The insatiable obsession with smallness

Aubrey Gordon has been one of my favorite cultural commentators since I found her podcast Maintenance Phase in 2021 - just when I was beginning to poke holes in my newfound world of woo-woo wellness and pseudoscientific health trends. I first listened to the episode on Moon Juice, because my curiosity was about to get the best of me; I was about to spend upwards of 80 dollars on a 30-day supply of adaptogens for energy levels. Their analysis convinced me not to, and so I kept listening. Soon, I had been introduced to another new world, and one that felt much more grounded in reality: wellness as provable practices, the destigmatizing of fatness, and tangible conversations around the nuances of health. The truth is that the truth is boring, everyone is different, being overweight doesn't necessarily make you unhealthy, and it certainly doesn't make you a bad person. Five years later, I still tout Aubrey as one of the smartest (and funniest) voices in health.

I thought her voice would carry us all further into the cultural wave of body neutrality and acceptance, along with the other creators and artists with similar messages. Lizzo's first album achieved this, had us admiring her honesty and blasting her courage with the windows down in the summer of 2019. In 2022, I attended pride celebrations intersecting with visibility for differently appearing and abled bodies. Everyone, it seemed, was finally in the streets and unashamed. I thought we had made strides in the collective understanding of health and wellness enough to start minding our own business and stop hating fat people - or at the very least, release our individual desperations for a "beach body." I really thought it was all an upward trend.

And then Ozempic was born.

After only about five years of its existence, the progress toward full acceptance of bigness feels to the collective like a fever dream. To me it feels like a massive blind spot. One of the major through-lines of Maintenance Phase is the acknowledgement that every few years comes a new "miracle drug" for weight loss, and then a few years following it comes the long-term studies of its detrimental, often ruinous effects on users. From Fen-Phen to the juice cleanse, though they certainly differ in terms of severity, nearly every sensational fad diet has later been regarded as a regrettable strategy for staying thin. This begs the question: why do we keep falling for it?

Conditioning of smallness

The simplest answer to that question is that we've been here before; perhaps we never really left. Even if there was a short sprint of acceptance of, and comfort in a bigger, "normal" body, the obsession with youth, fragility and purity has never gone away. We had Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby in 1978 - a film portraying her as a 12-year-old living in a brothel and exploited by their practices, her later modeling career both built and shadowed by this role. Men were obsessed with her supposed eternal childlike beauty, her soft skin, her innocent demeanor despite it all. Every impossibly thin celebrity from the 80's - Cher, Victoria Principal, and Sofia Loren to name a few - had diet books telling women how they could do it too, and still eat chocolate! The following decade brought hyper-thin models like Kate Moss to the forefront, with her ever famous line: "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels." And who could forget the 2000s tabloids that pointed and laughed at the golden girls of the time, Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson, for being too fat?

Our culture, especially celebrity culture, insinuates that a woman is meant to be as small and frail as she can possibly be. Until our bones start poking out, of course, lest we start looking like Nicole Richie or Amy Winehouse in peak alcoholism. As long as the richest and most famous among us are touting certain body trends, whether it be protruding clavicles or the 2016 BBL, it doesn't matter if preteens are reminded to look to their mothers, their neighbors, and their teachers for what a "real" body looks like (that's what The Care and Keeping of You told me back in the day) - commoners are at least encouraged to follow suit. Generations of mothers and grandmothers continue to crash diet and call themselves fat and disgusting in front of their daughters. My students today - yes, in 2026 - talk about fasting before prom or spring break trips. Eating disorders skyrocket, self-esteem plummets, and we're left in a cycle of impossibility. No matter how hard we try, we can never be small enough. We can never not be hungry.

We didn't hallucinate "body positivity"

There was a glimmer of change in this pattern about a decade ago, and as short-lived as it may have been, I don't think it's fair to discount it entirely. The Obama-era of "wokeness" brought in body positivity: a change in the online narrative that encouraged women to love their bodies no matter its size. The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, famous for its rail-thin and carbon-copied set of models began to rebrand, including plus-sized women and more diversity in their lingerie styles. Music and pop culture revolutionized in that more variations of bodies were being celebrated, witnessed, and talked about. Female rappers were able to be as crass and horny in their lyrics as men were in previous decades. The energy around "taking up space" was loud and unapologetic, and there were remnants of this wave all the way through to Trump's second term. It was real, and it was absolutely a step in the right direction.

But as many journalists and cultural commentators have rightly pointed out since, it was highly performative - a McMansion built on sand. Just the same as the rainbow logos disappeared from brand websites after 2024 Pride, most entities preaching "love yourself!" didn't give us any tools to really live better. Their sizes didn't expand. Shows like "My 600-lb Life," which only serve to gawk at fat people, didn't stop airing. Medical mistreatment didn't go away. Though differing bodies were certainly more visible and more normalized, the subconscious desire to look like the A-list celebrities of the ages always remained under the surface of bright, bold façade.

I've mentioned milestones in this movement from Lizzo to Victoria's Secret - once pillars of acceptance, even they succumbed to the whims of our most recent body backlash. Maybe in the 2000s it was "too far" for a woman to have her entire collarbone or spine exposed, but now it's the norm. We've come full circle.

The woman's role

Enter 2026: Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs reign supreme in med spas on Main Streets everywhere. The Super Bowl aired commercials for several brands offering them in their wellness lineups. Y2K fashion is back. The Kardashians removed their BBLs. It's cool to be thin again.

And much more sinister than that, it's become the social standard.

It's really no woman's fault that she feels the need to diet, obsessively work out, or take a drug to lose weight. It is what is not-so-subtly asked of all of us. Especially now, in the most conservative era we've lived through in quite a while.

The ideal conservative woman has always had a specific air about her: quiet, polite, out of the way, and of course, small. She doesn't own anything, and she doesn't have responsibility in public spaces. As the pendulum swings violently back into cultural and behavioral ideals mirroring those of the 50's and the 80's, so too does the expectation of women. We've made a little too much progress, lately, and history shows where that moment always inevitably meets severe backlash. The more freedom we have, the more others want to take it away. The happier and more confident we appear, the more a jealous figure will want to knock us down. Expansion always meets contraction. It's natural, but it's dangerous if we don't do anything about it.

The body is a very literal vessel to explain the woman's role in society at any given time in history. Now, when we're being heavily influenced and incentivized to make ourselves small, that doesn't just mean losing weight. It also means a shrinking of our voice, opportunities, desires, and rights. Starvation, whether intentional or through the use of an appetite-suppressing drug, aids those trying to take those things from us.  It's not a conspiracy to say that this is entirely the point until we all but disappear. When we begin to fade from view, when we live out our days malnourished and hungry, we experience brain fog, lowered energy, and lowered self-esteem. It's much harder to fight. And to those in power, that's good. That's ideal, actually. That's how we're "supposed to be."

The true feminine

But this is where everyone's got it backwards, because the feminine is actually supposed to be brimming with energy. A woman is supposed to be alive enough to contribute to a community. To share ideas, to make and enjoy nourishing meals. To dance. To laugh. To feel her body - the vessel that literally brings life into this world. She needs to be alive enough, healthy enough to have healthy children.

And in this light, she rightfully has the most power, so long as she is allowed to utilize it. But when kept small, she can't. That's exactly why they want us small.

Because the true feminine is also a force that hasn't been fully unleashed for a very long time. We see glimpses of it, especially in women who allow themselves to take up space long after the body-positive era faded away. We see it in the women who love and care for themselves and still have enough left over to give to their communities. We see it in unabashedly honest women. Loud women. Women who would never dare conform to a beauty or body standard. And to be honest, I think those in power want us to never see women like this, for fear that we may see we can do exactly the same thing. They're terrified of what would be unleashed if we weren't small.

Maybe they should be.