Living on nothing but ozempic and air

This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Twelve years ago, Suzanne Moore wrote what would become an infamous article for the New Statesman. The subject was female anger, especially in response to government cuts. Moore’s analysis got lost, however, in the outraged response to one line in particular:

We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual.

It was the last two words that did it. Accusations of transphobia abounded. Moore and her family were threatened with violence, while an article by Julie Burchill in her defence was quickly removed from the Observer website. It was a pivotal moment in the so-called “TERF wars”, but not, alas, in the development of any empathy for women dealing with this “ideal body shape”.

It didn’t matter that Moore was absolutely right. She could have used other words to describe it — a body that is male in terms of fat percentage, only with add-on breasts and porn-inspired grooming habits — but that would not have captured it in quite the same way. Her point was that the modern-day feminine ideal has little to do with female flesh.

An ultra-thin, modified male body provides the template to aim for and — as the reaction to Moore’s piece shows — we’re past the days this could be dismissed as an impossibility. On the contrary, we are told, not only can women be male, but the most oppressed ones are. What’s your excuse?

Over a decade later, when Alex Consani, a biological male, won model of the year at the 2024 British Fashion Awards, this was viewed as a win for diversity and inclusion. “I am the first trans woman to win this,” announced Consani, who was also the first to walk the catwalk for Victoria’s Secret. This is what counts as progress. Those of us whom female biology has distanced from this ideal — the factory settings women, the dinosaurs, the breeders — are not supposed to complain, at least not any more.

Once upon a time, when feminists criticised the use of very tall, emaciated models in the fashion industry, they would argue that designers had a male default in mind — no hips, no curves, nothing to get in the way. It is easier to design clothes for such bodies, offloading all of the work of making them functional onto women themselves, who were given the option of starving any obstructive flesh away.

“plus sized” or “curvy” models … if they were you or I, would merely be described as slim

The “supermodels” of the late eighties, sold to us as Amazons compared to what went before, were still ludicrously thin compared to the average woman. As Naomi Wolf argued in The Beauty Myth, women were shamed into seeing femaleness itself as a design flaw by an ideal reliant on “dropping the official weight one stone below most women’s natural level, and redefining a woman’s womanly shape as by definition ‘too fat’”.

Writing in 1990, Wolf expressed the hope that if the eighties had been an age of denial, “in the 1990s, if women can reclaim the pleasure of appetite, we may wonder what possessed us during the long, mean, pointless years of hunger”.

That didn’t happen in the nineties. It hasn’t happened now. From the perspective of 2025, it seems mad to imagine that it ever could. For all the talk of feminism and gender diversity — of body positivity/neutrality, of the evils of fatphobia — the ultra-thin idea hasn’t changed. It is there not just in fashion, but in related “creative” industries: film, TV, music, the world of “wellness” influencers.

If anything has changed at all, it is that mainstream progressive culture now requires us to talk around it, never delving too deeply into the misogyny and gynophobia at the heart of it. Yet what bigger symbol is there of the lack of power women have when even the richest, most famous and most adored appear to be surviving on nothing but Ozempic and air?

The 2025 Golden Globes saw 62-year old Demi Moore awarded for her role in The Substance, a film that claimed to lay bare the pressures of ageism and bodyism female celebrities face. It was the first award Moore, an actress who had always been judged for her looks and supposed “bad attitude”, had ever won. The Guardian declared the Globes “an evening of statement-making for women of a certain age, both on the red carpet and the podium itself”.

It was good to see Moore appreciated as an actress. Nonetheless, the images that accompanied the article were jarring. None of the “women of a certain age” looked to be of that age. Most, Moore included, were tiny. The piece declared it a victory to see that “some of the hardest-working women (and men) are getting older, yet remain gorgeous”.

It felt like a cruel misrepresentation of the problem. It has never been that women are not “allowed” to conform to the Hollywood ideal. They have always had permission to be as “gorgeous” as they like. The trouble is that when they fail to do so — by having bodies that age and grow and sag — they are marginalised. If you want to be celebrated for a role that reveals the cruelty of the rules, you still have to play by them.

To be female, is to let someone do your desiring for you at your own expense

I know: not all actresses, not all models. There are exceptions, all the “plus-sized” or “curvy” women (most of whom, if they were you or I, would merely be described as slim). That doesn’t alter the fact that when I watch the average Netflix series, I frequently end up feeling distracted by the skeletal bodies of the supposedly “most attractive” female characters.

Perhaps it is because it provokes memories of my own eating disorder, but I find myself running through these kinds of questions: is she focused on the role or is she thinking of food? Is it easier to live a life of semi-starvation when your livelihood depends on it? Do you forget there was any other way? It makes storylines seem extra-ridiculous. Why is there a pregnancy scare regarding a character too thin to ovulate? Why are we pretending someone so ill could feel anything approaching sexual desire?

To be clear: I don’t blame stick-thin women for doing what is required of them. I’d rather we didn’t go back to the “size zero panic” noughties, when the same media outlets that hounded former child stars for “getting fat” (aka “going through puberty”) hounded women such as Calista Flockhart, Nicole Ritchie and Victoria Beckham for setting a bad example with their own weight loss. What I’ve noticed, though, is that what passes for respect for today’s ultra-thin female star has become an excuse not to address what is right in front of us.

There is a particular sequence that is followed whenever anyone dares to suggest that someone such as Ariana Grande or Natalia Dyer looks visibly, disturbingly ill. Under pressure, the celebrity will insist she is at her ”healthiest ever”; press and fans will rally to accuse critics of “concern-trolling” and “thin-shaming”; there may even be insinuations that such observations trivialise real eating disorders, which can occur at any weight. It is hard to respond to any of this because, of course, it isn’t kind to the individual — and doesn’t directly help them — to say anything at all. But silence is normalising something that ought to be shocking.

Seeing these stars in action, I feel like I’m seeing someone with a major injury, blood spurting everywhere, while the whole world agrees to pretend this is absolutely unremarkable. I feel I’ve missed the memo where it was decided that — in the age of your body, your choice — the ultra-thin, anti-female, hyper-feminine ideal has become a non-issue. It’s unsophisticated to comment. I know, though, what I see.

According to the trans writer Andrea Long Chu, to be female isn’t to have the kind of body which, in a healthy state, should have a body fat percentage of over 25 per cent. To be female, claims Long Chu, is “to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense”. This is useful should one wish to sideline female material reality — female flesh, hunger, growth, need — and replace it with an image of femaleness as innate masochism and the willingness to be objectified.
Mainstream feminist protest about the cult of female thinness has been hamstrung by said feminism’s willingness to bow down to the porn-soaked theories of writers such as Long Chu. The modern-day body positivity and body neutrality movements aspire to be political, but theirs is a politicisation which shies away from recognising the salience of biological sex and the role of the porn industry in shaping the feminine body ideal.

In her recent book Unshrinking, the feminist philosopher Kate Manne ties herself in knots condemning medical and surgical interventions to make bodies thinner, but not to make female bodies more closely resemble male ones (flatter, straighter), providing these are coded as “gender-affirming care”. It is as though the options have simply been laid out more plainly than before: either be an inferior woman — because the “perfect” woman has hips like a man — or suffer trying to make yourself an actual man. Meanwhile, if a female celebrity so much as has short hair, she’s already considered a gender rebel. God forbid she gets to eat an actual meal.

Like Wolf, I thought things would be better by now. Instead, worrying about the women who disappear in plain sight became the problem to be solved. I thought bodies would change, but instead it’s the way we persuade ourselves not to care.