Everyone is really fucking thin. Am I allowed to say it?

Or are we gonna keep the whole pilates & protein tale going

It doesn’t feel very good to be a woman right now.

When has it ever? You’ll say, and I’ll tell you ok, fair! Consider this my International Women’s Day contribution, diving into the most uncomfortable.

It seems to me there’s virtually no polite way of pointing out emerging cultural patterns if the discussion involves a woman being visibly underweight. Talking around it is allowed, under the scaffolding of “trends” and “statistics”, big frameworks and abstract terms only, but abstaining from using any specific woman as an example is necessary. Otherwise, you’re partaking in bodyshaming, attacking the individual, or, one of my personal favorites, “you don’t know these people or what they’re going through.” You’re not wrong – I don’t know these people; but a spade is a spade, and saying that my feed is full of dangerously malnourished celebrities en masse is hardly controversial.

A problem doesn’t just go away if you refuse to look at it. Talking about what’s being presented as the new norm is the only way of getting closer to any resolve or understanding at all.

I also respect you, the reader, enough to not hide behind the “I’m scared for the impressionable young girls” facade. I am the impressionable young girl. Aged 27, scared and uncomfortable. The current landscape of ultra-thinness will make the gold medalist of remission flirt with behaviors they left behind, or fall face-flat back into them. Shall we all say good riddance to whatever our newfound, finally somewhat sustainable, non-extreme definition of health was, and be welcomed back by our disordered habits, arms wide open? Or, maybe, there’s still hope?

(Disclaimer: This essay is about the pursuit of extreme thinness by healthy people, not about medically necessary and mandated weight loss/management. These are two completely different conversations, and nothing below is about the latter.)

I feel like I’m perpetually getting don’t-worry-kitten’d. Okay. Yay. Problem at hand: women are shrinking. Then getting procedures and modifications to offset the unpleasant effects of rapid fat loss. Then shrinking some more. The trickle-down effect of GLP-1s becoming widespread, coupled with a lack of proper regulation around the drug, making tweaking one’s healthy BMI to underweight accessible and effortless, is palpable and bitter in the mouth. Restriction has always been there, but what was once exclusive to a disciplined few, physically demanding and unsustainable for most body types, is now a matter of a weekly needle ritual. There are structural societal changes happening at a light speed, and the refusal to engage with what’s happening –really engage with it, not just comment on it lazily and move on– does us very little good.

Saying anything about what you’re seeing with your own two eyes is met with such disdain and resistance, you’d think people are getting paid. It seems they feel virtuously holy and tethered to the ideal body themselves when they blindly defend it. An army of Bella Hadid’s unpaid interns are waiting to tell you that skinny people exist! and don’t comment on other people’s bodies! Sure, because you’re not missing the point at all. They remind me of Elon’s reply guys binding to his wealth by safeguarding him on X. I’m a big fan of transparency, but when celebrities attribute a visibly malnourished body to pilates and intuitive eating –which is exactly as much as they’ll disclose– they make it seem like the new extreme is nothing but a casual byproduct of good choices and sound decisions. Suddenly, your own healthy lifestyle of exercising and eating well, which likely has given you a healthy, supple, energetic body, feels like it isn’t working anymore because your clavicles aren’t sticking out enough.

right, because it’s the bob that’s making her unrecognizable

What we’re seeing is a big old mess, and it happens to be quite Foucauldian. It is a large particle of what Foucault coined as biopower – “power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.”¹ Power over body, essentially. Modern systems do an excellent job at control through optimization. By making us more useful, our bodies more docile, increasing our efficiency, making it all feel like an active choice. When big pharma offers a quick fix solution for us to escape our flesh, we will take it. Once it finally offers us a drug that enables us not to feel anything, we will take that, too. We crave being chastised and reprimanded for wanting: in turbulent times, all we need is to be absolved of such frivolities. To want it to exist and demand, and we just can’t afford all that right now, so the switch must be turned off. Existentially, it is a little humorous that the number one drug currently sweeping the globe is one that works by eliminating desire. Can we sit with the gravity of this? Who benefits from an obedient body that takes up less space and is cheaper to maintain, at once more economically viable?

The modus operandi of these control systems is so effective because it puts you, the individual, in a position of play-pretend choice. Starting Ozempic, specifically as a woman that doesn’t medically require any weight loss, can feel good – it signals agency; it’s a noble act in favor of your “health and longevity”, a cheat code to something you have most likely naturally and rightfully struggled with achieving. Maybe even a little secret you keep to yourself since you don’t technically need it and may be judged – everyone’s doing it, why shouldn’t you? You’re only following protocols of the new norm arranged with biopower. People need to feel as though the systems of control they succumb to are an exercise of free will. A questionable thing is not so questionable if we opted in ourselves. We crave a sense of control, an illusion of intentionality; the only thing standing between us and questioning the system.

Why do we do this? Simone Weil described the psychology of this impulse in Gravity and Grace², published posthumously: she saw that human beings, when succumbed to something hard, will not just tolerate their own deprivation but build entire belief systems around it. Suffering needs appeal, but it also requires a deeper meaning. The alternative would force a confrontation much more frightening: we will have to ask ourselves just how much of the social contract is written (and currently being rewritten with stricter rules) for women to be malleable, to fit into the framework that wasn’t set by us, one that actively incentivizes us into our most miserable, weakest versions, getting further away from the empowered notion of health we claim we’re in pursuit of. Further from Epicurean life, closer to indigence. We’re left to defend what we’ve suffered for because the only alternative is admitting that our suffering was, and is, pointless.

Here’s the challenging part of the new norm: no sovereign decrees that women must be size 00, no law requires it. But you’re given a new template. It’s subtle, but visual and undeniable. The new norm of what the divine feminine looks like is being pushed down your periphery from all sides, award shows to couture to social media and fitness. For instance, Style Analytics reported that plus-size body representation at fashion week has dropped 93%. Every incentive to pursue it is in your hands, loaded and ready to shoot. But no one’s forcing you to get skinnier, right?

from Style Analytics

It’s incredibly convenient to hide this nonsense under the guise of health and wellness. But being medically underweight takes a toll on the body, requires an extreme amount of control to achieve and sustain, and carries potential long-term health damage with it – this is obvious, science-backed truth. We’ve known this forever. So, why the anger, the secrecy, the defense?

Probably because any woman who has spent years and decades in a one-sided relationship with her appetite can’t hear “thinness culture is a tool of control” as neutral analysis of a situation. She takes it to heart, as though the central project of her adulthood is a lie, a product of biopower. This is also why GLP-1s are scrutinized in ED communities; a girl that suffers for her thinness in perpetuity now watches someone else achieve it pharmacologically and easily if they can afford it, and rather than questioning the value of thinness itself, she doubles down on defending it or flat out denies its widespread use. If thinness isn’t even worth the suffering she endured, then her hunger is retroactively emptied of its meaning. There’s an inherent wish to see others suffer exactly what we are suffering, as Weil put it. This is, naturally, both an ego and a class thing.

***

The altar of an undernourished body is a woman’s own domain of prayer, perhaps the only one we have left. Untouched by men, not fully understood by them either. By challenging it, we’re challenging the cosmology we’ve arranged for ourselves, and all the things we think thinness brings with it. Acceptance, validation, being wanted, acknowledged, and heard, or, at the very least, having a purpose in an increasingly hopeless environment. Give it too much meaning, and slowly but surely we can’t go without. “We are drawn towards a thing because we believe it is good. We end by being chained to it because it has become necessary.”

Judging anyone for wanting to lose weight, whether through Ozempic or the good old methods, is senseless.³ I’m no higher power, and I notice this in myself, which saddens me. It’s not even about my body anymore: as our physique is shrinking, so is our culture, an interest in partaking, creating, or contributing. There’s less inventive spark I remember growing up with, when the whole wide world felt available, wide open, at my fingertips like clay. No dream was too big then, no ambition too extreme. My desires have gone from big, juicy, audacious to just the new norm basics: get thinner, save more money, bite a little more of people’s attention on the impossible content conveyor belt. I’m feeling tunnel vision forming and walls of deprivation closing in on me.

That is, perhaps, the thing we’re not ready to admit. When we shrink ourselves, the smallness we acquire isn’t limited to our physical body. We think it opens up new horizons of power, but what tends to happen is we just end up wanting less. Less food, less sex, less comfort, less culture, less invention, less daydreaming. Less change. A woman who doesn’t want anything is a cheaper, more governable subject, yet to herself now more desirable and spiritually fuckable, finally freed from appetite and other mortal waste. She’s gracefully negligible, lightweight and otherworldly, takes no space at all, doesn’t raise her voice, would never cause a scene. And it should surprise no one that the drug everyone wants to get their hands on is one that shuts off hunger, essentially numbing most vital parts of the human experience.

It’s not a matter of asking how the GLP-1 era is going to change the way we exist in the world; That has already occurred, whether we’ve been partaking or not. How it will shape the years to come and just how much we can take before we start asking ourselves why we’re letting this health and wellness masquerade become the new norm, I don’t know. Again, I’m just a woman, and I’m not immune to what I’m seeing. What I do know is that honest conversations are the first step to better conversations.

I have certainty in two things: One, I’m not the only one sick of seeing people so intentionally malnourished. Two, in the most hopeless of times, when succumbing is the easiest way out and resisting feels futile and even lame, it is precisely our responsibility to do better. For ourselves, for our girlfriends, sisters, mothers, future daughters.

1. Biopower: Foucault and Beyond by Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar

2. Gravity and Grace (La pesanteur et la grâce) by Simone Weil; available here

3. See disclaimer - only talking about the weight loss of somebody at an already healthy weight