In 2023, Jemima Kirke posted a photograph of herself and found a single word waiting in her comments, repeated by several strangers: Ozempic. Kirke replied that she wished it were Ozempic, and asked how anyone could arrive at such specific conclusions about a person from the size of her body.
The answer, evidently, is easily. Since the arrival of a new generation of weight-loss drugs, the one-word accusation has become so routine that it functions as a joke format, and the list of people it has been aimed at is long enough to be meaningless — Mindy Kaling, Kim Kardashian, Jonah Hill, Lana Del Rey.
The vocabulary is new; the reflex is not. When a body changes visibly in public, the audience wants a cause, and will supply one. Over the past decade the supplied cause has been an eating disorder, or substance use, or steroids, or surgery, or unspecified dodgy supplements, depending on who was being discussed and what the internet had decided that month. Now it is an injection.
The rebrand
What has changed recently is the tone. The tabloid version of this — the shouty cover line, the circled thigh — is easy to identify as cruelty. The current version arrives dressed as welfare. It says: this person is unwell, and it is not kind to pretend otherwise, and refusing to say so allows an unwell body to be held up as something to aspire to.
That argument has a real constituency and it is not made in bad faith. Avery Edison, a content creator in Liverpool, has articulated it about as well as anyone: that a culture which decided never to discuss women’s bodies has ended up talking around eating disorders as though they were not happening, and that flagging a body as the product of illness rather than achievement is not an anti-feminist act. She accepts that identifying a disorder in someone famous might land as an insult to everyone who shares it, but argues her intention runs the other way — that she is trying to stop the illness being normalised, and that the celebrity in question will almost certainly never read her.
It is a coherent position. The people who have studied what these comments actually do still think it fails.
What the comment does after you post it
Emma Specter, the author of More, Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for “Enough,” has written extensively about Ozempic and about her own body. She recognises the frustration underneath the impulse — the exhaustion of watching very thin women installed as the standard — and does not accept that drawing attention to any individual body, admiringly or otherwise, heals anyone involved. It is a systemic problem being treated as an individual one, she says, and she speaks as someone whose own body has repeatedly become material for people with no investment in her wellbeing. Her therapist’s line, which she quotes, is that shame is rarely productive.
That is the mechanism. However carefully phrased, a public comment about one person’s body is not a conversation with a friend, and it is not an analysis of the forces that produce disordered eating. It is a finger pointed at an individual.
It may also achieve the reverse of what it intends. Amber Nelson, a copywriter in Washington who once wrote freelance for a celebrity gossip site and watched body policing become her beat, says concern-trolling can entrench the behaviour it claims to worry about, and that she knows this from her own history of disordered eating. Recovery organisations have published material along the same lines: comments about a person’s body can produce a renewed determination to change that body. Nelson also points out how rarely the audience accounts for the relationship between eating disorders and trauma, which makes the speculation, and the way it gets weaponised against women who have become visibly thinner, fairly macabre.
It becomes more macabre still when the diagnosis is wrong. Chadwick Boseman spent his final years being publicly appraised and worried over on the basis of his changing body, by people who did not know he had cancer. Ashley Ray, the comedian and host of TV, I Say w/Ashley Ray, thinks nothing was learned from it: the habit alienates the people who might actually need help, and obliges everyone else to account for themselves when no account was ever owed. Famous people, she suggests, offer an almost guilt-free outlet for an activity the culture is already obsessed with — assessing the bodies within reach.
The part that is understandable
The impulse is not mysterious. If you have spent your life inside a value system that ranks appearance above nearly everything, and against standards that were never achievable, there is a genuine anger in watching public figures appear to meet them effortlessly. Suspecting that something has been paid for, or suffered for, or concealed, is a rational response to being lied to for years.
None of which makes the posting useful. Turning a body into discourse does not shift anyone’s thinking; it maintains the surveillance that produced the injury in the first place. Specter’s proposal sounds unthinkable to most people who spend time online, which is probably the point: stop talking publicly about anybody’s body, and attend to your own. Her own eating disorder, she notes, is not going to be resolved by a pop star’s weight moving in either direction. The work available to her is the work on fatphobia and diet-culture thinking where it appears in her own life, rather than adjudicating the physical form of strangers.
This piece deals with body image and eating disorders. If you or someone you know is struggling, Beat offers support in the UK and the National Alliance for Eating Disorders runs a helpline in the US; elsewhere, a GP or local eating disorder service can point you to help.
