What “thin” looks like and means in Western culture changes over time, but one underlying narrative binds them all together: the belief that a thinner body is a more psychologically controlled and disciplined personality. By creating appetite Overcoming a chemical and physical process, the use of GLP-1s for weight loss appears to rewrite this narrative; but does it?
While men are more likely to face their own pressures around body size and physique, mandatory thinness has historically focused more on women. During the 90s, Kate Moss’s androgynous “heroine beauty” marketed deprivation as edgy and cool; then the Victoria’s Secret Angels rewrote women’s thinness as sensual, colorful and bronzed, the discipline of packaging. sex empowerment; The language of Thinspo and Pro-ana was expanded to include Fitspo, where strong was supposed to be the new skinny, but control and discipline were repackaged as just “health”. Despite the shift in language around mandated thinness, being thin remained a glorious reward that you earned for your struggle and sacrifice.
The mythology of suffering takes advantage of people’s self-awareness and self-understanding attention to their biological signals of hunger and appetite. A woman who tunes in to hunger can then ignore it. Myth acknowledges the body’s hunger cues, almost necessarily, but encourages women who can and can’t use and optimize it. This is the mechanism behind Kate Moss’ famous phrase, “nothing tastes like feeling skinny.”
Another way to slim down
This cultural environment includes the non-medical use of GLP-1. Originally approved for type 2 diabetes, these drugs are increasingly available through prescription and the black market for those without metabolic disease. They work primarily by suppressing appetite and slowing the rate at which food leaves the stomach. Patients reported a reduced desire and inability to overeat without becoming ill (Tolentino2023). The issue is not whether women should take GLP-1 drugs for certain conditions. This is a medical question that belongs between them and their doctors. The question here is what it means that the cultural moment around this drug seems to have become a new narrative that challenges the myth of suffering.
Appetite suppression is now promoted as a chemical and biological phenomenon that involves the need for psychological discipline and willpower. Losing weight can happen without the emotional stress of calorie counting and constant exercise. Breaking this moral narrative is worth a lot in itself. But the new story being developed still says that appetite is the problem, suppressed appetite is liberated, and chemicals are management care and treatment. If the mythology of suffering has exploited the self-awareness of hunger, the use of GLP-1 attempts to turn off the hunger and self-awareness signal. But the body’s hunger and satiety signals are more than just a nuisance for those without chronic conditions. They are, among other things, a form of embodied self-awareness: a particular knowledge that emerges from inhabiting the body over time. What a person knows about their hunger is part of what they know about themselves.
Writing in 2023, Gia Tolentino traces the historical genealogy of thinness from the Industrial Revolution to the present day, showing how thinness became a class and racial marker in the nineteenth century. Lifestyles became increasingly sedentary, food became more accessible, and clothing sizes became standardized. “The diet industry in the form of thyroid pills, slimming salons, and pop culture articles about ‘deformity’ and “crime” from excess weight. After the chronology to through body positivity The moment of the 2010s and its opposite in the “shrinking” Kardashians of today, Tolentino shows how this thin supremacy is old, adaptable and sustainable.
The introduction of GLP-1, says Tolentino, has ironically “led to a public rethinking of what it means to be fat, rather than a new focus on being thin.” Although the drug can help those who struggle with chronic health conditions (especially diabetes and obesity), regulate their metabolic function and those who have compulsive food thoughts, to work on a different relationship with food and appetite, for those who use it for aesthetic purposes, “it can work more like an injection. eating disorder.”
In its Feminist Analysis of GLP-1 Pharmaceutical Marketing in 2024, Varin and others. claim that the drug GLP-1 advertisementFocusing on women’s empowerment actually undermines its promises of self-care. Through appetite medicine, “offering a pharmacological solution that removes the emotional stress of weight loss” and “freeing women from their impoverished lives,” the ad presents a “heroic narrative that eliminates women.” It promises care in the form of emancipation. But Varin et al. challenge this rhetoric of self-care by calling for research that after weight loss “guarantees an improved quality of life in mental health.” They conclude that “a stable form of selfishness and what is described as ‘freedom’ from ‘misery.’ diet” may be best “rather than being produced less through conditional self-acceptance”.
Purity of virtue
Although the introduction of GLP-1 has significantly reduced the role of willpower in weight loss, women say that this myth about the moral willpower remains. Cassidy Georgewrite in 032c in 2025, interviewed women about their experience of taking GLP-1. A woman shared her experience with him stigma on taking semaglutide: “if you cheat on Ozempic, then apparently you don’t deserve a round of applause.” Another interviewee says, “it’s always been interesting – now it’s easier to get. But when people hear that you helped the version of yourself that society prefers, it suddenly doesn’t count.”
Describing what he calls “the great act of disappearance” (bodies disappearing en masse through the use of GLP-1, in the cultural context of the revival of the heroin-chic aesthetic), George describes his experience of being praised as “the best thing I’ve ever seen, at least in our brainwashed opinion.” George is not on semaglutide, but stress and emotional distress prevented him from eating and to sleep right He was, in his own words, “very sick”. But people read the anxiety signal in his body as if it is an achievement. She had never felt so valuable. The cultural gaze is so conditioned to equate thinness with goodness that it can no longer distinguish goodness from emotional and psychological distress.
Thin culture has never valued just thin bodies, but instead values the ethical performance of the suffering required to achieve them. Even when medication seems to be the need for self-administrationto refuseculture imagination disciplinary deprivation is sustained by romance. When thin is treated as evidence self controlLarger bodies are often read as a sign of indolence and laziness. In conclusion, body size can be read as a symptom proxy even in the age of GLP-1. If the nonmedical use of GLP-1s is going to change anything about our relationship to weight, it should do more than change the body; it must remove the meanings we attach to them.
