Camping Ozempic: The Glamourisation of Weight Loss Charging the Y2K Skinny Revival

Words: Nat Ty

Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro. No. More. Sorrow.  

Ari Dayan’s dance-pop song blares from the speakers of the bar in Montreal’s gay village where I’m having drinks with a handful of friends. At the end of the night we walk through the neighbourhood towards the metro, past the rows of pride flags that are hanging from every other lamppost. A friend points at a bear flag up above us. He lets out an emphatic sigh, lamenting that “they’ll be extinct soon…Ozempic is gonna be the death of the bear”. 

He gets a strong laugh from the group as well as some over-the-top sad frowns, and he is clearly onto something. Evidently, he’s referencing the new ubiquity of Ozempic. But he also speaks to a campification and glamourisation of Ozempic-use that has made its frivolous use problematically desirable.

Using Ozempic or its cousins (medications within the GLP-1 agonist family) for the explicit purpose of cosmetic weight loss is now commonplace. GLP-1s are genuinely life-changing medicines for many, particularly for those with type-2 diabetes. However, our understanding of GLP-1s has been vastly overshadowed by the fact they support significant weight loss in a high proportion of people who use them. We know now that GLP-1s have become a hot commodity among many who have no real medical need for them. They are an increasingly popular tool for those motivated by aesthetic desires to be thinner, and they work. GLP-1s are the enablers of the new wave of Y2K skinny. 
___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Since Hollywood found GLP-1 medications, the internet has documented story after story of drastic weight-loss transformations. Much of the media coverage is predictable insofar as it reveals the cruel and contradictory nature through which fat and weight loss are portrayed in modern society. Some celebrities have been praised and celebrated for their weight loss transformations, as if their thinness has granted them a newfound beauty and moral worth. Others, who openly credit medications like Ozempic to their weight loss, have been criticised for taking a ‘shortcut’ to thinness instead of slimming down ‘the natural way’. This is the product of a gross misunderstanding that we all have equal control of our body weight through dieting and exercise, and another bizarre moral imperative that we all must achieve thinness through the ‘correct’ means. 

The discourse around Ozempic alone is enough to remind us that we are living in body dystopia, in which the size and shape of our bodies are continuously the objects of scrutiny. It is a dystopia in which we all stand to lose, and in which fat folks bear the greatest brunt. In body dystopia, the relentless pursuit of skinny is normalised. 

“We are witnessing the campification and glamourisation of Ozempic use in pop culture.”

The last season of Drag Race All Stars offered us a serving of Ozempic discourse, but with a distinct layer of camp. Mistress Isabelle Brookes’ and Ginger Minj’s changes of body size were repeatedly subjects of praise from Ru and other contestants in the show, when they both emerged in the semi-finals in slimmer bodies than they’ve had in Drag Race Herstory. Brookes leaned into, and aptly pre-empted, commentary surrounding her bodily changes. For her talent show performance, she offered us a lip-synced parody infomercial, advertising ‘Ruzempic: (Slayglutide) Injection’. She began by hopping between two face-in-a-hole boards, one depicting a larger body and one slimmer, showing us a ‘before’ and ‘after’ weight loss transformation. She then paraded the stage with a gigantic syringe in hand, singing satirical praises of Ruzempic, and reeling off a comedic ultra-fast rundown of the medication’s possible side effects. 

Fat queens have long been the target of ruthless fatphobia on Drag Race. I can’t recall a recent roast challenge in which a fat queen was ‘read’ for anything other than their size or the assortment of character traits that are often problematically associated with fatness. I don’t want to overinterpret Brookes’ intent with her performance; she obviously has every right to body mod as she wishes, and the right to explore her experience artistically. Yet it’s hard not to read this act, at least in part, as a campy ode to the Ozempic-for-weight-loss era. It echoes, in this way, Dayan’s song, which I was so recently bopping my head to in the gay village. Satire or not, Brookes’ performance and Dayan’s song give meaning to my friend’s throwaway joke about the extinction of bears. With the immense power of camp queer culture, they nod to Ozempic use as fun, frivolous, and a means to becoming hot. 

We are witnessing the campification and glamourisation of Ozempic use in pop culture. It is a major force heightening the appeal of the new era of Y2K skinny which we are now weathering. We all stand to lose from this state of affairs, including Ozempic’s users. Taking GLP-1s under any circumstances is not a walk in the park; there are potential, serious physical and psychological side effects. They are expensive, must be taken regularly, and most people don’t keep the weight off when they stop taking them. They are not a holy grail solution to being thin forever. 

Most importantly, though, the uncritical glamourisation of skinny is always a loss for body liberation. We know that beauty is intensely subjective. What we understand to be beautiful is a product of our cultural history, and it is according to a transient value system that has taught most of us to hate our bodies by default. Sabrina Strings, for instance, taught us that fatness is a quality that we, in the ‘west’, have been taught to fear by medical and cultural institutions, for as long as European race scientists in the 18th Century began associating the idea of fatness to notions of blackness. Fatphobia has sinister roots, and it is an ideology that we can only be liberated from through its destruction. To destroy, we cannot participate. 

Ozempic, and its campification, are things to be wary of. Ozempic is the instrument charging the Y2K skinny revival, and its glamourisation and campification is giving the movement cultural validity.  Woe is the campification of Ozempic.