What “thin” looks like and means in Western culture has changed over time, but one overarching narrative holds them all together: the belief that a slimmer body represents a more psychologically controlled and disciplined self. by doing appetite suppressing the chemical and physical process, using GLP-1 for weight loss supposedly rewrites this story; but is it?
While men increasingly face their own pressures on body size and physique, compulsive thinness has historically targeted the strongest women. In the ’90s, the androgynous Kate Moss’ “heroin chic” look marketed deprivation as unnatural and cool; then Victoria’s Secret Angels rewrote feminine delicacy as sensual, toned and bronzed, repackaging discipline. sexual delegation; The language of Thinspo and Pro-ana expanded to include Fitspo, where strong was supposed to be the new skinny, but control and discipline were simply repackaged as “health.” Despite the shift in language around forced thinness, being thin remains a glorious reward for your struggle and sacrifice.
The mythology of suffering takes advantage of what people achieve through self-awareness and self-awareness. attention to the biological signals of hunger and appetite. A woman who adjusts to this hunger can then ignore it. The myth acknowledges, almost demands, the body’s hunger signal, but moralizes women who can and cannot use and optimize it. This is the mechanism behind Kate Moss’s famous quote, “nothing tastes as good as feeling skinny.”
Another way to thinness
This cultural environment includes non-medical uses of GLP-1. These drugs, originally approved for type 2 diabetes, are increasingly sold by prescription and through the black market to people without metabolic diseases. They work primarily by suppressing appetite and slowing the rate at which food leaves the stomach. Patients reported decreased appetite and were unable to overeat without becoming ill (Tolentino2023). The problem is not that women should take GLP-1 drugs under certain conditions. This is a medical question between them and their doctors. The question here is that this cultural moment surrounding drugs seems to have become a new narrative that challenges the myth of suffering.
Appetite suppression is now heralded as a chemical and biological phenomenon that bypasses the need for psychological discipline and willpower. Losing weight can be done without the emotional hassles of calorie counting and constant exercise. Breaking this moral narrative is worthy enough in itself. But the new manufactured narrative still says that appetite is the problem, that suppressed appetite is liberated and chemical. management care and healing. If the mythology of suffering used the self-awareness of hunger, the use of GLP-1 seeks to calm the signal of hunger and self-awareness. But the body’s hunger and satiety signals are not nuisances to be managed by those without chronic illnesses. They are, among other things, a form of self-knowledge: special knowledge that comes from living in a body over time. What man knows about his hunger is part of what he knows about himself.
wrote in 2023, Jia Tolentino Tracing the historical genealogy of thinness from the Industrial Revolution to the present, it shows how thinness became a class and racial marker in the nineteenth century. Lifestyles became increasingly sedentary, food became easier to access, and clothing sizes standardized. “Diet industry revived” thyroid extract pills, slimming salons and “disfigurement” and “pop culture articles about”.crime” being overweight. Going up in chronological order body positivity The moment of the 2010s and its transformation in today’s “shrinking” Kardashians, Tolentino shows that this superiority of thinness is old, flexible and persistent.
Tolentino noted that the introduction of GLP-1 ironically “prompted less public discussion of what it means to be fat than it did to rethink being thin.” While the drug may help those struggling with chronic health conditions (especially diabetes and obesity) to regulate metabolic function and help those with food compulsions to have a different relationship with food and cravings, for those who use it for aesthetic purposes, “it works more like an injection. eating disorder“.
In A Feminist Analysis of GLP-1 Pharmaceutical Marketing in 2024, Warin et al. states that GLP-1 is a drug advertising‘s emphasis on women’s empowerment undermines its promises of self-care. By medicalizing appetite, offering a pharmacological solution that transcends the “emotional strain of weight loss,” and “liberating women from a life of poverty,” the ad “presents a heroic narrative that weighs women down.” It promises self-care in the form of freedom. But Warin et al. Complicate the rhetoric of self-care by referring to research that concludes that “mental health quality of life is not guaranteed to improve” after weight loss. They conclude: “A more sustainable form of self-care and what is described as ‘freedom’ from ‘poverty.’ dieting” might be best “produced (instead of) by self-acceptance.
Stability of virtue
Although the introduction of GLP-1 has largely eliminated the role of willpower in weight loss, this narrative of moral willpower still persists, according to women. Cassidy Georgeto write 032c In 2025, women were interviewed about their experience of taking GLP-1. A woman shared her experience stigma on taking semaglutide: “If you’re cheating on Ozempic, you don’t deserve the applause.” Another respondent says: “Skinny has always been attractive – now it’s easier to achieve. But as soon as people hear that you’ve helped change society’s preferred version of yourself, it suddenly becomes irrelevant.”
Describing what he calls the “Great Disappearance Act” (bodies disappearing en masse with GLP-1, against a resurgent cultural backdrop of the heroin-glam aesthetic), George recounts his experience as “the best I’ve ever seen, at least in our brains.” George was not on semaglutide, but stress and emotional turmoil prevented him from eating and sleeping right. According to him, it was “very bad”. But people read his body’s signal of anxiety as an achievement. He had never felt so valued. The cultural view is so conditioned to equate delicacy with virtue that it can no longer distinguish health from emotional and mental distress.
The culture of thinness has never valued thin bodies, but rather the moral value of the suffering necessary to achieve them. Even when pharmaceuticals eliminate the need for self-medication.rejectioncultural imagination continues to romanticize disciplined deprivation. When viewed as evidence of subtlety self controllarger bodies are often read as signs of indulgence and laziness. In short, body size continues to be read as a proxy for character even in the age of GLP-1. If the nonmedical use of GLP-1 is going to change anything significant about our relationship to weight, it needs to do more than change the body; we must eliminate the meanings we attach to them.
