Jia Tolentino

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981 appearances 13 recordings 3 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard Apr 2025

Jia Tolentino’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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What Now? with Trevor Noah · The Ozempic Obsession with Jia Tolentino (ARCHIVE EPISODE) · 2 Jan 2025 podcast

But yeah, I mean, I'm pro-choice too, you know, like it's... It's none of my damn business what anyone's doing with their own body.

I, you know, this I do have thoughts on, you know, I think that one of the things that our whole fascination with Ozempic is based on is, and it's interesting, you know, Christiane, I wonder if you have thoughts with little kids, right?

Part of beauty is thinness as it's taught to you from a really early age, like fatness, queerness, darkness, all of these things are like coded as signs of deviance. Like you, you learn as a really young child in Disney movies in anything about Like beauty is really coded as morality and there's this Protestant work ethic thing, right?

It's something that you should achieve through hard and punitive work and discipline, right? And when people use Ozempic, it's like, you cheated. You skipped the hard work part, you know? And so you got the thing we demanded of you, but now we find this a vaguely immoral thinness.

I hear what you're saying.

But in both cases, it's about wealth, right? I mean, in both cases, like the thing that is valued is always the thing that's correlated with wealth. And I feel like that's been the case. You look through art history, right? The fuller figures are valued at a time when it's, you know, the wealthy signifying plenty.

And now it's signifying, you know, I got a trainer, I got a cook, I got a, you know...

It's so interesting that all of this concern about what creates health for kids always comes down to food and weight.

And it's like there's so much other stuff. It's like it's housing policy. It's like it's it's food stamp policy. Right. It's all of these things. And it's like funding for recess and, you know, and for like physical activities and for and for all these things, because, you know, there are there are levers you can pull to change things.

your body certainly during childhood and that, you know, like it's not to say that lifestyle and what you eat doesn't affect it. But, you know, there I talk to doctors that are, you know, they're the patients are their kids are in food deserts and they have nobody that can take them outside. And it's not safe to be outside where they are. They are just kind of sitting in a room

you know, all day because of, you know, this myriad of structural factors. And so the only lever to pull for these complicating conditions is a drug like this.

Yeah, for sure. You know what I mean? How else would you enrich the private prison? Exactly, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I think of I kind of think of the Kardashians as, you know, the sort of weather vane for what the winds of sort of capital and, you know, like deeply punitive, technologically based beauty standards. You can literally see written upon their bodies what women all across the country are going to then do, you know, in this really kind of amazing, terrifying way. And so, yeah.

You know, I think it was like that. No one had ever heard of it. And then, you know, I started to hear about there was this shot that was intended for treating chronic conditions caused by type 2 diabetes that women in Hollywood, like, you know, some women in Hollywood were taking and their bodies were suddenly visibly changing.

And it was interesting to me to begin with because, you know, like I grew up in, you In sort of very conservative Houston, Texas, like deep within this hegemonic, like white dominated the age of sort of the only people that are beautiful are like Paris Hilton, you know, and Britney Spears. And that was the body prescribed.

And then we had the sort of Obama era, you know, grand democratization of culture, which included. you know, people started to have open dialogue about how you could be healthy at every size, which you can, right? And that all sorts of bodies are beautiful. And I always felt a little skeptical of the sort of Dove ad body positivity thing for reasons we can get into later.

But I said, okay, finally, like we have reached a new era. Maybe it will unlock the sort of hold that white diet culture has had on America since the 20s, basically. And then this happened. And it was like, Oh, no. Oh, no. We're swinging. I mean, that was my initial interest. I was like, I thought we had already changed that we were going to stay on this train of, you know, openness.

And I don't know. And the sharp swing back and what that meant for the way people talked and thought about beauty, I thought was extremely interesting. And then so I just started tracking it.

I think it exists. And I think probably the people that are the best at it are fat people. You know, I think that there are a lot of people that have been that have spent, you know, that it's been like this cultural discursive work in the last 15 years to establish a whole vocabulary for how we could be talking about these things. Right.

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