Jia Tolentino
speaker
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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Appearances
What Now? with Trevor Noah · The Ozempic Obsession with Jia Tolentino (ARCHIVE EPISODE) · 2 Jan 2025
podcast
Why wouldn't you conform, right? Like it's.
I mean, I mentioned earlier, like the little dove, every, you know, everyone is beautiful, like the beginning of the sort of corporatized body positivity movement. It seemed dangerous to me immediately because it seemed like, no, like actually beauty is this sort of arbitrary assignation based on people's conformity to market forces. It's not like it's not like a spiritual, moral thing. good.
Like it was this whole thing that was really important to say that everyone was beautiful, as if to say everyone is good. And it was like, no, no, no, everyone is good and worthy. But perhaps that has nothing to do with beauty.
Yeah. And it seemed to me like perhaps it is just much more important to say like everyone is worthy and beauty is not as important as we ever thought it was at all. Like it's just this thing, right?
It's body neutrality, yeah.
Yeah, and it just seemed like, oh, this is a thing that people are going to make a lot of money off of. Yeah, for sure.
Okay, hold on. There's this ClickHole article from 2016 that the headline is, this plus size model was inspiring, but then she lost 100 pounds, which was also inspiring, even though she was already perfect before, but she's also perfect now. You know what I'm saying?
Like it's like this very like, and it's like this is the sort of circular hamster wheel that you get into when it's like everyone's beautiful, but also health is good. But also we love you no matter what you do. But also some choices are socially weighted and it's just so convoluted.
Yeah, I'm so far from that body. I don't look like Chris Evans. I'm so far from that. I think back to the LeBron thing, though, it's like, you know, he has very specific needs for physical performance for his body that all of us do not.
But I think it's an interesting thing to bring up because the question is, how does he need to live in and or change his body to do the things that he wants to do with it? Even that as a way that people would talk, even that would be just a really nice way for people to talk about it.
Like it's like for people like it's if weight was incidental to that, it was like, can you do the things in your life that you want to do? You know, do you feel good?
And it's like that is probably the foundation that, you know, that could be the start. That's amazing.
Yeah.
Yeah. And like, do you feel good? Do you feel good in your body? Right. I think that's what I was thinking about the like appetite and pleasure thing. Right. Like if that was valued. Right. Like people just feeling good.
Like it seems extremely health conducive. Right. Yeah.
There was a there was a thing there is like Harvard does this implicit bias study. And I think I mentioned in that piece that I think it was I'm going to get the dates wildly wrong. But it was maybe sort of from a point in the mid 2000s to a point in recent years. They analyzed sort of 10 vectors of bias about age, about age.
Skin color, about like gender, about, you know, like these various things. Every single implicit and explicit expression of bias went down in that sort of like Obama era period, except for bias against weight. And that went up, I believe, both implicit and explicit. Wait, so everything went down except that? Yeah, I was quite surprised by that.
Yeah, everything went down of the 10 things tested in this particular Harvard study.
What I thought originally about the best case sort of cultural effect of this, you know, the fact that this technology exists could be is that we could kind of remove the moral valences from every part of this conversation possible, right? That we could understand that...
metabolism and the hormonal preset that leads your body to be a certain weight and that all of it is much more sort of arbitrary and kind of morally neutral. And like you said, Christiana, like a sign of just all of the other things environmentally that you're swimming in. Like I think that is the best thing that something like Ozempic can do is just is lead people to the understanding that
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