Ozempic culture: The obsession with beauty and youth shapes film, TV and books

Every era has imagined its ideal body. Ours, moreover, demands that we achieve it to retain even a minimal sense of worth as individuals. For years now, we have witnessed the return of extreme thinness, the cult of youth and flawless beauty as moral imperatives of our time.

Ozempic, along with other drugs in the GLP-1 family — initially used to treat diabetes and obesity — has become, in less than five years, the symbol of a new body economy. Injectable weight-loss medications, anti-aging treatments, regular doses of Botox, hyaluronic acid or salmon sperm, as well as filters and other image-altering technologies, promise to correct any deviation from the new social norm. Since the pandemic, when health concerns took center stage in everyday life, the discourse has taken on a totalitarian tone, amplified by powerful propaganda machines: social media.

Ozempic is a weight-loss drug, but it is also the symbol of a new era in which the body is understood — even more than in the past, which is saying something — as something perfectable to the point of exhaustion. Beauty, youth and thinness have always been signs of virtue: they convey values such as discipline, self-control, willpower and even purchasing power. In late capitalism, new meanings have been added to these: an acceptable body signals that its owner knows how to manage themselves. Conversely, a tired, wrinkled, overweight body, or one with unconventional contours, is interpreted as a symptom of poor self-management.

The culture of our time has absorbed this shift in the climate. There is no shortage of works that can be interpreted as parables of the culture surrounding Ozempic and similar drugs, even some that were conceived before these drugs became widely popular. For the most part, they are expressionist laments about bodies made ill by their desire for thinness, their fantasies of eternal youth, and the constant impulse to compare themselves with other bodies.

This is the subject of recent films such as Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, which in 2024 turned anxiety about the passage of time and bodily perfection into raw material for a cruel fable in which a television star fired upon reaching middle age — played by a stunning Demi Moore — tries an experimental drug that creates a younger, smoother and more commercially viable version of herself.

Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man explores similar territory, in which an actor with neurofibromatosis undergoes an experimental treatment to transform his face, eventually taking on the attractive features of actor Sebastian Stan, though losing his facial deformity does nothing to resolve any of his insecurities. Jessica Hausner’s Club Zero stars a teacher at an elite boarding school who turns so-called “mindful eating” — a euphemism for plain and simple deprivation — into a doctrine of austerity and purity. Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister, released in theaters after its screening at the Sitges Film Festival, is a body horror reimagining of Cinderella in which the imperative of beauty demands that one undergo atrocious treatments. And The Ugly Ones, a feature film released on Netflix, is a terrifying dystopia where cosmetic surgery becomes mandatory upon reaching adolescence.

Added to this list is Insatiable, an Australian horror film set to hit theaters in late July, in which a medical student obsessed with losing weight discovers a new drug made from human ashes.

Television is also beginning to reflect this unease. The Beauty, a series created by Ryan Murphy, who has always been attuned to the excesses of the present, imagines a sexually transmitted disease that makes infected people physically perfect, though with a rather inconvenient side effect: the virus beautifies first, but then kills. The series has been available on Disney+ for the past few months.

Meanwhile, the exhibition The Cult of Beauty at the CCCB contemporary arts center in Barcelona explores this obsession from a historical perspective. The exhibition offers a journey through the evolution of beauty ideals, the construction of aesthetic standards and the vindication of bodies excluded from the norm. Its central thesis is that art and visual culture have served for centuries to construct and promote these standards, and that today these ideals are being revived on social media, red carpets and other facets of popular culture. Its effects are far from abstract: a radical resurgence of fatphobia and ageism — if they ever truly went away — coupled with aesthetic pressure that falls primarily on women, though men are not exempt either.

“The fear of aging, of fat or of bodily transformation is not a new phenomenon, but today it appears cloaked in new technologies and the language of individual choice that often conceal the power structures that underpin it,” observe curators Júlia Llull and Blanca Arias. Their exhibition reminds us that, throughout art history, beauty has been associated with proportion, harmony and virtue. This equivalence was reinforced with the emergence of Judeo-Christian morality, when beauty ceased to be a mere aesthetic quality and became an indicator of righteousness as well. Meanwhile, ugliness, deformity or difference were seen as signs of disorder, sin or deviance.

That is why it is no coincidence that the figure of the monster has made such a powerful comeback in the contemporary imagination. “At a time when pressure on bodies is intensifying through image culture, body-modification technologies and the notion of body optimization, the monster emerges as the figure that embodies everything the canon seeks to expel,” the curators say.

This is exemplified by Elisasue, the hybrid creature from The Substance — as tender and pathetic as any human — among other recent instances of body horror, a genre that has become fashionable in contemporary horror for good reason: “It’s a subgenre that expresses the anxieties of a culture that demands constant intervention on one’s own flesh to keep it young, productive, thin and desirable.”

In that sense, Ozempic is not so much an anomaly as a sign of the times. “It reveals that the canon stubbornly refuses to disappear,” the curators state. Yet their exhibition also offers a glimmer of optimism, reminding us that no aesthetic dogma lasts forever: “Even if the norm presents itself as natural, immutable or inevitable, it is as fragile as any historical construct. What has been constructed can also be dismantled.”

A very similar conversation is taking place in bookstores. Christopher E. Forth’s monumental book Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life reconstructs the long Western history of aversion to fatness and reminds us that, contrary to certain common assumptions, distrust of the plump body has run through history since classical antiquity, linked to excess, animality, filth, aporophobia and moral suspicion.

However, the author himself — a history professor at the University of Kansas — acknowledges that the phenomenon is reaching new heights today. “Diet, exercise, treatments, and drugs are part of an invisible regimen that has almost become an obligation for the neoliberal subject,” Forth says in an email.

The historian traces the origin of this obsession with the body, which has existed since the dawn of humanity but has intensified in recent decades, to the origins of cinema. “The advent of the cinematic close-up made the face more scrutinizable: its features and flaws were magnified. At the same time, it turned movie stars into new models of health and beauty,” he explains. “With social media filters, we become the stars of our own movies; we can correct our image, look for a moment like an improved version of ourselves, and then try to make our real bodies match that retouched selfie.”

His book finds a contemporary counterpart in a series of titles that view thinness and beauty as battlegrounds marked by social violence. Manual para romper un cuerpo (Manual for Breaking a Body) by Lara Gil draws on the author’s experience with bariatric surgery to debunk the promise that losing weight is enough to fix a life. Cinco lorzas metafísicas (Five Metaphysical Rolls of Fat) by María von Touceda combatively rejects the obligation to correct being overweight. Leticia Sala’s short essay Dame veneno que quiero vivir (Give Me Poison, I Want to Live) delves into the skincare industry (valued at over $150 billion), the fear of aging and the normalization of anti-aging rhetoric. And Las niñas bonitas no pagan dinero (Pretty Girls Don’t Pay), by Clara Nuño, brings that pressure into the realm of fiction, examining beauty standards passed down from mothers to daughters and the damage wrought by exposure to social media from an early age.

These books demonstrate how deeply rooted aesthetic and body-related pressures have become in contemporary Spanish literature, particularly in works written by women. “The body was already present in the work of many earlier female authors. What has changed is that certain bodily experiences, and a woman’s relationship with her own body, are no longer viewed as trivial or lacking in universal relevance,” notes Rosario Villajos, author of La educación física (Physical Education) and winner of the 2023 Biblioteca Breve Prize. Set in the early 1990s, her novel follows Catalina, a teenager navigating that precise moment when a woman loses control over her own body: the moment it begins to be observed, judged and desired by others.

Women who were teenagers in the 1990s grew up, Villajos recalls, with a demanding ideal of thinness. Today, aesthetic pressure is amplified by even more powerful channels. “In the past, the beauty ideal reached us via magazines, television or advertising; now, it comes through a screen that never turns off. Back then, the ideal was nearly impossible to attain; now, there seems to be an added obligation to pursue it. We live in an era where we are told that if we aren’t thin, young or attractive, it is because we haven’t tried hard enough,” the writer observes. “Beauty is no longer perceived as something one either has or doesn’t have; it has become an individual responsibility. It is as if failing to be young, thin or attractive today is, above all, a personal failure.”

This culture of self-optimization produces bodies that are considered desirable, but also others that are punished and excluded, especially when they do not conform to accepted norms. This is the context for Gorda sinvergüenza (Shameless Fat Woman), by Aida González Rossi, an essay that addresses fatphobia through the lens of language. Her starting point is the word fat, historically used as an insult, yet she also explores the possibility of inhabiting the word differently: stripping away some of its derogatory weight and transforming it into an identity in its own right, much as others have done with slurs reclaimed by gay and lesbian communities.

González Rossi, however, does not idealize the previous wave of body-diversity discourse embraced by fashion magazines as the supposed end of the longstanding obsession with thinness. The illusion did not last long. “The body-positive discourse, so visible between 2016 and 2021, contains many pitfalls. In the end, what it does is create another beauty standard: you have to be fat in that way, or be a fat woman who loves everything about herself,” she says. “That leads us to think a lot about our appearances. And capitalism has a strong interest in us doing that, which is why this discourse has been so thoroughly absorbed by the system.”

How far will this phenomenon go? The film The End of It, shot in London by Catalan director Maria Martínez Bayona and screened at the Cannes Film Festival, envisions a future where aging is a treatable medical condition and death has become optional. The protagonist is 250 years old; she renews her blood via a machine and has replaced her bones with more durable materials. In this story, the very concept of age has been abolished. “Even though the film is set in the future, we aren’t that far from that reality,” the director says. “Today, there are already mothers and daughters who, almost bizarrely, look the same age. Medicine has achieved things that once sounded like science fiction, and there’s a real debate about what our biological limits are.”

Martínez Bayona wrote the screenplay before Ozempic became mainstream, although these questions had been in the air for a long time. “The idea of finding an elixir of eternal youth is as old as humanity itself, but in the last five or six years, the focus on longevity has intensified greatly. An entire industry is emerging, with gurus like Bryan Johnson, who claims he’s going to live forever.”

Ozempic culture isn’t just a cult of thinness. It is also one that resists any sign of decline or human finitude. “I don’t know if we’ll live to be 250 years old, but I have no doubt that people will try,” says the director.

Her remarks recall, in a far less grotesque form, Kim Kardashian’s famous admission in 2022. Asked what she would do if she were told that eating excrement every morning would make her look younger, she replied: “I might, I just might.” Body horror, as we said, even though there is less and less need to rely on special effects.

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