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Over the past year, I have witnessed the slow extinction of fat people in the upper-middle class. They were always rare, at least in PMC social circles in major global cities like London and NYC, but there were always a few here and there, and there has been a significant and noticeable decline since the arrival of Ozempic. This is near-universally true among women and (formerly) obese men; pot-bellied men who are 20 or 30 pounds overweight continue not to care in many cases, although even their numbers have shrunk considerably.
In the medium term, I wonder what the social consequences will be. Since the explosion of obesity from the early-mid 1970s, classical notions of beauty have been complemented by what I guess you could call the “butterface”, someone facially unfortunate or mediocre (mid) but who has a somewhat more attractive - by virtue of not being fat, usually - body. In 1950, being skinny with an ugly face put you in the bottom quartile of hotness. In 2020, it probably put you around the middle, maybe even somewhat above average in the fattest places. Now, the value declines again, and the face card returns to its position on top.
I don't think this concept is exclusive to the modern obesity epidemic, or that it will end with the Ozempic era. The concept of the butterface, a woman with a great rack and an ugly face, exists in earlier men's writing, but it's a crass concept that only a real horndog male would talk about, and up until recently that wasn't the kind of stuff that was typically written down, and if it was written down it wasn't the type of stuff that typically survived. Certainly if you read Playboy issues from the 50s and 60s the idea of a woman with great ass tits and a mediocre face comes up pretty often, typically as a desirable temporary partner but less marriageable.
Especially given the variable impact that weight loss will have on breasts, the varying adequacy of surgical substitution, and the known tendency of women to go too far with it, and the general degradation and crassness of modern culture, guys are still going to talk about butterfaces.
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Was that really I case in the middle/upper middle class though when people are pair bonding? People who were fat before their mid twenties/thirties or their first pregnancy was very rare ime, maybe 1/25 tops, and then we're counting mere overweightedness, obesity was at least less than half of that. I remember in my middle school there was the one obese guy everyone knew because he was obese and we were like 1000 students. In my university class there was one in two hundred that was fat. Going around campus almost no one was fat.
I'd wager that childhood/youth (over)weight problems is very, very weighted towards the lower working class and underclass (although this might be different in America, I don't know) and becomes relatively common as people enter middle age, with some people who were normal weight in their twenties swelling up like balloons, but at that point they're already in long-term relationships and most have kids.
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