Earlier this year, a Swiss theater company sought out “people with eating disorders to be involved in a play about Joan of Arc,” according to a recent story in the New York Times.

Here’s the director’s explanation: 

… she had initially wanted to explore Joan of Arc’s psychology. “How is it possible that a teenage girl can just go ask a king, ‘Give me a horse and some soldiers and I’ll go and fight?” Pauwels [the director] recalled thinking.

Then, she said, she got an intuitive feeling that people with anorexia might be able to provide useful insight. Like Joan of Arc, she said, they behave in ways that can be unfathomable to many people and appear to be seeking control. “When I talk with people with anorexia, they understand,” Pauwels said.

Not surprisingly, many had concerns with the ethics here, or lack thereof. Despite the director’s earnest-seeming intention, the idea has the whiff of stunt-casting. But then, accusing a theater artist of being theatrical is sort of beside the point, so here we are.

Bodies — and what we’re supposed to think about their dimensions — have always been a source of fascination. Despite efforts to push for more expansive ideas around body positivity in recent years, the pendulum has swung back to a mindset not dissimilar to the media’s preoccupation with skinniness that prevailed throughout 1990s.

According to Oregon Health & Science University Hospital: “Eating disorders are now on the rise worldwide. Between 2000 and 2018, prevalence more than doubled.”

There’s also a condition called atypical anorexia nervosa, in which “people experience the same restrictive thoughts and behaviors while remaining in larger bodies,” according to reporting in National Geographic:

“The main difference, really, is that folks with atypical anorexia are within the ‘normal’ or above weight range, according to BMI, while someone with anorexia nervosa would have BMI in the underweight range,” says Sara Bartel, a psychologist specializing in eating disorders at Nova Scotia Health in Canada.

“Both individuals will be just as concerned about body size, concerned around weight gain, weight and shape really determining how they feel about themselves.”

The bodies we probably most obsess about — other than our own — are those we see on screen. It’s hard not to respond this way. A fundamental nature of TV and film is that it asks, no demands, that you look. 

Actors then stride across red carpets to promote their projects, and once again we are asked to look. 

But we’re in a funny moment, where there’s all this looking, but also maybe discomfort in talking about what we’re seeing. “Stop body-shamming!” is a frequent rejoinder on social media, and that impulse to mind your own business isn’t wrong. You don’t know why anyone’s body looks the way it does and nobody owes anyone else an explanation.

But all of this is happening with a new twist. The introduction of GLP-1 drugs — Ozempic and the like — which have become popular in Hollywood. 

It’s an industry with a history of favoring ripped bodies in men and exceptionally slender bodies in women — bodies, in other words, absent any visible lumps or bumps or anything that might be construed as an imperfection. When a heavier actor is cast, it’s often because their lack of conformity to the narrow beauty standards is part of the story’s text or subtext. That’s not always the case. But more common than not, their fatness is part of who that character is. Part of their narrative arc.

Why bring this up at all?

Celebrities are human beings. Period. Full stop.

But they are also vessels for selling ideas and ideals — and sometimes selling literal products. And we should be able to talk about what they’re selling, even if what they’re selling is a physical image.

Celebrities are entitled to move through the world in bodies that aren’t forever the subject of speculation.

But that’s complicated by the fact that they don’t want us to ignore their bodies either. How they look is often an essential part of the public persona they’ve crafted.

On one hand, you have someone like Meghan Trainor, who launched her music career with a song boasting she’s “all about that bass (no treble)” — an anthem celebrating thicker bodies. Now that Trainor has lost weight, are we, the general public, meant to ignore her pivot? 

For the bulk of their careers, Mindy Kaling and Amy Schumer had bodies like Trainor’s — pretty close to that of the average American woman. Even so, I’m sure they had various encounters in Hollywood that made them feel monstrous, which is perhaps why they often found ways to subvert that with a joke. Now their bodies look different — less “average American woman” and more “Hollywood stamp of approval.” 

Last week, Schumer announced she was deleting all her pre-weight loss photos from social media. People make these kinds of choices all the time and Schumer was coy about why, so I don’t want to read too much into it. I don’t even particularly like her work! But still, I feel sad that anyone would feel compelled to erase a portion of their existence, whatever the reason.

Consider this story the Tribune ran from Bloomberg earlier this week:

Weight-loss drugs are coming for a new kind of customer.

“You don’t need to be obese to start a GLP-1,” reads an ad from a telehealth startup, the words scrawled in icing on a cake. Another one features a slender woman excited to lose a little weight before her wedding. Yet another says patients can drop 17 pounds in two months by microdosing copycat Ozempic.

They’re part of a marketing blitz that’s ramped up in recent months, with ads plastered on billboards, in subway stations and online.

Also:

A study released in August found that off-label Ozempic prescriptions for people who weren’t obese, overweight or diabetic grew from 3% in 2018 to 30% in 2023. For off-label Wegovy, it rose as high as 38%.

We don’t even fully understand the potential long-term effects of these drugs, but OK.

Let’s talk about “Wicked”

The specter of eating disorders has surrounded the publicity campaigns of the first “Wicked” movie as well as the recent sequel, most notably concerning the movie’s stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. I think what strikes me most about Grande isn’t so much how she looks, but how she carries herself right now. It’s as if she were made of glass. Handle with care or she might shatter before your eyes.

There’s a self-infantilization that she’s undergone. It’s a different sort of shrinking that has her speaking in higher, wispier voice and changing her entire demeanor into someone much more doe-like.

Though she’s only 32, she’s been in this business a long time. Long enough that there’s a lot of video from earlier in her career when she seemed more confident in taking up space than she does on this recent press tour, where she often seems overwhelmed by the world’s attention.

The world is an overwhelming place right now. Doing press, with its demands of being “on” non-stop, probably only accentuates that. Maybe there are things in her private life that feel overwhelming, too.

I have real compassion for that.

But I’m also fascinated by that tension of look but don’t-look-too-closely that the celebrity ecosystem asks of us.

We’re all influenced by what we see — by ideas about what is or isn’t considered attractive — but I think young people can be especially susceptible to this messaging. And it’s not just about bodies, but faces too.

According to The Cut:

Earlier this month, actress Shay Mitchell launched Rini, a skin-care line for kids ages 3 and over.

I just …

The brand — which currently sells sheet masks, although barrier-repair cream and bodywash are apparently on the way — quickly inspired backlash. Parents argued that marketing beauty products to children, especially young girls, takes Sephora tweens to a new extreme, exposing them to unrealistic beauty standards at an even earlier age.

Or consider this recent NPR headline: “With 'Baby Botox,' young adults strive to keep wrinkles from ever forming.”

A sociologst named Dana Berkowitz is quoted in the story and she says social media is driving some of this:

… by looking at curated images of others far more frequently, inevitably, people were comparing those faces to their own.

But also:

At the same time, Berkowitz says some celebrities, along with social media influencers, now openly earn income through endorsements of various cosmetic procedures, further normalizing it.

Celebrities are human beings. 

But they are also vessels selling ideas and ideals — and sometimes selling literal products.

We have to find a respectful way to talk about this.