I’m not exactly sure what women are supposed to be doing right now. I’m not even exactly sure if we (I’m a woman) get to decide it? I’m not sure if we’re supposed to celebrate normal bodies or be skinny. And if we’re trying to be skinny, are we supposed to celebrate being skinny or are we supposed to critique women who are trying to be skinny?
I’m not sure if we’re supposed to love our aging faces or if we should feel “empowered” to challenge our sagging skin? Are we supposed to feel “emboldened” to not wear makeup? Or “empowered” to wear makeup with abandon? I’ve been in conversations where it’s both deeply feminist to wear makeup and deeply antifeminist to wear makeup. So, which is it?
My point is, I am truly at a loss.
The depth of my confusion occurred to me when I was on the stage of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me, NPR’s lovably nerdy and comedic news quiz show. I was a panelist alongside the wonderful Brian Babylon and the inimitable Maz Jobrani. Peter Sagal, our excellent leader-in-jokes, brought up the phenomenon of “Ozempic face.” Have you heard of it? Oh, it has been relentlessly claiming faces since its inception.
Ozempic was designed to be a diabetes medication, and taking it can make you drop the pounds very quickly. That’s when celebrities latched on and started losing even more weight than they normally have to lose, and it appeared as though a miracle drug had come to save them. Hoorah!
Except, Ozempic, as it turns out, also sucks the fat out of faces. So Ozempites ended up being hot in the bod but Machinist in the face. Unwilling to accept this particular Sophie’s choice, victims of Ozempic face would then go to their friendly neighborhood plastic surgeon and get a bunch of stuff injected so that they would have more face on their face.
It’s a vicious cycle, though, technically, at some points in this cycle, some people looked really hot.
It was this phenomenon that we bantered about on the Wait Wait stage when I pointed out that it’s not surprising that women would take Ozempic. The skinny ideal has been our reality for centuries! But then Babylon pointed out that this couldn’t be true anymore because we’re in the time of Lizzo! Things are different now! The audience erupted in applause. I would, too; Lizzo has that effect.
Everyone is supposed to walk a tightrope where they do a lot of injections but don’t look like they’ve done a lot of injections. It is crazy-making.
But after the show, I kept thinking about it, because despite Lizzo’s best efforts, I’m pretty sure the patriarchy still stands and that the beauty ideal is still thin with a touch of angular. Yes, we worship Lizzo and plus-sized models are an actual category and there are TV protagonists who look like your very normal, size-10ish Aunt Cheryl. But most everyone I know still wants to be skinny.
Then there’s the face. Madonna unveiled her new look at the Grammys, and although she’s a major icon of global music stardom, the thing we really looked at was her face. Has she done too much? She should obviously do stuff to her face, but it shouldn’t ever look like she’s done stuff to her face.
Alternatively, if she had just aged, we would have aggressively questioned why she hadn’t done anything to protect her face from aging. From where I stand, only Oscar-winning actress Frances McDormand seems to be allowed to age, but everyone else is supposed to walk a tightrope where they do a lot of injections but don’t look like they’ve done a lot of injections. It is crazy-making.
We’re at a strange inflection point in womanhood. We’re supposed to have all the rights (still working on abortion, obviously), we’re supposed to have all the equity (still working on that, too), and culturally, we still haven’t achieved sovereignty over our own beauty. Clearly, Lizzo and Frances aren’t enough, but maybe the fact that there is so much confusion is the actual sign that something is changing. Maybe the fact that smooth skin and a shrinking waistline are no longer the definitive answer can give us all a little hope.
In the meantime, I guess I’ll do a few noncommittal situps and see how this all shakes out.