You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin

The body as a class marker.

Photo by pawel szvmanski on Unsplash

By now, you have almost surely heard of Ozempic, the diabetes treatment being used off-label as a miracle weight loss drug. New York mag’s The Cut has another startling, depressing story about the drug’s ubiquity among a set of wealthy, already-thin women, and touches on the question of what happens when being thin isn’t a struggle against cravings, because you simply crave so little. That thinness is an aspiration wrapped up in a particular kind of female denial — some 80% of those who use Ozempic for weight loss are women — is poked at, but not fully explored.

So is a related question: What happens when body size as a class marker becomes even more deeply entrenched?