The influencers convinced you to start smoking in 2024 just like they convinced you to go vegan in 2015. This year, cigarettes have crept into my timeline, and it’s not just celebrities like Charli XCX and the cigarette bouquet Rosalía gave her for her birthday party. Influencers and celebs alike in New York, LA, London, Paris, Copenhagen: they’re all posting pics smoking outside the bar, snaps of their used ash trays, selfies of their hair clips shaped like lighters à la Dua Lipa. Maybe they’ve always been smoking, but were too worried of backlash to post about it. Not anymore. One reason for the comeback is probably, yes, brat summer, but I argue that the ciggies began showing their butts much earlier than that album dropped. People are picking up smoking again because of a second reason: ozempic.
Ozempic makes you skinny. Smoking makes you skinny. Everyone wants to be skinny and now suddenly no one is scared to admit it. We don’t care how or which unhealthy tools we need to use to drop 10 pounds. It’s no longer taboo to eat barely anything at a restaurant with your friends because you’re not hungry. Ozempic is making people smoke because they either a) don’t have an appetite or b) because they don’t want to have one. If smoking’s comeback was rooted purely in brat summer, in the party mood, in the fuck-it’s-the-end-of-the-world attitude born of a shitty political situation, women would also be drinking alcohol more, which is statistically (and anecdotally) not the case. In fact, increasingly more women are giving up the booze and the sober curious movement is on the up. Alcohol might also cause cancer, but it will also make you gain weight.
The vegan movement of the second half of the 2010’s always masked itself as a way to be ‘healthy’, to care about the planet, to love animals (and trust me, I was hardcore vegan for 8 years because I convinced myself of these things too). But if I’m honest, and if lots and lots of 2010’s vegans are honest with themselves too, we all know it’s because the vegan women posting pics of themselves, with their açai bowls and buddha bowls and all the bowls of raw vegetables you never asked for, were skinny. Being vegan was obviously a cultural phenomenon because people thought it would make them skinny! And no one would admit it! Because at the same time that skinny vegans were taking over the newsfeeds and minds of young women, so too was the body positivity movement.
Influencers claimed to love their bodies. Lingerie campaigns ran with women of larger shapes in their underwear, fake-laughing at how much fun they were having being themselves. Luxury fashion brands cast one or two plus size models in their shows for a couple years, even though they really didn’t want to. Most of the skinny vegans subscribed to this body positivity movement themselves, without recognising their own privilege, telling their followers that everyone was beautiful in their own way, even if you don’t have 100k followers because you’re too fat xoxo.
The problem with the BP movement was that, deep down, no one really believed it. Some women moved on to ‘body neutrality’, acknowledging that they would never actually ‘love’ being fat because as a society we do not accept fat people, especially fat women. Still, brands begrudgingly featured fat models, we pinned superficial self-love quotes we wished we believed, and we all secretly judged the way Kelly Clarkson looked on the red carpet even though we told our friends that her dress was ‘flattering’. This era resulted in a landscape of foamy women’s media. A soft layer on top of all we consumed, meant to make us feel good about ourselves. Underneath, we sensed something incongruent, something dark, yet the foam was thick and frothy, and no one had the guts to dig and find out what was down there. Why weren’t these mottos and models and media actually making us feel good? For all intents and purposes, it was that we still wanted to be skinny, because society wanted us to be, and we weren’t allowed to say it out loud.
Everything produced was surface level, media was flat, everyone was afraid to say anything that might make people not love themselves. The body positivity movement expanded past the body into a you-are-all-perfect-the-way-you-are-and-everything-about-you-is-positive movement. Which meant nothing (and no one) in mainstream women’s media could be criticised, nothing could be seen as exclusive: fashion, art, music, beauty, food and beverage, advertising. Secretly the execs still somehow needed us to feel bad about ourselves so we would buy their products, and what resulted was an inauthenticity, a fake positivity. Something that we could sense but not verbalise.
I recognise that the Me Too movement happened around the same time in the late 2010s, which also affected the way we view women’s bodies, and their autonomy over them. This surely impacted the media being produced. The shit that happened in the 2000s and early 2010s, and the way women were mocked/criticized/bullied in the media was rightly called out, and we shouldn’t go back to an era of gossiping about a celebrity gaining five pounds and wearing a low-cut dress. But I don’t attribute the boring media during that time to this movement. I argue we’ve carried into the present our learnings from Me Too because it wasn’t fake. The sentiments around Me Too were honest and women believed in them. Rational citizens don’t believe we should be trashing women. The effects of the movement were authentically translated into campaigns. A true step was made towards how women are represented as powerful, more than objects, and have authority over their bodies and lives. We aren’t shaming anyone else for their bodies and choices anymore. We just care about ourselves being thin. And we’re smoking.
So, we’re back to the cigarettes. Everyone knows they’re bad for you. They give you cancer. They give you wrinkles!! But, they also give you a low appetite ;). Smoking can’t falsely claim it will make your skin glow like a high carb low fat raw vegan diet can. You accept the facts and science about cigarettes, but you smoke anyway because it makes you look cool and it makes you not want to eat dessert. Can’t lie about that! You live your life in truth and acceptance of what you truly want: to be cool and to be skinny. There’s no incongruence. There’s no foam. We can be honest and agree it’s ok we’re not all perfect and, no, we don’t like how we are so we’re going to pick up a cigarette to try and change ourselves. We believe it! It’s true!! Smoking causes cancer! Let’s smoke because it makes us look a certain way and we like the hope it gives us.
You can lie about using ozempic and people do. They don’t like to admit they’re skinny because of a drug and not because of personal hard work (re: a lesson for another time on why society is religious about restriction and self-flagellation of the body). But before anyone ever uses ozempic, they’ve already been honest with themselves. Ozempic’s purpose is to make you lose weight. No one goes to the doctor to get a weight loss drug without first admitting to themselves that they don’t love their bodies the way they are. They want to be skinny! And they’ve been honest about it! They had enough self awareness to realise it, and ozempic made it culturally acceptable to say it.
People are smoking because they aren’t hungry because they’re already on ozempic, or people are smoking because they don’t want to be hungry because they’re not on ozempic. We’ve all been honest. Fuck it, fuck our bodies, we just all want to be skinny and hot and glad that’s all in the open. Fuck it, fuck our bodies, we apparently want a psycho president that makes us feel something. Now can our media can be honest and raw and critical? Pretending otherwise got us nowhere, so let’s stop being surface level and actually make something meaningful. Maybe my own media diet has just shifted, but I’d argue a chunk of what’s been published recently has been more critical, juicier, smarter. We don’t have to like everything and everyone. Media frames the way people see the world, shaping culture and how we feel. For a long time, we’ve been feeling nothing. But we know what people want now. They want to smoke. They want to be skinny. They want to say what they actually think. Ozempic is ushering in a new paradigm and we all better brace ourselves for an honest reality check.
It's not you, co. 