Published
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be skinny. Before I knew of thigh gaps and collar bones, I knew the slender beige of my Barbie doll’s limbs as I held her waist with my chubby little fingers. The doll was a present from my new sister. I looked at the healthy baby and my healthy mother in the hospital bed, flesh upon flesh, shiny sweat and big beams, merry pink and red. This Barbie looked so much more like the women I saw on television than whatever was going on here. I clutched her particularly hard in the car ride back.
I do remember the first time I encountered feminism. It was a long paragraph on Tumblr, indignantly detailing the daily injustices of teenage girls. I nodded along earnestly. Two separate posts of Brandy Melville models flanked either side of the text, and the writing pulsed at me on my screen like a throbbing heart between ribs.
I have spent much of my life believing in women's rights for all and in thinness for myself. It’s a conflating notion that has built up a brick-and-mortar presence within me since my girlhood. I am aware of how utterly misogynistic it is to expect women to take up less physical space than our male counterparts. I am also aware of how much my own identity rests upon the laurels of litheness, how desperately I wanted the body I now have, how zealously committed I am to maintaining it.
Naomi Wolf said a culture fixated on thinness is not an obsession with female beauty, but an obsession with female obedience. If the apple (95 calories) biblically represents women’s disobedience, well, maybe Eve wanted to have one before a meal to reduce her appetite. Famously, she may be fucking that night anyway. And if she’s going to be portrayed for infinity, she might as well be presented with a flat stomach. It’s absolutely exhausting and, at the same time, second nature.
Whether virgin or vixen, we all know better than to care—let alone, as is the case for many women today, totally fixate—on slimness. Yet millennia out from the first woman, we’re obeying the rules not of womanhood, but the societal demands of womanhood, the pressures of particular physicality, in direct disobedience of our own bodies. Low-cal apple crisps, low-carb diet apple Snapple, triglyceride-lowering apple cider vinegar. Today, the apple is a symbol of the virtue of discipline, and all the rewards reaped by having a body that can prove that to the world.
I watched my mom shake her head at my 2014 phase with diet tea. I find myself shaking my head in the same way while observing Ozempic culture eat our girls and women alive. How can I judge women who don’t need GLP-1s in their use of them regardless, when I myself have bent over backward to a back-breaking low-calorie pretzel in accommodation of my own obsessive determination to be small? These jabs yield the same results without the silent suffering associated with the daily maintenance of a low BMI. Yet I still recoil when celebrity after celebrity shrinks with each passing award ceremony until they are mere flesh and bone under the exposing light of the Hollywood lens.
This isn’t all done to attract men— it’s more so done to fit within a man’s world. Slimness is a metric by which we measure the success of womanhood. Capable, desirable, professional—not necessarily sexual, but accompanied by the power and freedom of sex if she so desires. Yes, ok, fine. Our obsession with a fatless, flat physique carries a bit of the weight of the male gaze. It’s just not exclusively that. It’s a silent but codified declaration to other women, too: either I have my shit together, or I’m just blessed with the sheer, unsellable fortune of genetic luck.
With Ozempic, slimness—that indisputable tenet of societal beauty—is accessible through our other metric of social currency: wealth. Of course, if they can bottle that into a series of DIY jabs, people will consume it! To glide through rooms with a brilliant body is so seriously seductive because of the awards it promises and delivers. For many, it’s a no-brainer.
Ozempic culture has ripped up the former rulebook, making it nearly impossible to escape its impact.
And of course we are angry about it. We are angry that it’s 2026 and we are still so hyper-fixated on being skinny, more so than in recent years. And that we are facing, once again, how irreversibly impacted we are by other bodies in our relationship to our own. If the pendulum swings one way, we all must shuffle in patient order to accommodate it, or else lose our perceived place in the hierarchy. Obviously, this is not the experience of all women. But for those who have tasted the status of moving through society with a slim physique, it’s difficult to surrender, even if it manifests in a form of self-hatred for enjoying it.
As with all weight discourse, the secretive nature of Ozempic culture has only amplified our political resentment of its existence. Is she on it? Are you on it? That resentment rages in a queasy existence with our reluctant admittance that we are aware of the privileges of thinness, and are complicit in seeking it ourselves. It’s tough work, being both an inmate and jail warden. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that within all of this, we find ourselves forcing our bodies into submission to skinniness, desperately trying to take up as little space as possible, chemically abolishing our desires in pursuit of becoming someone else’s.
