Ozempic and the Death of the Fat Pop Star

by Super normal woman

Megan Trainor, best known for her body-positive anthem  “All About That Bass” — do you guys remember that song? — is on Ozempic. Mounjaro, actually, but everyone who’s talking about it is calling it Ozempic. She’s fairly skinny now. I saw some pictures of her at some Women in Music event and she looked definitely not how I remembered her from when I watched that music video a bunch of times when it came out in 2014, when I was a skinny child, which I no longer am.

I’m familiar with the shape of my body — which is maybe just a euphemism for weight — being neither endogenous (the 2010s “body positivity” version of the origin of your body) nor grounded in “lifestyle” (the things your mom tells you about diet and exercise). For much of my teenage years and my entire adult life, my weight has been primarily decided by various psychiatric medications, which can make you lose or gain a lot of weight very quickly. So I think I’m somewhat primed to be plied by Ozempic, because I get that the body is a unit of biology, and you can do crazy things to organisms with drugs. 

If you live in a kind of vacuum where it’s just you and the drug, and you are not influenced, and you don’t influence anything else, it kinda doesn’t matter what you do. 

I’m way closer to living in that vacuum than Meghan Trainor. I think that Meghan Trainor, and Serena Williams, and Rosie O’Donnell, and Rebel Wilson (for a while), and Whoopi Goldberg, and Amy Schumer (for a while) going on Ozempic does matter.

Lizzo is not on Ozempic. She’s been very clear about that. But she has lost a lot of weight in the last few years, after being a major Fat Pop Star. I can’t imagine giving any meaningful evidence that this is because of the influence of semaglutide drugs in the A-List world, and the normal people world, because thinness is always “in.” Even when “curvy” gets its turn as desirable or stylish, the dominant public narrative always centers the “correct” or “healthy” body over the body that is in some way divergent. With regards to both Lizzo and the women on Ozempic, a celebrity woman being celebrated (and simultaneously criticized) for losing weight is not a novel idea. Is there a clear effect of semaglutide drugs specifically on the celebrity environment, or is it just an accelerated version of what pop culture already valued in a body? Is Lizzo a control group that validates that question?

Additionally, if the fat celebrity is a dying breed, does it matter? People talk about fat women in music and on TV making kids and teenagers who look more like them feel more secure in their bodies — less likely to develop eating disorders, specifically. But was celebrity culture ever doing that? Rebel Wilson’s movie roles, Amy Schumer’s comedy, Lizzo’s top hits, and, of course, “All About That Bass” could be part of a “fat confidence” canon. It seems to announce, I know you look at me and don’t like me, but look, I’ll prove I don’t care, I’ll convince you I’m still hot, I’ll convince you that I’m so self-aware I can talk around my grossness to you. In this “fat confidence” songbook, fatness is still a central burden. I don’t think this constellation of work, now losing weight on or off Ozempic, has succeeded in making the fat body implicit. 

But I do think it matters. I do think Ozempic has changed the way A-Listers, and everyone else, think about thinness and what they respect in a woman’s body. And even if these mainstream fat celebrities have failed to save a generation of girls from eating disorders, as we fantasized in the 2000s-2010s, there was value to having them just hanging out.

Ozempic makes weight loss easy — that’s what everybody says, that’s what every single ad I get on Instagram tells me. Ozempic clears away all the reasons someone might struggle to lose weight: no harsh diet or exercise regime, no restriction of how you might naturally look. Ozempic does what I felt my psychiatric medication did for me when it made me drop a substantial amount of weight without thinking about it, but puts it under your control. Ozempic changes your body by taking you out of the equation. The new framework removes the politics of body positivity, feminism, and fat advocacy. Without the discomfort of diet and exercise, there seems to be little to criticize. But the cultural fixation on the thin, healthy, correct body remains, so the framing is never you can if you want to. It’s always, why don’t you?

Over the summer, on a late night walk around our neighborhood, my best friend very sincerely told me that I should think about going on Ozempic. He didn’t mean he thought anything particular about my body; he had no opinion at all. But he thought, in the world of Ozempic, your body is optional. He thought in this new context, the choice to be thin would involve no suffering, and the politics had fallen away, there was no message in resistance, so I might as well choose to be happier by simply becoming skinny.

Maybe, because I will never save a kid from an eating disorder, or write a hit song that will make some self-conscious woman feel sexy again, my choice doesn’t matter, if you believe Meghan Trainor’s choice does. Having control of yourself by being beyond yourself is so fucking enticing. But is something lost when you step away from your body? Even if a “natural” body doesn’t exist, is there still that weird, illusive value in being who you are? And when Meghan Trainor and everybody else go on Ozempic and talk about it a lot, are they contributing to further taking the choice to, y’know, exist as you are, away from other people?