I was working on my store recently and modeled a pair of leggings featuring fluorescent images of brain cells — bright, colorful patterns inspired by microscopy. I’m about 5'4" and 138 pounds, which places me squarely in the range of what is considered an average-sized woman. Still, as I looked at the photos, I noticed a familiar reaction: my legs didn’t look as thin as I would have preferred. I’m not overweight, but the discomfort was there.
As I sat with that feeling, it became clear that my preference for thinner legs had very little to do with health and everything to do with a lifetime of exposure to advertising and fashion imagery. For decades, magazines and media presented thinness as the ideal. When you step back historically, however, it becomes obvious that “ideal” body types are cultural constructs that shift with time.
In earlier centuries — the Renaissance being a clear example — women with fuller bodies were considered desirable. Thinness was associated with poverty, illness, and frailty, or an inability to bear children. As industrialization increased food availability, excess weight came to be viewed as unhealthy, and the aesthetic ideal reversed. In my view, this trend reached its most extreme and absurd point during the “heroin chic” era. Even today, despite the body positivity movement’s efforts to broaden representation, thinness remains deeply idolized. I’ll admit that bias lives in me too. It has been ingrained over decades.
Recently, a new factor has entered the picture: GLP-1 agonist drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro. These medications have dramatically altered the visual landscape of weight loss. Rapid fat loss, particularly in the face, often results in a hollow or gaunt appearance that can make people look older. In response, many turn to cosmetic procedures and fillers to compensate.
This dynamic is perhaps most visible among the women who socialize at Mar-a-Lago, where the so-called “Mar-a-Lago face” has become a recognizable phenomenon. Excessive lip fillers, inflated cheeks, and elevated brows create exaggerated features that often look strangely uniform. In isolation, cosmetic enhancement isn’t the issue. What’s striking — and unsettling — is the sameness. These women resemble caricatures, but not in the way caricature artists exaggerate unique features to preserve individuality. Instead, the exaggerations are identical, producing a Stepford-wife effect: exaggerated, standardized, and oddly inhuman. Their aesthetic — bold colors, tight dresses, overt displays of wealth — evokes something closer to 1980s television excess than personal expression.
It made me wonder whether Ozempic face leads directly to Mar-a-Lago face. Given the speed of weight loss and the compensatory reliance on cosmetic intervention, the connection seems likely.
As I reflected further, I began to see this as part of a broader pattern. The political right tends toward control — over bodies, appearances, and behavior — often in pursuit of an unnatural ideal. The left, by contrast, tends toward individual freedom: freedom to be thin or heavy, straight or gay, trans or cis, tattooed or not, brightly colored or natural. While the left does care about health and well-being, it places far more emphasis on limiting corporate power than policing individual bodies.
Looking at the women of Mar-a-Lago — their thin bodies, identical faces, and extreme cosmetic interventions — I felt a wave of sadness. The effort required to belong is immense. Cosmetic procedures are painful. GLP-1 drugs often cause significant side effects. These women are suffering to fit into a group identity, and they accept that suffering because belonging has become essential to who they are.
What struck me most was the realization that they can never truly leave. When identity is so fully fused with a group — and with one man in particular — departure becomes almost impossible. Donald Trump is aging and clearly unwell. He will not be around forever. When he is gone, and when Mar-a-Lago loses its centrality, what happens to those whose identities are built entirely around him? Without his power, who are they? Without his grievances, what cause remains? Without a strongman to absorb their anger and explain away their failures, what fills the void?
Many people on the left will feel little sympathy for disaffected MAGA followers when that day comes. I don’t share that reaction. I feel sorrow for them now, and I expect I will feel sorrow for them then. It is a terrible thing to feel so powerless that you must attach your identity to a dominant figure in order to feel strong. It is a terrible thing to have such a fragile sense of self that belonging requires constant conformity and suffering.
Donald Trump has always exhibited malignant narcissism. He humiliates and belittles others, and disturbingly, his followers admire him for it. That admiration reflects something wounded — a resonance with their own unacknowledged pain. Everyone carries emotional injuries, often rooted in childhood. I can’t know the specific wounds that led each person here, but I can recognize the pain itself.
If people were grounded in self-love, they would not be threatened by difference. A gay wedding down the street would not disturb them. Muslims praying would not provoke fear. Hearing Spanish spoken nearby would not feel like an attack. The reason these things don’t bother many of us on the left is not moral superiority — it’s that we are, generally speaking, more at peace with ourselves.
My deepest wish is that everyone finds that peace. I don’t judge MAGA supporters. I see them as hurting people. That includes the women of Mar-a-Lago. Beneath the conformity, the procedures, and the performance, there is a profound absence — and that absence is what I find most tragic of all
