Lily Huynh/The Cougar
In an era of Ozempic and body-negative media, we must work to understand the state of our country. Our media and consumption habits are shifting into a seemingly new norm.
Outside of its use to manage specific medical conditions, this conversation appears uncanny as media decides whose body images to uphold and whose to dismiss as past season.
Great jeans!
Sydney Sweeney’s recent ad for Novig, she appears nude or minimally clothed, using sports equipment to cover her body. The ad’s attention to Sweeney’s body ultimately overshadows the focus on sports betting and reveals something distinctly American about both the ad and the broader GLP-1 discourse surrounding it.
The actress also appeared in a similar ad with American Eagle, promoting jeans with the tagline, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” The play on words “jeans” and “genes” feeds into the traditional Western beauty standards of blonde hair and blue eyes, which are retained genetically.
While most discourse surrounding her marketing decisions discusses how Sweeney is proof that “sex still sells,” author Sabrina String reveals a deeper pattern that links the marketing of thinness to broader ideas of what it means to be American.
Weight worried
String draws on the work of social theorists Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault to explain this dynamic. Bourdieu theorizes that elites distinguish themselves from the lower class through exclusive diets and physical appearances, while Foucault examines how biopolitics maintains the exclusion of the poor from healthcare.
Together, these ideas explain how fatphobia operates by tying thinness to social status and desirability, while fatness is framed as excess, greediness and even sin.
This hierarchy is reflected in today’s attitudes toward weight loss, especially with the rise of GLP-1 drugs.
GLP-1RA uptake is not just for those who are clinically obese, but also extends to those with no medical risk and are simply “weight worried.”
This worry stems from the current media narrative around thinness, which String argues is used to craft legitimate race, sex and class hierarchies.
Social media algorithms play a role in shaping the narratives behind “clean girl” and Pilates aesthetics, which can promote lifestyle changes that require disposable time and income more accessible to higher-income consumers.
Body politics
Coincidentally, U.S. politics are in some ways aligning with conservative ideals through agendas concerning immigration and reproductive care, reflective of the conservative majority among U.S. Supreme Court Justices. Rather than existing separately from cultural body standards, these political conditions contribute to a broader social environment.
Identity becomes increasingly tied to ideas of who belongs within the nation, a definition that historically has not included fuller bodies or minority women.
If ads including Shaquille O’Neal using GLP-1 or Charles Barkley’s partnership with Ro weren’t enough to convince us of the cultural weight loss movement, the new protein-packed additions to our favorite menus will only further reinforce it.
From bunless burgers to the “Ozempic-friendly” menus at Shake Shack and Smoothie King make societal attitudes toward weight loss and weight excess are more difficult to ignore.
As Sabrina Strings suggests, the body has never existed outside of American ideas about class and belonging.
Perhaps what makes GLP-1 discourse so distinctly American is not the pursuit of thinness, but the way that pursuit becomes intertwined with questions of who belongs, who is desirable and what an American body should look like.
opinion@thedailycougar.com
