What GLP-1s Have Not Changed |
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Western beauty ideals have long linked thinness to discipline and virtue.
GLP-1 medications appear to bypass the suffering traditionally associated with weight loss.
Attitudes continue to moralize the myth of suffering even in the age of GLP-1s.
The non-medical use of GLP-1s raises questions about what is lost when hunger is treated as a problem.
What “thin” looks like and means in Western culture continues to morph over time, but one implied narrative threads it all together: the belief that the thinner body signifies a more psychologically controlled and more disciplined self. By making appetite suppression a chemical and physical process, the use of GLP-1s for weight loss ostensibly rewrites that narrative; but does it?
While men increasingly face their own pressures around body size and physique, compulsary thinness has historically been directed most intensely at women. During the ‘90’s, the androgynous Kate Moss “heroine chic” image marketed deprivation as edgy and cool; then the Victoria's Secret angels rewrote women's thinness as sexy, toned, and bronzed, repackaging discipline as sexual empowerment; Thinspo and Pro-ana language expanded to include Fitspo, where strong was to be the new skinny but control and discipline were merely repackaged as “wellness.” Despite the shifting language around compulsory thinness, being thin has remained the glorified reward you gained for your struggle and sacrifice.
The mythology of suffering exploits the self-awareness and self-understanding people gain through attention to their biological signals of hunger and appetite. The woman who tunes into that hunger can then ignore it. The myth acknowledges, almost necessitates, the body’s signal of hunger but moralizes the women who can, and cannot, use and optimize it. This is the mechanism behind Kate Moss’s popularized phrase, “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”
A Different Path to Thinness
Into this cultural milieu enters the non-medical use of GLP-1s. Originally approved for type 2 diabetes, these drugs have become increasingly available through prescription and the black market to........