version of herself but in real life.” Later on, he writes,
The most dominant body isn’t even the body that walks around with us all day; it’s the one photographed and disseminated. “It’s like everyone is so psychologically damaged from living a two-dimensional life,” Alissa Bennett, who writes and lectures about art and is a director at the Gladstone Gallery, tells me. She’s found herself talking about Ozempic all the time; everyone takes it, and she considers it bizarrely accessible. It’s like Facetune injected into real life. “Do you read the Daily Mail ever?” she asks me. “They’re like, ‘Look at these Photoshop fails!’ and people have waists that have a circumference of four inches. And so when it sort of happened” — that everyone’s real waists were whittled down to skewers, too — “the weird thing is I didn’t really notice it.”
Technology continues to create new standards of beauty, and to normalize the body modification undergone to attain that beauty. And technology has also made beauty incredibly lucrative. What’s so disappointing about the Ozempic craze is that it seems to be a tacit acceptance of the idea that thinness is beauty, the last few years of the body positivity movement be damned.
What happens when something previously unattainable for many people—thinness, or ultra-thinness—suddenly becomes attainable? What if that thing is something we equate with beauty and goodness, something that can literally create wealth? Who gets access, and who doesn’t—and what stories do we tell about the ones who don’t?
These are some of the questions I was trying to explore in my first book, which I co-wrote with my friend Jackie Roberti. In our book, the drug that becomes available confers eternal life instead of thinness, but it functions in much the same way: getting access to this drug is seen as an individual responsibility, despite the various structural factors that mediate it; people with access have unlimited time to amass their fortunes, deepening their structural power; and people without access are seen as lazy or morally weak, the way fat (or poor) people are often seen today. Jackie and I figured that if there really was a panacea for age and disease, it would be distributed unequally, the way every other technology has been. That’s why it troubles me that scientists are getting closer to understanding and maybe even resetting age, and tech billionaires are throwing money at the problem. I’m all for understanding for understanding’s sake—but in our stratifying society, one thing we all have in common is that we all die. What happens when even that common ground goes away?
Thank you for this work. Even in this short post, I found insight into things I'd been wondering about.