My unease, and even outrage, made sense at the height of the love-your-body/lifestyle-not-diet mood of the early-2000s wellness movement. Fat Is a Feminist Issue made no pretenses of loving or even accepting fat bodies as they are, but encouraged women to understand their size as the somatic manifestation of a social pathology. And feminist empowerment meant embracing this causal link and summoning the self-possession to shed the pounds that mostly symbolized subordination to patriarchy, or at least a self-destructive form of resistance to it.
In the age of Ozempic, Fat Is a Feminist Issue hits different, as the kids say. The absolutely voracious appetite in the United States for GLP-1s since their release in early 2023 has literally changed the economy of Denmark, where manufacturer Novo Nordisk is located. The drugs are officially available to those who are diagnosed with obesity or diabetes, but their off-label use for weight loss is off the charts for those who simply want to be thinner and can afford to pay handsomely for it. The cultural impact is hard to overstate: tabloids calling out ever more svelte celebrities for “Ozempic face,” gyms replacing cardio equipment with weight racks to address the muscle loss caused by the drugs, awkward acknowledgments of extreme weight loss for which there is no etiquette, and many who thought they were above scrutinizing other people’s bodies scrolling through social media whispering about whether this or that acquaintance did it “the old-fashioned way” or with our generation’s apparently magic pill. As it turns out, nearly a half-century after Fat Is a Feminist Issue and a quarter-century after I was so sure of the outdatedness of its underlying assumptions, women—more than half of GLP-1 users—are apparently as enthused as ever about losing weight as a way to unlock health and happiness.
So what can this text still offer us in this era that feels so different from the 1970s but, in its enthusiastic embrace of weight loss, so similar?
On the one hand, Fat Is a Feminist Issue is above all a fascinating and useful historical snapshot of a very different era in the history of diet and physical culture that vividly anticipates our own. Consider that Orbach had to push to even include “feminist” in the title; her skittish editors felt feminine was safer, a debate hard to imagine today. In wrapping weight loss in the idiom of feminist liberation and therapeutic self-improvement, Orbach was indeed making a radical contribution in the 1970s, but one that has by now morphed, in part, into the cynical dressing up of diet language in a discourse of self-care and empowerment.
