The news that Serena Williams – a woman with arguably one of the fittest and strongest bodies in the world – is delighted to have lost those pesky post-baby pounds is a story that should give us pause. It encapsulates the latest body dream being sold to people all over the world who have the financial capacity to access the GLP-1 dream of never having to tangle with a craving again, never having to resist their longings for food, never having the munchies, never having to say no because their appetite, their desire, has miraculously shrunk and receded.
Williams’s husband’s investment in a telemedicine company with the capacity to supply the GLP-1 drugs tells another side of the story. This is the explicitly economic side of the family of miracle drugs that are yielding huge revenues for the Danish economy and the big pharma companies that endeavour to provide this drug in pill form rather than as an injection – which will ensure even greater reach, uptake and profits. Payment for these drugs requires a monthly subscription plan, somewhat like a mortgage that never ends. And just like inhabiting a new home, the result of taking these medications provokes spending in allied industries as the body house is rehabbed with cosmetic surgeries and treatments needed to plump the now-sagging faces, thighs and buttocks which have turned into empty sacks.
The longed-for uniform lean body is paradoxically being revived just as women in particular were beginning to feel they could occupy more diverse body forms – with Williams, for many, being an exemplar of female body strength and beauty. The 50-year struggle for body diversity to resist the endless thin aesthetic which presses in on all of us – and especially on girls and women from eight to over 80 – and to accept their appetites and their body of whatever shape, size, height and hue is thus eviscerated in one fell swoop. The psychological and political fight inside almost every woman to dare to give up the screaming criticisms that come from inside and out is nullified. We can all live the (body) dream if we have the money.
“Now we can all live the lean dream – if we can afford the drugs. But I fear the true cost may prove far greater,” writes Dr Susie Orbach in her latest piece for The Observer.
