One of the funniest – and in my opinion, falsest – things women have long said is ‘I’m doing it for myself – not for men’ about improving the way they look. Men have rarely said the same about women, which reflects that men have never been principally valued for their looks, historically, as they generally earned far more money than women. Women had to look as pretty as possible in order for a man to pick them and support them financially, thus my brilliant line ‘Men are judged as the sum of their parts; women are judged as some of their parts.’
Women said it about small things, like refusing to let their grey hair grow out, and big things, like full-on and extremely painful surgical face-lifts. They said it lots about cosmetic facial adjustments over the past couple of decades, but we all knew it was a lie. A decade ago, I knew a 60-year-old woman who had a bunch of ‘tweakments’ done ‘for me’ but when drunk confessed to me her intent of finding a rich man to fund her unutterably lazy lifestyle. I had to tell her – it would have been cruel not to (and no fun) – that rich men tend not to want sexagenarians on benefits, but rather young trophy girlfriends with jobs and status. Our friendship did not survive what I saw as my healthy level of candour and she’s still looking.
However, things have changed somewhat since then. Over the past few years, the sexes have separated to an unforeseen degree; not just in the West (so the usual bitter male suspects can’t blame whiny white women) but to an even greater extent in countries like Japan, where traditional sex roles have been maintained to a far greater extent for far longer. And where did it get them? 30 per cent of men and nearly 45 per cent of women aged 16-24 ‘not interested in or despising sexual contact’ and half of all Japanese people reaching their mid-twenties with no sexual experience at all, leading to governments begging its people to procreate or face extinction due to decimated birthrates.
But the same avoidance is also true, to a lesser extent, of experienced grown-ups, who have had more than enough sex and are keen to swerve the wearisome two-step of of middle-aged heterosexuality. Late-onset lesbianism, the increasing ease of IVF and single-parenthood, the neurotic nit-picking from women that men are somehow not up to standard – that he must ‘treat you like a princess ’but yet be a ‘bad boy ’who is taller and earns more than you. Can women imagine putting up with a similar list of demands? It wouldn’t happen, as men tend to be more easily pleased: show up, bring booze, strip off.
So when one hears that the rise of semaglutides will lead to an increase in divorce, unusually, I’m inclined to believe that women are doing it for themselves. ‘Fat jabs to unleash divorce boom - couples undergoing rapid weight loss twice as likely to end “unhealthy relationships”’ announced the Telegraph, apparently not sure whether to hiss or cheer. The study goes on to quote David Sarwer, director of the Center for Obesity Research in Philadelphia: ‘It’s not that losing a large amount of weight is ending healthy marriages … It’s probably more that for the person losing weight and feeling better about themselves, it may be empowering them to leave an unhealthy relationship.’
Already, around twice as high a proportion of women than men initiate divorce as it is. The cruel old joke ‘How do you lose 12 stone of useless fat? Divorce your husband!’ is more than likely to become reality as women (4 out of 5 current users of fat-jabs according to the charity The Health Foundation) see the miraculous fruits of their lack of labour. Women now view their bodies with the wonder of a scientist creating a new kind of human as the fat magically melts away and the ‘food chatter’ they may have lived with all their adult lives simply ceases.
One great casualty of the rise of the fat-jab in older women will be the fall of the Silver Fox myth
I remember my own early experiment with semaglutides (pills, not jabs, though I’d go on to try them, too) in the spring/summer of 2023, when I lost three pounds a week for six months. One day my husband announced – with the shocked solemnity of a conservationist discovering that a rare breed of monkey was now extinct – ‘Your bum’s disappeared!’. Though I was keen on my bum, I didn’t care, in fact I was delighted; there’s something about the semaglutide experience that makes it feel oddly enchanted in its outrageousness. And let’s face it, I’d once had my name under a magazine photo of Jabba the Hutt. I was the only person I knew who got fat while taking cocaine three times a day, like other people brush their teeth.
Still, be careful what you wish for. In 2024, with my last ampule of Mounjauro still in the fridge, I would be struck down by a spinal abscess and go on to lose a third of my body weight after suffering severe muscle wastage during six months in hospital. I became the only patient on the ward advised by the dieticians to put on weight; even now, nearly a year out of hospital, I couldn’t help feeling a bad thrill when a community nurse said casually to me ‘As you’re so small…’ SMALL! I was never small, not since I grew my splendid rack at the age of 13.
But I digress. I think that this time women are telling the truth, and doing the fat-jab thing for themselves, because the ‘New You’ promised falsely so many times before, primarily by cosmetic companies claiming they can turn back time, has come true via the miracle of real science. You’ve only got to see the likes of Oprah and Lizzo – who built their brands on ‘body positivity’ aka Fat Pride – casting their previous endorsements to the winds and totally going for it with the jabs. They don’t care about being called traitors; they’ve belatedly discovered the old Kate Moss line ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.’
The more slender middle-aged married women get, I feel that they’ll look on their husbands with more disfavour. There’s the chance that these men may take up fitness in order to keep up with their newly-minted mates, but as illustrated in the brilliant Lionel Shriver novel The Motion Of The Body Through Space (2020), middle-aged men who take up fitness seem pitiable in a way women don’t, tending to go over the top; we’ve all cursed the men on mountain bikes hurtling along the pavements. Furthermore, one great casualty of the rise of the fat-jab in older women will be the fall of the Silver Fox myth. Men will age far worse than their female counterparts, and the hot-to-trot 70-year-old amped up on Viagra and looking for love – at the moment tolerated as a kind of have-a-go-hero of the Sex Wars – will be seen as the sad-sack he is.
Of course, with the rise of influencers like Clavicular and the cult of ‘looksmaxxing’, young men are already starting to accentuate their bodies over their brains in a way women once felt they had to. If sisters are doing it for themselves, the theory seems to go, why not brothers? Pleasing oneself is of course better than pandering – but it’s lonely, too. Once again, reports like these make me happy that I grew up in the free and easy times I did – and very sure that should my 30-year union ever end, I would never, ever want to be ‘out there’ again.
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