Ozempic: Say farewell to ‘body positivity’
Is Ozempic killing the body positivity movement? asked Katie J.M. Baker in The New York Times. That’s what disappointed fans of plus-size influencers are wondering. Many online celebrities who “once celebrated their curves” and denounced fatphobia have recently switched to documenting major weight loss, often enabled by injections of Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs. Rosey Blair, who has 188,000 Instagram followers, defended her choice to drop 60 pounds with the help of Mounjaro. “I have zero remorse or shame,” she wrote. “Two years ago, I couldn’t wipe my own ass!” Critics called those comments “ableist and self-hating.” Even Oprah Winfrey, queen of the public weight-loss journey, has taken heat for getting thin with the help of a GLP-1 drug, said Kellie Carter Jackson in CNN.com. Now close to her 160-pound target weight, she recently announced she was leaving the board of Weight Watchers and dedicating an upcoming talk-show special to these medications. It certainly is “an interesting moment in our weight-obsessed culture.”
News flash: It’s “OK to lose weight,” said Jack Butler in National Review. Only in a warped society can a fat person drop pounds only to have strangers berate her for being “dishonest with her community,” as one irate follower told formerly plus-size model Dronme Davis. Nearly 42 percent of Americans are obese, putting them at high risk of diabetes, heart disease, and other medical problems; obesity costs our health-care system $173 billion a year. That’s the real societal scourge, not thinness. Ozempic, however, has upended the moral calculus of weight loss, said Ashley Baker in Air Mail. Women have been trained to think that “thinness signifies self-control, virtue, and beauty,” and can be achieved through the hard work of dieting and exercise. But now, a single, self-administered injection each week makes appetite regulation far easier. Some people seem to think that’s cheating, and “morally inferior” to losing weight “the oldfashioned way.”
Nonetheless, Ozempic and similar drugs do seem to be ending “society’s short-lived flirtation with body positivity,” said Arwa Mahdawi in
The Guardian. That movement did not truly end the association of thinness with willpower and heaviness with gluttony. But while these medications are creating a new kind of diet culture that doesn’t require living on kale smoothies, the basic assumption remains. Even in Ozempic’s brave new world, women remain “judged by how much space they take up.”