The Era Of Pretending Women Didn’t Want To Be Skinny Is Over

Lizzo, Demi Lovato, Barbie Ferrera, Meghan Trainor, and now Amy Schumer have all been vocally outspoken about body positivity, called for bigger body representation, and condemned “diet culture,” only to later embrace the thing they supposedly thought was the enemy: the beauty standard.

That leaves many wondering whether fat activists were ever sincerely concerned about dismantling “unrealistic beauty standards,” or if their perceived lack of access to thinness left them no other pathways except to devalue thinness as a worthy object of desire.

Evolving Beauty Standards

Beauty standards ebb and flow, as can be observed through a cursory glance through history. Body types go in and out of fashion. Just through a modern historical lens, there was 90s heroin chic, then the hipbone-prominent low-rise-jean skinny pop star with her abs-out phase of the early 2000s, followed by the Kardashian-popularized slim-thick curvy physique consisting of big breasts and butts and a snatched waist.

Now, thanks to the accessibility of weight-loss drugs, we're seeing a re-emergence of thinness. The first signs came from the architects of the previous body standard themselves: the Kardashians, whose deflating assets did not go unnoticed. Before long, everyone was sizing down in what has been dubbed the de-Kardashian-ification of America: reversed BBLs, implant removals, and injectables dissolved.

In the span of a few years, the Kardashians and female Hollywood celebrities have been boasting a noticeably slimmer and more natural physique. Well, natural in proportion, not methods. Noticeable cosmetic enhancements in the form of “more is more” are out of fashion. Now, the best work is undetectable, and with everyone copying the Kardashian Instagram-baddie maximalist approach, it was bound to lose its appeal. Smaller breasts and butts have come back in, as has a slender frame.

The Rise and Fall of Body Positivity

While weight and body shape have proven to be among the more malleable of standards, they are not entirely subjective or untethered from biology. Even as bigger and slender bodies have come in and out of fashion, a waist-to-hip ratio of about .7 has remained the most attractive across cultures. In women, cues that signal femininity, youth, symmetry, and vitality are about as inherent to beauty as fish are to the ocean. What we have found attractive throughout human history has been at the same time remarkably consistent and yet wildly varied in narrow ways.

The 2010s body positivity movement, which made larger bodies more visible and acceptable, was not a historical anomaly per se, as pre-industrial Europe saw Rubenesque bodies as beautiful during the Renaissance and Baroque eras because it was a class signifier at a time when thinness was related to the peasant class and likely meant you were starving. The wealthy, then, signaled their status, resource abundance, and the time they had for leisure with their portly figures.

While no one should be bullied for their weight, we are under no moral obligation to uphold certain aesthetics as beautiful as some sort of reparations for the trauma of the skinny-chic era.

It's probably fair to say that body fat percentage (but not necessarily body fat distribution) is a fluctuating beauty standard tied to resource availability. When calories are scarce, fatness is desirable because it's coded as upper class. When calories are cheap and abundant, thinness becomes the status ideal because it translates to self-control in a way that is still class-coded (excess resources, time, discipline, or even technological or medical help).

The thing about the 2010s era of fat liberation is that it was never internalized as a beauty standard. How could we expect it to, when, in relation to what I just described, there is the human tendency to value body fat as it relates to resource availability and class? There is no flex or high-class status marker in gorging yourself on seed-oil slop in the 21st century, the era of caloric abundance, where you can count yourself in the lucky minority if you're not overweight, obese, and don't have a diabetic or metabolic condition.

So, what do we make of the 2010s fat acceptance movement? It definitely made real strides in the culture, effectively shifting the beauty standard to skew plumper than the 2000s ideal. But it did not make fatness beautiful. No one believed that, not even the fat activists themselves. In practice, the body positivity movement functioned as a social justice movement that pathologized thinness and dieting to push back against the prevailing expectation of hyper-thinness and unsolicited scrutiny of women’s bodies for falling outside a narrow aesthetic range.

That part has been good. We definitely overshot it, but at least no one today seriously thinks the newly postpartum Britney Spears at the 2007 VMAs represented the upper limit of how “fat and disgusting” a woman could look. Swinging the pendulum to the opposite pathology by glorifying obesity as healthy and beautiful is not inventing the wheel; it's the same sickness inverted. While no one should be bullied for their weight, we are under no moral obligation to uphold certain aesthetics as beautiful as some sort of reparations for the trauma of the skinny-chic era.

We can unambiguously say that the tabloids calling objectively thin women fat were acting reprehensibly without any sense of hypocrisy. We do not need to pretend, however, that morbid obesity is healthy or beautiful. Fat acceptance was not body neutral; it was a pressure campaign that actively sought out to change people’s preferences by force. It smeared and attacked the people and companies that were not interested in making obesity some glamorous project.

Countersignaling Thinness, But At What Cost?

The fat acceptance movement’s goals went beyond fighting for human dignity and combating harassment. It wanted to transmute what most people found unattractive and unhealthy into something virtuous, beautiful, and worthy of representation. Fat liberationists, as they called themselves, demanded representation in media, advertising, clothing stores, runways, and commercials, featuring as front-page centerfolds that told young girls “Fat Is Beautiful.” Brands that were not “size inclusive” or that did not get in on the thickening were called out for fatphobia.

They also fought to change the scientific consensus in the medical community, where obesity has been understood, for quite some time, to be a significant risk factor for a host of medical problems that need to be flagged with overweight patients. These include a higher risk of Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, sleep disorders, and cardiovascular disease. But fat activists interpreted neutral medical information as dehumanization and their weight-related risk as weight stigma.

To this day, fat activists train their followers to advocate for themselves by minimizing and deflecting their doctors’ medical advice relating to weight, insisting that doctors have a fatphobic prejudice that prevents them from addressing their problems. Instead, they claim doctors reduce every symptom to a weight-related affliction. Fat activists have pathologized health discourse because they equate it with personal attacks that amount to personal failure. Their ideological stake in framing obesity as medically neutral has led to an anti-science framework that dismisses legitimate concerns about BMI, diet, and lack of exercise.

And don't even get me started on the boogeyman they made out of the “d” word: dieting. Along the way, “dieting” became a dirty word. I can understand the baggage it comes with, considering the nonsensical fad diets popularized in the early 2000s, but dieting is nothing more than considering the nutrition and caloric density of meals and using meal planning and portion control (calorie restriction) for weight management.

Dieting is not inherently bad, but thanks to the combined efforts of the body positivity movement and the eating disorder recovery community (who were very vocal about their post-2000s body image grievances), we have been forced, as a society, to pretend it's possible to lose weight without a mechanism that would actually reduce body fat.

If the only way to lose weight is to create a calorie deficit (consume fewer calories than you burn), but the rhetoric is that diets are toxic and don't work and “actually cause rebound weight gain in the long term,” then what is a gal to do except sulk about how unfair the world is?

The fat acceptance movement’s goals went beyond fighting for human dignity and combating harassment. It wanted to transmute what most people found unattractive and unhealthy into something virtuous, beautiful, and worthy of representation.

This is the self-fulfilling prophecy many fat activists have created for themselves, convinced they all magically have some sort of thermodynamically resistant thyroid problem or metabolic disease that turns air into fat. Frustration is understandable, but the solution is a more agency-forward worldview, not one that asks society to do the changing.

They have bought into propaganda that, by design, keeps people stuck, feeling helpless. It keeps them in the same situation: with a surplus of calories and body fat. So a seductive little idea took hold: the notion that fat people do not actually do anything differently than thin people. No, those thin people are not eating less or moving more, they are just “genetically blessed.”

It's a comforting narrative, but not a true one. Research consistently shows that obese people consistently underestimate calorie intake and overestimate activity levels. For anthropological research, watch the British reality show Secret Eaters, where obese people who have struggled with their weight for years and swear they track every calorie are monitored with 24/7 surveillance cameras that reveal the truth: a whole lot of calories go regularly unaccounted for.

But my point is not that obese people are fundamentally broken human beings. And in some sense, their argument is true. They don't really choose to be fat. If we zoom in on their genetics, brain chemistry, and biology, there are infinite factors that go into a person’s hunger cues, emotional regulation, relationship with food, and impulse control. Many of these factors are not in our control in any meaningful sense.

A significant portion of fat activists swear they don't eat more than thin people, while others fight for acknowledgment that obese people have dysregulated hunger hormones or a disordered relationship with food, such as over-relying on food as emotional comfort or dopamine seeking. But all of these burdens now face extinction thanks to the arrival of a little pill called semaglutide.

Ozempic Reveals the Real Aim of Body Positivity

Ozempic (a.k.a. semaglutide) was approved by the FDA in 2017 for the treatment of Type 2 Diabetes. The GLP-1 receptor agonist showed promising weight-loss effects and, by June 2021, was approved by the FDA for weight management. The “diet industry” experienced a revolution overnight. Celebrities were emerging from post-pandemic lockdown looking suspiciously slim following rapid weight loss.

One after another, A-listers were shedding pounds in what seemed like overnight physique transformations. The secret got out: a highly coveted weight-loss pill can make what has always been the bane of female existence, diet and weight management, a simple, effortless process. No willpower required; just take the pill and enjoy the silencing of food noise, the reduction in appetite, the ease with which you can eat fewer calories, and focus on nutrition because cravings have been silenced.

Oprah, who was never a fat liberation activist but a proponent of the self-love movement whose ethos was “your worth is not your weight,” helped pave the way for body positivity. She previously claimed she would not take Ozempic despite famously struggling with her weight for decades because she felt like it was taking “the easy way out.” However, she publicly changed her mind in 2023, admitting she began using the weight-loss medication as a tool to avoid yo-yoing, recognizing obesity as a disease.

One after another, A-listers were shedding pounds in what seemed like overnight physique transformations.

More recently, she has spoken candidly about how the drug reframed her assumptions about thin people. “One of the things that I realized the very first time I took a GLP-1 was that all these years I thought thin people had more willpower,” she said, believing they ate better foods, resisted temptation longer, and never touched a potato chip. After living a day inside the GLP-1 state, she realized they simply do not experience the same intrusive hunger thoughts known as “food noise” that she battled her whole life. “The very first time I took the GLP-1, I realized they are not even thinking about it,” she said. “They are eating when they are hungry and stopping when they are full.”

Many other celebrities, previously vocally proud to be fat or “all about that bass,” seem to have come to the same conclusion. Meghan Trainor, who caught flak years ago for perceived skinny shaming in her hit song “All About That Bass,” is now 60 pounds slimmer with the help of Ozempic and has gotten a breast augmentation despite a public image of being above buying into the thin beauty standard or getting plastic surgery.

Barbie Ferrera, who shot to fame for her depiction as Kat in Euphoria, seemed to be branded at first as a vocal fat activist, reclaiming the word fat, speaking out against weight stigma, and having a prominent “navigating the world as a fat girl” storyline on TV. However, she later admitted she felt the body positivity movement falsely attributed the idea that she was confident in her body to her when she never said that.

She criticized the backhanded compliments she would receive from body-positive people for acting like it was radical and brave for her to exist in her larger body while wearing a crop top. Now, the actress has lost 65 pounds and is reportedly angling to rebrand in Hollywood and move away from the fat-best-friend typecasting. While it's unclear if she is taking Ozempic, the timing and motivation for her weight loss lead many to speculate she could be using GLP-1s. She recently walked the Victoria’s Secret runway as a plus-size model, despite a reported sharp decline in plus-size models getting work in the industry.

Amy Schumer has publicly spoken about owning her body and refusing to play the Hollywood game of trying to fit the conventional beauty mold. Her entire career shtick has been one of self-deprecation around being the funny, frumpy, ugly chick (this is not my assessment, this is how Schumer intentionally cultivated her public persona). Schumer’s decision to delete all her pre-weight-loss photos from social media after debuting her post-Ozempic slimmed-down figure contradicts the self-love messaging, which has everyone talking on social media.

The Sour Grapes Rationalization of Beauty Standards

Reports of Schumer’s 40-pound weight loss, combined with erasing her pre-weight-loss digital footprint, sent online discourse spinning. Some X users chimed in claiming that Ozempic has been an “extinction-level event” for body positivity. Others joked that the drug was invented just so people could learn the difference between stated and revealed preferences.

One user, @minordissent, predicts we will see a full evaporation of the body positivity movement in the next decade following the rise of GLP-1s because “the primary driver of dysgenic ideas like body positivity stems from valuing the good thing, trying to get it, and failing so horribly for so long that, as a psychological self-protection mechanism, people abandon the value, or even invert it entirely, and hold onto the new dysgenic value for dear life to avoid falling into severe depression and self-loathing.” He adds, “By reducing the difficulty significantly of achieving the ‘good’ value, we massively reduce the incentive to defect from it.”

It turns out that much of body positivity has really been a sour-grapes rationalization. In the fable The Fox & the Grapes, a fox spends all day trying to reach a bunch of ripe grapes hanging from a vine. The grapes seem ready to burst with juice, and the fox’s mouth waters as he gazes longingly at them. He repeatedly jumps to reach the grapes but cannot quite grasp them. He tries again and again but tires himself out, never quite reaching the delicious grapes.

He sits down and looks at the grapes in disgust. “What a fool I am. Here I am wearing myself out to get a bunch of sour grapes that are not worth gaping for,” he says and walks off scornfully. Better to convince yourself the thing you coveted was actually rotten inside when you realize it's unattainable than to accept it's both valuable and out of your reach. That is the core motivation behind fat activism or self-love or body positivity; whatever they are calling it these days.

The second that the imaginary boundary disappears, so does the ideology. These coping mechanisms extend far beyond mere body image. Some suspect we will see similar trends as they relate to far more consequential ideas, like mortality. “As soon as you can purchase life extension, all the takes about how death gives life meaning will never be seen again,” tweeted X user Hunter Ash.

We're already seeing the same dynamic play out with the Make America Healthy Again movement and the longevity-pilled biohackers like Bryan Johnson. Whether humans can actually extend lifespan is still an open question, but the reflexive aversion people have for aesthetic and health optimization tracks almost perfectly with their sense of access.

Living a longer, healthier life? That sounds terrible, dystopian even, if you assume it's only for the rich. Striving to live up to a beauty ideal? That is just an unrealistic and oppressive standard perpetuated by the patriarchy, unless those standards are available to me. Then, the moralizing, like clockwork, mysteriously evaporates.

Thinness was never inherently oppressive; it's just a beauty ideal that body-positive celebrities and activists assumed they could never have.

Thinness was never inherently oppressive; it's just a beauty ideal that body-positive celebrities and activists assumed they could never have. The off-limits sense of power led to this cultural reframing of coveting thinness as immoral. Why are fat people any more entitled to the status of beautiful, luxurious models than anyone else? Is it really a human right to have pretty privilege, or just a first-world problem? Because remember, the plus-size models don't feel bad about taking thin women’s jobs or making fun of them in songs or slandering them as anorexic, so long as it raises their status, but expect endless benevolent deference in return.

These celebrities have let the mask slip and are slowly walking back the old talking points. Some stay silent, others admit, “Yes, I do want to be smaller.” It's confirmation that they moralized their limitations and pretended it was some principled framework. This is why it's far better to just celebrate beauty and goodness as virtues in their own right. If you ever get the opportunity to attain them yourself, at least you won't be a giant hypocrite.