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Beauty Mark is a monthly column by Allie Rowbottom, where she answers readers' pressing beauty questions. To submit your question, email beautymark@bylinebyline.com.
Ah the big O: Ozempic. What a product! What an encapsulation of myriad cultural ethos and class divides! What a time to be alive! Though the shortage of Ozempic and other GLP-1 receptor agonists (like Wegovy and Munjaro) is ongoing—remedied for the most part, then returned every few months as drug companies hustle to keep up with demand–discourse has recently turned to whether people using glp-1 agonists for what appears to be “vanity” weight loss (defined as minor weight loss and/or weight loss without significant medical necessity) are using the drugs as a band-aid, a circumnavigation of their own laziness, a failure of will. Are they blindly buying into beauty culture, or perpetuating fatphobia, or failing to properly absorb the messaging of the body positivity movement by using the drug to lose weight they wouldn’t want to lose if they had properly absorbed the messaging of the body positivity movement?
Body positivity is ostensibly about accepting all bodies. It’s about helping individuals to embrace and feel comfortable in their bodies. This does not, by definition, exclude bodies on Ozempic. Then again, body positivity is also about combatting unrealistic body standards, and it’s hard to imagine the proliferation of GLP-1 agonists, especially among celebrities and influencers, helping to combat a cultural obsession with thinness as power. Herein lies the contradiction that defies the sweet comfort of shaming other people, the easy morality of a viral tweet.