Something sinister is underway in Hollywood. The scrutiny of bodies, behaviors, and attitudes of women who live in the public eye is, unfortunately, nothing new. But the normalization of “eating disorder culture,” with women in Hollywood withering away in front of our eyes is rightly causing alarm. “Ozempic chic,” a redressing of “heroin chic” from the ‘90s, is bringing back extreme thinness in a big way, and the result will be nothing short of lethal. 

It’s no secret that entire industries profit enormously from making women and girls feel bad about our bodies, so that we’ll go to desperate lengths to change them. When Ariana Grande is paraded around for media appearances by her money-hungry label executives despite suffering from a severe eating disorder, searches for “thinspo” on social media and explicit pro-eating disorder content skyrocket. The result is devastating—nearly half of teens say they feel worse about their body image due to social media, and people who spend over three hours a day on social media are twice as likely to develop eating disorders. 

The Costs Of Skinny Culture

If you feel like ads for GLP-1s are everywhere you look these days, you aren’t imagining it. In 2025, advertisement spending for the weight-loss injectables topped $1 billion, further feeding into a massive societal pressure to take them. And it’s working—15% of US adults have reported using a GLP-1 drug at some point.

So what happens when a drug meant for treating things like diabetes and heart disease is being widely and publicly used as a get-skinny-quick tool, as seen amongst actors, pop stars, and other wealthy celebs? While there is limited data on who exactly is using these drugs (in part because of their rapid influx into the broader population), undoubtedly, media influence has significantly increased their usage (including a new “microdosing” Ozempic trend) amongst lean and non-diabetic people.

This comes with serious risks. Already, nearly a tenth of all Americans, about 31 million people, will meet the clinical benchmark for an eating disorder at some point in their lives. This is before even accounting for the full impact of GLP-1s and their relationship to eating disorders. Misinformation about eating disorders abounds on the internet, but they are serious medical conditions that can be extremely dangerous to an individual’s physical and mental health. Every 52 minutes, someone in the US dies as a direct consequence of an eating disorder, making it the second deadliest psychiatric illness behind opiate addiction. For drug companies, the harm to our wellbeing is worth the $190 billion projected that GLP-1s will rake in by 2035. In fact, capitalism relies on making us sick to sell us back a quick fix.

No Liberation Under Capitalism

For much of the modern era, thinness has generally come to signify status and wealth—as it usually requires free time and disposable income to maintain—and is therefore upheld as capitalist society’s standard of beauty. Putting wealthy and unhealthily skinny women on pedestals sets an unachievable, and dangerous, standard that negatively impacts not only ordinary women, but trans people and men as well. 

The shift back toward extreme thinness follows the receding of the feminist movement of the late 2010s, including #MeToo and the Women’s March, which for a brief period opened the space for the “body positivity” movement. This has left the door open for deeply reactionary ideas about gender to be pushed by the far right and the ruling class, which many thought had become a relic of the past: women’s bodies are the property of their husbands, women should be subservient and soft-spoken, and more. These are very useful ideas for the capitalist class in this new era of inter-imperialist conflict and war, which demands rigid societal roles. Weight loss corporations have been able to exploit this ideological shift for their own profit, which has in turn driven some of the worst of these features beyond what anyone could have imagined.

These resurgent reactionary ideas will need to be beaten back by an even stronger, multi-gender feminist movement that fights to end the true source of our oppression: capitalism. Instead of pouring money into advertising, we need money put into things like free healthcare that includes gender-affirming care, mental healthcare, and eating disorder treatment. The fight for body liberation is inextricably connected to our fight for equal rights, equal pay, an end to harassment and discrimination, and reproductive rights. “Skinny culture” reflects the truly rotten core of this profit-driven system, which has nothing left to offer us except misery and sickness. It’s time to root it out for good.