Ozempic Culture: How GLP-1 Drugs Are Reshaping Beauty Standards and the Cultural Imagination
核心洞察
Ozempic and other GLP-1 receptor (搜索) agonists have become symbols of a new "body economy" where thinness, youth, and beauty are framed as moral imperatives and individual responsibilities.
Curators Júlia Llull and Blanca Arias argue that the fear of aging and bodily transformation is now "cloaked in new technologies and the language of individual choice that often conceal the power structures that underpin it."
A wave of recent films, television series, and books — from The Substance to The Beauty — reflects growing cultural anxiety about body modification, anti-aging treatments, and the relentless pursuit of physical perfection.
In less than five years, Ozempic and other drugs in the GLP-1 receptor (搜索) agonist family — initially developed to treat diabetes (搜索) and obesity (搜索) — have transcended their clinical indications to become potent cultural symbols. These injectable weight-loss medications now sit at the center of what commentators describe as a new "body economy," alongside anti-aging treatments, regular doses of Botox, hyaluronic acid, and image-altering technologies that promise to correct any deviation from an increasingly demanding social norm.
The phenomenon has intensified since the pandemic, when health concerns took center stage in everyday life and social media amplified a discourse that frames beauty, youth, and thinness as markers of virtue. "Beauty, youth and thinness have always been signs of virtue: they convey values such as discipline, self-control, willpower and even purchasing power," the analysis notes. In late capitalism, an acceptable body signals that its owner knows how to manage themselves, while a "tired, wrinkled, overweight body, or one with unconventional contours, is interpreted as a symptom of poor self-management."
Cultural Reflections in Film and Television
The cultural absorption of these pressures is evident across contemporary media. Coralie Fargeat's 2024 film The Substance, starring Demi Moore, turned anxiety about bodily perfection into a fable in which a television star fired upon reaching middle age tries an experimental drug that creates a younger, smoother version of herself. Aaron Schimberg's A Different Man follows an actor with neurofibromatosis (搜索) who undergoes experimental facial transformation, only to find his insecurities unresolved. Jessica Hausner's Club Zero depicts a teacher who transforms "mindful eating" — described as a euphemism for deprivation — into a doctrine of austerity and purity.
On television, Ryan Murphy's series The Beauty, available on Disney+, imagines a sexually transmitted disease that makes infected people physically perfect before killing them. The Australian horror film Insatiable, set for release in late July, features a medical student obsessed with weight loss who discovers a drug made from human ashes.
The Historical Perspective
The exhibition The Cult of Beauty at the CCCB contemporary arts center in Barcelona situates this obsession within a broader historical arc. Curators Júlia Llull and Blanca Arias observe: "The fear of aging, of fat or of bodily transformation is not a new phenomenon, but today it appears cloaked in new technologies and the language of individual choice that often conceal the power structures that underpin it."
The exhibition traces how beauty has been associated with proportion, harmony, and virtue throughout art history — an equivalence reinforced by Judeo-Christian morality, where beauty became an indicator of righteousness and ugliness a sign of disorder or deviance. The curators note the powerful resurgence of the monster figure in contemporary imagination: "At a time when pressure on bodies is intensifying through image culture, body-modification technologies and the notion of body optimization, the monster emerges as the figure that embodies everything the canon seeks to expel."
Body horror, they argue, has become fashionable for good reason: "It's a subgenre that expresses the anxieties of a culture that demands constant intervention on one's own flesh to keep it young, productive, thin and desirable."
The Literary Response
In publishing, Christopher E. Forth's Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life reconstructs the long Western history of aversion to fatness, tracing it to classical antiquity. Forth, a history professor at the University of Kansas, acknowledges the phenomenon is reaching new heights: "Diet, exercise, treatments, and drugs are part of an invisible regimen that has almost become an obligation for the neoliberal subject."
Forth traces the modern intensification to the origins of cinema: "The advent of the cinematic close-up made the face more scrutinizable: its features and flaws were magnified. At the same time, it turned movie stars into new models of health and beauty." He adds: "With social media filters, we become the stars of our own movies; we can correct our image, look for a moment like an improved version of ourselves, and then try to make our real bodies match that retouched selfie."
Spanish literature has produced a series of works addressing these pressures. Lara Gil's Manual para romper un cuerpo draws on the author's bariatric surgery experience to debunk the promise that weight loss alone fixes a life. Leticia Sala's Dame veneno que quiero vivir examines the skincare industry, valued at over $150 billion, and the normalization of anti-aging rhetoric. Aida González Rossi's Gorda sinvergüenza addresses fatphobia through language, critiquing how body-positive discourse between 2016 and 2021 was absorbed by capitalism: "In the end, what it does is create another beauty standard: you have to be fat in that way, or be a fat woman who loves everything about herself."
Beauty as Individual Responsibility
Rosario Villajos, author of La educación física and winner of the 2023 Biblioteca Breve Prize, captures the shift in how beauty is perceived: "In the past, the beauty ideal reached us via magazines, television or advertising; now, it comes through a screen that never turns off. Back then, the ideal was nearly impossible to attain; now, there seems to be an added obligation to pursue it." She adds: "Beauty is no longer perceived as something one either has or doesn't have; it has become an individual responsibility. It is as if failing to be young, thin or attractive today is, above all, a personal failure."
The Longevity Frontier
Maria Martínez Bayona's film The End of It, screened at the Cannes Film Festival, envisions a future where aging is a treatable medical condition and death has become optional. The protagonist is 250 years old, renewing her blood via machine and having replaced her bones with more durable materials. "Even though the film is set in the future, we aren't that far from that reality," the director says. "Today, there are already mothers and daughters who, almost bizarrely, look the same age. Medicine has achieved things that once sounded like science fiction."
Martínez Bayona notes that the focus on longevity has intensified greatly in the last five or six years, with an entire industry emerging around figures like Bryan Johnson. "Ozempic culture isn't just a cult of thinness. It is also one that resists any sign of decline or human finitude," she observes.
The curators of The Cult of Beauty offer a tempered note of optimism: "Even if the norm presents itself as natural, immutable or inevitable, it is as fragile as any historical construct. What has been constructed can also be dismantled."