Fat Acceptance : Ozempic :: Heteropessimism : The Right Guy
we're only human
I was interviewed by the How I Make Money Writing Substack. Check it out.
The last few years have presented a brief, poignant window where you could watch an army of once-dedicated believers let their ideology slip loosely from their hands, in real time. A set of public-facing people had spent the better part of a decade building careers, brands, whole moral identities on the premises of fat acceptance - the notion that their plus-sized bodies were perfect as-is, that the desire to be thin was a patriarchal cudgel, that “a healthy weight” was a slur. I say with total sincerity that I had and have immense sympathy for most of them, as our society is relentlessly cruel to fat people and the vagaries of genetics ensure that different people have vastly different odds of losing weight and keeping it off. I was however often frustrated by their extremity and tendency to make claims that contradicted established science. As is so often the case, questions of fat acceptance seem to be caught in a rigid binary of extremes, with total fatalism about weight loss on one hand and facile “self-control” dogma that leaves out an immense number of relevant variables on the other. It felt like we were stuck in that binary… until those same fat acceptance acolytes began, quietly, getting the shot. Suddenly, the fat acceptance people were on Ozempic.
Not all of them, obviously. But enough that that world acquired a distinctly sheepish texture, full of essays about “doing it on my own terms,” selfie-cam missives on Instagram stating that “this isn’t about thinness, it’s about my blood sugar.” People who had insisted on the wickedness of any medical or social preference for being thinner rather than fatter were suddenly taking medication to become thinner. And, you know, cool. That’s absolutely legitimate. We can certainly advocate for the equal dignity of fat people, for their right to privacy, and for an ethos of kindness regarding weight and related issues while allowing for anyone to use GLP-1s if they and their doctors think it’s a good idea. If your perspective is simply “fat people can’t just choose to not be fat, they shouldn’t be ridiculed for their figure, somebody else’s weight is none of your business,” then there’s no contradiction. The trouble is that many of the fat acceptance people had in fact gone further and insisted that a preference for thinness in and of itself was disordered and that there was no legitimate reason to prefer to weigh less rather than to weigh more. And when Ozempic started to become widely available, well, they were in a bit of a pickle. A very understandable pickle, to be sure, one we should view with equanimity. But we also should take the lesson about what people are really like - about wanting to be thin, yes, but also about the ever-present seduction of trying not to want what we can’t have.
I want to suggest that “heteropessimism,” the gender discourse concept that’s launched a thousand essays at exactly the venues you’d expect, is just like fat pride, and that the right partner is just like Ozempic. Both are rejections of something the person doing the rejecting claims not to want until, when there’s a new option, they do want it. And this is OK. It’s better than OK, it’s good! And it’s good especially because, as cool and radical and self-defensive as rejection of romantic love may appear to be to some straight women right now, an actual life lived intentionally without long-term romantic partnership is going to prove to be very much not for everyone. For some, sure. But I suspect, in fact, that the women who will be content without romantic partnership are not the ones throwing the term heteropessimism around at all. There have always been women who are OK without a man, after all, but it’s only recently that a lot of women have tried to make that status their brand. And, you know… we’ll see. If the right guy comes around? Yeah, I have my doubts that a viral TikTok is going to outcompete the dictates of the human heart. Still we should be gracious about all of this, if I’m right. The woman who’s proud to be fat until GLP-1s give her the chance to be skinny is only human; the woman who’s a heteropessimist until she finds herself charmed by the right man is only human. But both should probably consider what exactly their choices tell us about the broader human condition.
