Down to the bone
Today: Please join us in a fiery welcome for the newest Hydra: Lindsey Adler, writer of the Critical Thinking newsletter.
Issue No. 523
The Hunger (reprise)
Lindsey Adler
The Hunger (reprise)
by Lindsey Adler
I have no insight into the lives of celebrities beyond the veneer they create for public consumption, and I don’t know which of them are punishing their bodies with eating disorders. I do know one thing, though. This year, a whole slew of famous people have turned moments meant to celebrate their work into showcases for their achievements in thinness. As a recovering anorectic, I find this brings up a visceral, enraging recollection of similarly twisted and damaged moments in popular culture.
The display is unmistakable. Award show ensembles are chosen carefully. This year’s theme is gauntness, with bony shoulders and protruding sternums. Sheer fabrics and strategically placed cutouts are conspicuous. So far, no one seems to have figured out how to exclusively highlight sharp-edged hipbones, though that can’t be far off. In any case, though, emaciation is in again.
On March 15, the morning of the 98th Academy Awards, the New York Post ran a story headlined, in part: “Stylists fear Hollywood stars are blind to how skinny they really are.” It ran with a photo of Emma Stone, nominated for Best Actress for her role in Bugonia, the same award she won two years ago for Poor Things, a black comedy/body-horror film about a woman whose body is literally brought back from the dead, reincarnated with the mind of an infant and an insatiable sexual appetite.
It would be impossible to count how many words have been printed in Page Six about women and their unruly bodies. Their editors have been exceptionally ravenous for paparazzi photos of female public figures for decades now. In this cultural moment, the tabloid’s editors decided it was more important to highlight female celebrities for being too skinny. What is the world record for how far a pendulum has swung?
This regressive development was easy to forecast from the moment mainstream society gained access to GLP-1s (glucagon-like peptide-1 agonists)—medications like Ozempic and Mounjaro, which were originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes and are now extensively used for weight loss all over the world. Previously GLP-1s were a secret miracle drug available only to the rich and connected. Starting in the summer of 2023 I noticed that a rash of celebrities had suddenly dropped a noticeable amount of weight, but at that point few understood that their suddenly slenderized bodies were the result of medical assistance. Oprah Winfrey revealed herself as an Ozempic user a few months later, in a December cover story in People magazine.
“It was public sport to make fun of me for 25 years,” she said. “I have been blamed and shamed, and I blamed and shamed myself… I was on the cover of some magazine and it said, ‘Dumpy, Frumpy and Downright Lumpy.’”
“The fact that there’s a medically approved prescription for managing weight and staying healthier, in my lifetime, feels like relief, like redemption, like a gift.”
For more than a decade before that, we’d been pummeled with paparazzi photos of celebrities leaving Barry’s Bootcamp and Pilates reformer classes. Those of us watching at home were meant to understand that the public figures we can’t escape were designing and maintaining their “perfect” bodies through expensive private regimens of exercise and nutrition that most of us can’t afford. Lean women stay lean through iron-willed discipline, these images assured us; they also showed us that celebrities with curves were making deliberate and intense efforts to tame them. And then suddenly we learned that celebrities known for decades to have been struggling with their weight had found a revolutionary new drug in GLP-1s. It wasn’t just the boot camps anymore.The revelation explained what these famous users, slim at last, had been choosing not to disclose as they shed pound after pound.
Keep us breathing fire!
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