Ozempic Didn’t Kill Body Positivity: Capitalism Did

Over the past couple of years, Ozempic has gone from being a key drug for the treatment of diabetes patients to a near-mythic modern solution for weight loss that has enraptured and enraged millions. The think pieces have been constant, as has the misinformation. We’re not a society equipped to have a healthy conversation about our own bodies, not while there’s money to be made, and the mainstreaming of this drug has driven things to a fevered peak. Skinny is forever. Every major star on the red carpet seems thinner than before. Meghan Trainor, once all about that bass, is all treble now thanks to weight loss drugs (and a sponcon boob job.) There’s a renewed focus on how we look in a way that feels more pointed than ever. Body positivity? It’s gone.

In fairness, I don’t believe that the layered and politically driven roots of the body positivity movement are going to disappear just because they’re not the In thing of 2025. It would be unfair and reductive to dismiss the valuable work of so many women who are doing the work of undoing centuries of fatphobia. It’s not their fault that, as happens with anything of note, their labour was hijacked for the purposes of profit. We all got very tired of seeing skinny women lament how mean it was for people to call them fat and that they were so proud of their societally acceptable forms. We were deluged with ads for products that claimed to uplift curvy bodies but never showed anything more diverse than a size 14 hourglass figure on a white woman with zero body hair.

Capitalism and the contentification of everything, wherein the dumbest and most craven individuals are encouraged to “get their bag” at any cost, works best when it robs a concept of nuance and fundamentalism. Body positivity at its core wasn’t just about celebrating diverse body types or making clothing brands more accessible, although that work certainly mattered. The crux of this philosophy was in the still-radical idea that the way you look should not be a judge of your worth or character. You can be any size, you body can look or work (or not work) in any variety of ways, and that shouldn’t dictate how you are treated by society. It shouldn’t be used to deny you employment or medical care or a seat at the table (there’s a reason much of this activism crosses over with the works of disability rights communities.) But that’s hard to package into fast fashion gimmicks or snake oil. You can’t sell waist trainers and all-meat diets to vulnerable people when they understand the message that structural barriers need more than cute slogans to be dismantled.

But even as body positivity in its most bastardized form became a fad to corporations and trend chasers, it couldn’t take over the tyranny of mandated skinniness. It never became cool or fashionable to be fat. Nobody ever talked about wanting to look like plus-sized models, not in the way that magazines used to share crash diet plans so that we could replicate Kate Moss’s heroin-chic litheness. Maybe it became less popular to share Weight Watchers ads or cheer on bullying personal trainers on The Biggest Loser, but the rhetoric just received a crunchy new makeover with the arrival of the wellness movement. Juice cleanses took over the Atkins diet. Pilates and yoga became status symbols. The fatphobia was dressed as a health matter with a side-order of anti-science conspiracy.

Now, aside from Ozempic, we have the RFK Jr.-ification of health and beauty. Tradwives rub beef tallow on their skin and claim sunscreen is poisonous while advocating for raw milk and all-beef diets. Roided-up scammers revel in body shaming as much as the women’s magazines of the ’90s, only now they’re following around strangers on TikTok to berate them for their audiences. Pro-anorexia content has made a terrifying resurgence. The manosphere is virulently fatphobic, as are the QAnon conspiracists. Even Britain’s Labour government talked about forcing unemployed people onto weight loss drugs to get them back into work (no, it doesn’t make any sense.)

And it’s all monetized, of course. You can get sponcon for weight loss drugs, much like we used to be bombarded with ads for waist trainers and laxative teas. Oprah Winfrey made a ton of money shilling Weight Watchers to her fans, then when she admitted to using weight loss drugs, she turned that into yet another opportunity to sell something. Some celebrities have been candid about using Ozempic but others are still hedging their bets, much in the same way that poreless and wrinkle-free 50-year-old celebrities tell their fans that the secret is their own skincare line, available to all good folks at the low low price of $50 per scrub.

I find this shift to be both deeply oppressive and wearily inevitable. The skinny fetish never went away, of course, but those incremental steps towards a more beneficial system have been rolled back with ruthless speed. It really feels like people couldn’t wait to have another excuse to hate on fat people, to reinforce a stiflingly narrow beauty standard that has trapped us for decades. Now, I have to watch all of these red carpet appearances where women are getting thinner and thinner and we all have to pretend this is not only normal but the desired status quo for the rest of us.

The implication is clear: there’s this fancy new drug out there, so there’s no excuse for you to look how you look, unless you’re poor. It’s easier to sell something when it’s still viewed as an elite offering, and right now, amid a recession and America’s government gutting the already shredded recesses of its healthcare system, Ozempic is as much a status symbol as a Birkin bag.

Weight loss is a deeply personal thing that is, unfortunately, conducted in public for all to see and judge. Your relationship with the meat sack your brain is forced to inhabit can be a tricky one, even if you’re somehow impervious to societal pressures and affiliate ads. Some things work for you and others don’t. You beat yourself up for not meeting targets or turn your caloric intake into a game that can never be won. You’re encouraged to embrace (and pay for) unhealthy quick-fix schemes and acts of self-flagellation because you’re taught that you must suffer for your sins. Then Ozempic comes along, and you can’t get access to it because your insurance won’t cover it or it’s unavailable due to shortages. You use it and people call you a cheat who’s not losing weight “the right way.”

Body positivity was never incompatible with making a decision to change your body. Hell, time does that for us all. But it certainly feels like we’re being smothered by the dual forces of shame and profit into doing things that won’t work or will hurt us in the long term. A famous fictional pirate once claimed that life is pain and anyone who said otherwise was trying to sell you something. I think it’s the other way round: people trying to sell you crap must convince you that life is pain so that you’ll purchase their solutions. To confront the societal problem at the heart of the matter would be to put them out of business.