Ozempic and the Trend of Body Positivity
Drugs and diets swearing to hold the elixir to everlasting health and beauty is nothing new. Every decade or so, a new weight loss fad dominates the pop culture soundwaves. From tapeworms, cotton balls, cigarettes and coffee, amphetamines, and diabetes drugs, our pursuit for the ideal body by any means necessary has deep roots. But how do these pursuits of bodily perfection compete with recent progress made by the body-positive movement? What do they say about society's habit of mistaking bodies for fashion trends, and who (or what) is responsible for the entanglement of fashion and figure?
ELLIE KURLANDER // FLAT HAT MAGAZINE
The easiest way to understand society's attraction to trends and the conflation of bodies and clothing is through heuristics — mental shortcuts that allow us to make decisions more easily at the cost of nuance. As a way to relieve the burden of choice, our brains look to the standard-bearers — usually media outlets and corporations — to tell us what to buy, how to look and act, which skincare routine will keep us looking younger longer, who is "ugly," who is "pretty," among others. Standard-bearers manufacture societal expectations to sell the idea of increasing one's social currency. Over the past century, these industries have promoted the notion that youth and thinness are the most valuable asset.
Before the age of mass media and industrialized economies, bodily preferences and social currencies were as varied as the cultures that held them. However, the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution did what it does best and ruined everything. To save on production costs, the clothing industry created standard sizes that favored thin bodies. The lack of inclusivity in sizing meant that if a person wanted to embrace the current fashion trends, they had to alter their bodies accordingly. Promoting the notion that a person must be thin to be fashionable soon became widely accepted and highly profitable — and where the potential for profit goes, other industries follow.
Health-based corporations found ways to monetize women's insecurities by peddling fad diets and weight-loss drugs that catered to whatever was popular in the trend cycle at the time. For example, to fit into the Twiggy-inspired babydoll dresses of the 1960s, women would adhere to the grapefruit, cigarettes, and black coffee diet. The toned physiques that paired well with aerobics leotards of the 1980s were best achieved through the appetite suppressant drug fen-phen. To properly flaunt the whale tale and skinny jean combo of the 2000s, you need only make an appointment with CoolSculpting and subscribe to the Adkins or the Weight Watchers diet. Similarly, the fledgling years of social media saw the rise of the Kardashians and similar influencers promoting flat tummy teas and BBLs to get that perfect hourglass shape.
As the 2010s rolled through, and the noise of influencers promoting pills, powders, and potions to achieve the perfect body type rose to an all-time high, a beacon emerged to save us from the trenches: The body positivity movement. The movement originated in the 1960s with a staunch political agenda that advocated for the equal treatment of all bodies regardless of shape, color, or ability. The new era of body positivity in the digital age built off the foundation activists had laid half a century prior. Plus-sized activists of color vocally resisted the standard of beauty grounded in whiteness and forced fashion and diet industries to confront their racist histories. Models and activists like Ashley Graham began appearing on the cover of Vogue, and artists like Lizzo showed audiences that you don’t have to be thin to perform like an athlete. Though the early years of social media remained a never-ending cesspool of insecurity and unattainable bodily ideals that still haunt me today, the emergence of popular influencers whose bodies defied the social norm planted a small seed of body acceptance. I naively believed this pattern would follow us into the 2020s, where health and fashion would finally be divorced from size. However, capitalism did its thing and ruined everything. Again.
When advertisers and marketers realized they could profit off self-acceptance, they jumped on the opportunity, and what was once a radical movement became a watered-down, tokenized parody of itself. Fashion magazines began peppering plus-sized models and superficial articles about self-love into their portfolios as sacrificial offerings to the keyboard warriors, and celebrities who already adhered to conventional Western beauty standards began centering themselves in the narrative. Soon enough, body positivity became yet another progressive calling card, drained of all impact and substance.
As soon as the novelty of body positivity wore off, the movement's battle cry turned into a whisper — and a new decade began. If we've learned anything about the 2020s so far, it's that the body positivity movement was not a wrench in the trend machine; it was a cog. The turn of the decade has brought with it yet another paradigm shift that prioritizes thinness over other body types. The Kardashians reversed their BBLs, low-rise jeans and Miu Miu mini skirts dominated fashion trends, and heroin chic models graced the runways once again.
The recentering of sample-sized bodies in popular culture meant that society needed a new way to assist people in their journeys back to conventional beauty standards. This leads me to society's latest drug du jour: Ozempic. When future historians put their metaphorical pen to paper and write the story of pop culture phenomena that dominated the 2020s, there is no doubt that Ozempic will have its own chapter. According to Google analytics, searches for Ozempic have risen 436% since the start of the decade, and its presence in the pop culture lexicon is far from losing momentum.
Manufactured by the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, Ozempic hit the market as a diabetes treatment drug. The once-weekly injectable drug contains semaglutide, which regulates hunger cues, making users feel fuller for longer. The appetite-suppressing qualities of Ozempic resulted in reports of weight loss by users, and as soon as the weight loss bells rang, Novo Nordisk found themselves appealing to a much larger market. The increased demand for Ozempic prescriptions for cosmetic purposes led to the manufacture of Wegovy — a drug nearly identical to Ozempic but containing a higher dose of semaglutide, leading to swifter, more dramatic weight loss results.
Acquiring a Wegovy prescription is now as easy as taking a BuzzFeed quiz. Online pharmacies dole out prescriptions like candy, and doctors don't hesitate to classify the drug as a cure-all for every ailment experienced by a fat person. Moreover, the demographics of Wegovy and Ozempic users are getting progressively wealthier, thinner, and whiter, showcasing that our twenty-first-century standards of beauty are not so inclusive as marketed.
The rapid and ever-expanding popularity of injectable weight loss drugs has blown down the house of cards the body-positive movement worked hard to build over the last decade. The standard-bearers have rejected the notion that fatness is acceptable and have reverted to the size that is consistently profitable. This latest shift towards thinness shows how contrived our perceptions of beauty are, and the structures of trendsetting and capitalism signal that, for the foreseeable future, we are doomed to live in a cycle where any attempts at meaningful change are destined to be short-lived.
It should be noted that the purpose of this article is not to shame anyone for wanting to lose weight or to encourage fat people to stay fat for the sake of activism. It's your body; follow your bliss. However, it is important to understand the deep-rooted systems that profit from the "shortcomings" of medium and large bodies.
So, how do we create a system that doesn't view a person's flesh as a form of social currency that can be altered as easily as a pair of jeans? The best answer I can give is body neutrality — a feat that is easier said than done, but worth the effort. The bedrock of the fashion and diet industries is predicated on using idealized body types to sell products. By de-centering mainstream beauty ideals and respecting our body's function rather than appearance, it will be harder for these industries to capitalize on them. As a result, the media and marketers will be forced to regroup. Though this is a bright image of the future, I am hesitant that my master plan will ever come to fruition.
ARIANNA STEWART // FLAT HAT MAGAZINE
In the meantime, it's helpful to keep in mind that while drugs like Ozempic and weight-loss trends can produce positive outcomes for some, our bodies will still never be good enough in the eyes of tastemakers — and that's by design. The more unattainable the beauty standard is, the more we want to attain it; the faster the trend cycle moves, the faster we'll want to move with it. There is nothing wrong with you; people are just greedy. The only “wrong” of your body is the way the world treats it.
