Shrinking Women
Seeking the body's grace in the Ozempic Age
My mother is disappearing before my eyes. She has always been a presence, large in spirit, yes large in love, one of those people who changes the emotional weather in a room. She has also, for as long as I can remember, been round. Her lap was a squashy nest in which to salve my childish nightmares, her arms a soft harbour for teenage agonies. Her roundness was as given as the greenness of the vegetables she magicked into being in deep beds outside the back door, as given as the reliability of rain on summer holidays. It no longer rains here, reliably, in the summer holiday and my mother is no longer round. She is small and getting smaller and consequently as fragile looking as I have ever known her, and celebrated everywhere she goes for being so. Except, that is, by the friends who keep telling her to stop losing weight, who seem not glad but somehow threatened by the loss of her roundness.
There are shrinking people everywhere we look. It is not a great wasting disease, but for many a liberation from a prison of flesh against which they have long wrestled and struggled. For my mother, despite the real and sometimes gruelling discomfort of the side-effects, the weight loss jab is indeed a gift. It is the only intervention she has yet found which might bring her unruly body down within the boundaries of what we are told is “healthy“ and “safe“. After ten years being pre-diabetic, trying low carb and everything else, this seemed the best course. Her desire to remain not just alive but playful and present with her grandchildren, keep growing vegetables, drives the quest to shrink, and I completely understand why.
I am not shrinking. I am instead doing the thing that happens around my age and expanding. It is slight but noticeable. I am not celebrated everywhere I go for it. I think probably no one notices, but I do. I am not the size I was. I am not going to say what size I am, because if you are smaller than me, you probably can’t help but feel a tiny pulse of superiority, and if you are larger you might roll your eyes and wonder what I am whining about. Our constant, semiconscious status triangulation kicks in around many things, and body size is one of them, at least for women. Being aware of all this, aware of my own place in it all, irritates me, and over the minor irritation of it is a major irritation at the fact of being irritated. I care, and I don’t want to care.
Those who take the weight loss drugs speak of a reduction in “food noise”. Due to a Herculean effort on behalf of my mother not to pass down the generational chain-reaction dysfunctions handed down to her, I don’t have to deal with a lot of “food noise”. Despite her spending what seemed like my whole childhood in either Weight Watchers or Slimming World, neither my brother or I received anything more than average level issues. I eat healthily, mainly when I’m hungry, only rarely for other reasons. I have always been within the medically prescribed “healthy” range, according to the scales. What I have instead of food noise, is weight noise. The deeply coded, difficult to eradicate sense that if only I were a stone lighter, everything would be better. I rarely ever actually do anything about this, because I already eat well and pleasurably and hate diet culture with my whole heart. I also observed enough failed attempts in my mother to have little faith in their efficacy, but the thought remains. Perhaps I should try keto? Cut out sugar entirely? Restrict my eating window? How could we not, when every newspaper supplement suggests a new body reduction project? I wonder how many of us just live with the lingering impression that our bodies are slightly faulty, taking up more than our fair share of space in a way that is mildly bad manners, and frankly unchic.
Whether that sounds familiar might well depend on your gender or gender expression. Men have their own nonsense narratives to deal with, and the ones around body shape are rapidly catching up, but they tend to be around being bigger. More bulk, more muscle = more Man. With women, the message implicitly or explicitly is almost always: be smaller. Take up less space. Look more fragile. Signal that you need protection from a man dealing with his own unstable sense of self. I came to a profound realisation of this interviewing Jameela Jamil for The Sacred. She said
Every time through history, women start to get too much power. All of a sudden, a beauty standard comes in that is so dominating, debilitating and exhausting, just coincidentally, at the same time where suddenly women are committed to shrinking themselves, doing something that will deplete their energy, deplete their resources, consume their time, and that will only give them less energy and less fight to to ask for or fight for equal rights. It's happening again.
I know the weight loss jabs are often transformative for people but my goodness are the side effects brutal. In cases where it’s medically advised this is usually a fair trade off. My concern is the many women taking them simply to conform to the idea that if they are smaller they will be acceptable. It is heartbreaking and enraging and completely understandable given the dominant narratives forming us. Articles like this one in The Times about the fashion editor taking the jab to go from a size 12 to a size 10, as if size 12 requires medical intervention. Public figures like Serena Williams, one of the fittest, strongest women in the world, shrinking. If you can, why would you not, given the underlying logic that for women at least, smaller is always better?
