There Is No Magic Pill
Words: Anna Hutchcroft
(from Issue 05, Magic)Ozempic promised to make women smaller, calmer, easier to want. Nobody asked what happened to their wanting.
The drugs suppressing these desires come under a handful of brand names – Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro – all of them copies of the gut hormones that tell the brain the body has had enough. Ozempic and Wegovy mimic one of those hormones, GLP-1; Mounjaro mimics two, GLP-1 and GIP. The injections are stronger than what the body produces and are built to last a week. They were made for type 2 diabetes but levelled out the appetite so completely that people lost up to a fifth of their body weight. And this, not the blood sugar regulation, is what made these drugs famous. By 2024, semaglutide, the molecule in Ozempic and Wegovy, was generating around 30 billion US dollars a year for the Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk, close to 70 per cent of the company’s revenue.
In American pharmaceutical ads, Ozempic has a jingle. “Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic,” sung to the tune of Pilot’s 1974 song “Magic”. The ad begins with diabetes, dutifully covering blood sugar and A1C, then gets around to weight, which is the part everybody pays attention to.
In another ad, played during the Super Bowl, we see Serena Williams, thirty-four pounds down, injecting herself with a GLP-1 on camera for a telehealth company called Ro, telling viewers outright she isn’t cheating. An athlete whose entire public body has been made to stand for work, mastery and restraint, which is exactly why she’s the one chosen to say it. If the most earned body in sport promises the needle isn’t a shortcut, maybe yours isn’t either.
There should be no coyness about the legitimate use of these drugs. Type 2 diabetes is serious. Obesity is a chronic, relapsing illness, with consequences that reach far beyond whether somebody likes the look of their stomach in a dress. GLP-1 medicines can lower health risks, ease pain, restore mobility, improve blood sugar and hand people back parts of their lives that illness had taken away. For somebody whose knees hurt every time they stand up, whose liver is failing, whose body has been locked in a fight with hunger for decades, this drug is a mercy.
But can a medicine be clinically valid and still be dangerous in the hands of a culture that cannot leave women’s bodies alone? The same injection prescribed to treat chronic disease is now sold through telehealth funnels to the woman who wants ten kilos gone before her wedding, the woman who thinks thinness will make her more promotable, the woman who is medically well and has nevertheless absorbed the idea that well is not enough. GLP-1s offer the same promise: less hunger, less body, less trouble.
Women want relief, beauty and an easier time moving through a world that prefers them smaller, smiling and docile. That world keeps arranging female life so that shrinking looks like the most practical route to a better one. The people selling that drug call it liberation, without asking what else it takes down with the appetite.
Over time, wanting has rarely been allowed to look innocent on a woman. Hunger, sexual desire, need, taking up room, all of it gets read as a flaw in her, a slackness, a failure of the thing she’s meant to be. In Fearing the Black Body, Sabrina Strings follows modern thinness back through colonialism and the slave trade: restraint and delicacy handed to white women, greed and ungoverned flesh projected onto Black women.
Strings makes us aware that this standard of thinness was recently and deliberately constructed, assembled by the people who gained from it, then taken in by women so completely that it stopped registering as a standard, even to them. The point was never only to be small. A woman was meant to have made herself small, through denial and self-control, in all those private negotiations about girl math and girl dinner and the perennially prepubescent girl body. But there’s a conflict when a drug gets invented that does the suppression for her, biochemically, once a week. Thinness was prized as evidence of the punishment it took to get there. A result that costs nothing isn’t the same prize. The discipline used to be a day of barely eating, white-knuckled. Now it can be a jab and a Diet Coke for dinner.
A GP I spoke to for this piece works in Sydney’s eastern suburbs and asked not to be named. She does one or two weight consults most days. Mostly, she sees women in their forties and fifties, bodies that shifted at perimenopause and won’t shift back, the old trade of effort for thinness no longer paying out. They’ve read the articles, watched the videos and are on the hunt for a doctor to put them on the drug. Half the time their minds have been made up before they’ve sat down, and if the GP says no, she knows another doctor down the road will say yes. Most of them leave with the script.
There are rules about who’s allowed it, sure, but they don’t hold many people back. For Wegovy and Mounjaro, the number is a BMI of 30, or 27 with a related condition, and that can be almost anything: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, sleep apnoea, prediabetes. As a measure of any one person’s health, BMI is trash. It can’t distinguish muscle from fat, so a strong, active person can fall into the “unhealthy weight range” based on their numbers alone. Ozempic itself is only approved here for diabetes, not weight, but Wegovy is the same molecule, semaglutide, just dosed and sold for weight loss, and it’s approved for exactly that.
When the patients come back, they’re usually thrilled. The weight’s dropping, a knee stopped aching and the jeans do up. What almost never comes up is sex. They’re losing weight and happy about it, and the happiness is real. But if that warm bloom of desire never shows at the sight of a boner in track pants, a skilful reverse parallel park, or the sight of someone rolling a cigarette with one hand, that part tends to go unspoken. They may be hesitant to pin it on the drug. Saying it out loud could risk the thing that’s keeping them skinny.
The GP compared GLP-1s with the pill and the SSRIs: things women take for years despite the flattening or dimming somewhere else.
“It’s just difficult being a woman, really,” she said.
Dopamine drives both reward-driven eating and sexual desire, and these drugs appear to dampen its signalling in the brain’s reward pathways. These drugs might make sex better for some women while worse for others. The research can’t tell us which yet, but mostly, it hasn’t tried.
Australian prescribing data show women receive the majority of GLP-1 scripts, and the research into what any of this does to sex has been run, again and again, on men and male lab mice. Millions of women are taking drugs designed to alter appetite and reward, and medicine has stayed astonishingly incurious about what that does to desire.
Go hunting for one woman in the literature, and you turn up, more or less, exactly that. One. A written-up case of a woman who couldn’t orgasm after starting one of these drugs and got it back when she switched to another.
It blows my mind that nobody has done the obvious thing, the thing anyone would do first if they actually wanted to know: take a room full of women starting the drug, and follow what happens to their wanting over time. Perimenopausal women, already dealing with shifts in sleep, hormones, body image and sexual response, are an especially urgent group to study. We can say with relative confidence how many kilograms the dose will strip from a body. About how much desire it strips, we are guessing, and we are guessing off men.
Even a good study would struggle to isolate the drug. Desire is shaped by sleep and mood and pain and medication and the person breathing next to you in the dark, all of it at once.
Sex can come more easily for a woman who isn’t embarrassed about what she looks like with the light on. She doesn’t have to reach for the blanket to cover herself up. She isn’t second-guessing what she looks like when she’s on top. For a lot of women, feeling attractive isn’t some frill laid over the top of desire. It’s the thing that turns them on.
Ask women in midlife what makes them want sex, and feeling wanted comes up near the top. Being desired can loosen self-consciousness, and feeling at home in the body makes it easier for pleasure to live there.
But feeling at home in the body is complicated in a culture that has handed a woman a script telling her she has to cling to her youth, take up less space, and be wary of becoming invisible if she ‘lets herself go’. The phrase itself is revealing. Letting yourself go implies there is some moral duty to remain tightly managed at all times, as though a woman’s body is a project that can never be completed. Resting from the endless work of self-surveillance is not a permission a woman should have to grant herself, nor something she should have to earn. Yet increasingly, practices that once sat firmly in the territory of beauty or body modification are folded into the language of wellness and self-care. Botox becomes self-care. Ozempic becomes self-care. Meticulous food rules become self-care. Even orthorexia, an unhealthy obsession with being healthy, can disguise itself as virtue when a culture rewards obsessive “clean” eating and relentless self-improvement.
A 2023 ResumeBuilder survey found that a quarter of American workers had faced weight discrimination on the job, and more women now say plainly that they are on these drugs because thinness still works as a professional credential. Often, it isn’t that she believes there is something wrong with her body. It is that she knows the world does. She knows a larger body gets read as less desirable, less capable, and the anticipation of all that settles into her daily life, into what she wears and what she denies and what she reaches for, whether she signed up for it or not. And the same chemistry that shrank her can dull her appetite for the very thing she lost the weight to go and find.
She may have gone on the drug to date, to get chosen, to get the job, or to walk in somewhere and finally register. A woman can turn more wantable to every person in the room and feel nothing whatsoever move in herself. Being wanted is not the same as wanting back.
Lisa Miller, in The New York Times, wrote about a couple who stopped having sex after the wife went on one of these drugs and lost sixty pounds. The weight loss reversed her liver disease. She got the body she’d wanted for twenty years. But her husband grieved her bigger body, the heft of it against him in the night. She found she didn’t want to be touched at all. She told Miller she “wants to want to have sex.”
Two parts are speaking here: the one who knows sex matters, to the marriage and her sense of self, and the one whose body just doesn’t want it anymore. The drug changed the shape of her body, and it changed her wanting, too.
“A GLP-1 drug can stifle hunger, lighten the body, take the edge off pain and maybe even fix the bloodwork. And yet, there still isn’t a pill for the gap between being wanted and wanting back.”
