Welcome back to “The Straight-Male Case,” an intermittent series in which Will Rahn confronts the things lesser men fear. So far, he’s immersed himself in Taylor Swift, Sex and the City, and Pilates. Today, it’s the idea that all bodies are beautiful—or, at least, okay.
“How does a fat man get so many girls?”
That was the question Mao Zedong supposedly asked Henry Kissinger at their historic 1972 meeting in Beijing. Assuming it really happened—it may well have been something Oliver Stone invented for his film Nixon—the question was likely something of an icebreaker; Mao, a big man himself, always did well with the ladies, as dictators often do. So he probably anticipated Kissinger’s famous and well-documented response: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
The rise of Ozempic and other GLP-1s has proven to be the death knell of what we called “body positivity,” the idea that all bodies are inherently beautiful. Famous actresses like Amy Schumer and Melissa McCarthy, who once celebrated their (relatively) stout bodies, have all suddenly shed a lot of weight. Doctors are so enthusiastic about GLP-1s, which also lower inflammation and protect the heart muscle, that you can imagine a world in which they become almost mandatory. It already appears that way in Hollywood, where burly actors like Russell Crowe, John Goodman, and Jesse Plemons are suddenly svelte.
At the same time, it seems a lot of young men have convinced themselves—or been convinced by freaks like Andrew Tate—that they need to be beautiful to find a mate. This view is, naturally, quite common among the incel community, who believe that they need either Jon Hamm’s face or Warren Buffett’s wealth to get a date, because women are incorrigibly superficial.
