Ozempic is coming to NZ, you should rewatch Shrek
I am begging you: before you put a drug into your system to destroy your appetite, please watch Shrek 𓆩♡𓆪
Angels! This is a guest post from my fellow internet angel and pal xxx
Caveat! It shouldn’t even need to be stated but if you need the drug for medical reasons and it helps your life - hell yeah, I’m obsessed with that - especially women getting access to life-changing care!! This piece is about the #society of it all xxxxxxx
Ozempic is coming to NZ, you should rewatch Shrek
It’s 2025 and Sydney Sweeney is selling her bathwater and Sabrina Carpenter is on her knees for anonymous hair-pulling men and Kylie Jenner is flippantly sharing details of her implants in the TikTok comments without so much as a second thought. Meghan Trainor of all people is posting SPONSORED CONTENT ABOUT HER BOOB JOB and being PRAISED FOR IT, as if it’s not dystopian to accept money to tell people to put plastic inside their bodies just for funsies. Every second celebrity and their mum are taking Ozempic, and now it’s probably going to be every second person you see at Glassons, because it’s finally going to be on NZ shelves within a matter of days.
I don’t know why I am continually surprised when time and time again, celebrities are “all about dat bass” until they suddenly find themselves in the position of drinking their “happily ever after” potion to become rich and sexy, which is apparently more important than like, I don’t know, representing real people, appearing even vaguely human, and having a singular critical thought. The difficult part is, it’s impossible to criticise these women without criticising the system they are operating within. If you were handed a get out of jail free card, wouldn’t you take it too? It’s a deeply nuanced conversation.
Except, actually, it’s not.
In 2001, some Scottish green monster hit the nail on the head: You either choose to be yourself, or you don’t.
It has recently come to my attention that all of the Shrek films are currently on Netflix (and the last one is on Neon). I know this because I just watched all 4 of them back-to-back in some sort of cosmically-fuelled Cancer Season astrological breakdown (and I cried in every single one.) It was during this green fugue state that it hit me that, 24 years later, these movies full of earwax and rats on a spit are regrettably still our best defence against the dark arts.
In both movies (I am kind of gonna pretend the last 2 didn’t happen, although they’re still worth watching), Fiona and/or Shrek are basically offered the choice to either ‘be sexy’ or ‘be themselves,’ and both times, they choose the latter. And it’s like, not even a real question. They return to themselves each time and are happier because of it, and it’s awesome. They achieved what so many movies fail to do, which is send the message that you can actually love yourself because of, not despite being fugly (because they only tend to cast exclusively hot people, and not literal ogres, à la that scene in the Barbie movie where they have to add a note to the filmmakers that “Margot Robbie is not the right person to cast if you want to make this point.")
It’s actually sad that I am writing this in 2025 because like COME ON. We should have progressed even slightly as a society in a quarter of a century, but as Chloe Laws wrote in her incredible piece, “If the original Bridget Jones was released today, people would still call her fat,” we’ve taken 2 steps forward and 3 steps back.
I think this is the reason these films struck such a chord this time around, because they met me in a place of extreme exhaustion. I feel like we are all experiencing a combination of “news fatigue” and “compassion fatigue,” where we’re so burnt out from hearing about the 101 million problems you could have with your body that you actually feel like just giving up on even having a conversation about how messed up it all is. Like that TikTok of that lady who stitched herself screaming and stomping on her phone to avoid hearing about how “we could be optimising ourselves better.” I would try to find the link to it, but I’m too dead inside to search “self-optimisation” on Tiktok and wade through the dumpster fire of ED content I’ll undoubtedly be presented with, and then spend the next 2 weeks blocking weight loss ads off my feed because the algorithm has identified me as a vulnerable target (it’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business).
It’s draining to spend hours forming an opinion on whether Sydney Sweeney and Sabrina Carpenter and some brainrotted tradwives on the internet are ‘single-handedly destroying feminism’ or are simply just existing as women in a messed up system, trying to make the most of it. Jumping through hoops of internalised misogyny and horseshoe theory is mental gymnastics. To watch Shrek again was to be dunked in a vat of ice water and re-emerge feeling like the answer is obvious: all you have to do is be so fucking real with yourself that it is deeply offputting to other people, and that is enough to be happy.
So I am begging you: before you put a drug into your system to destroy your appetite, please watch Shrek. It cuts through the nuance of it all without making you feel depressed about the state of the world. It makes the glaringly simple point that it’s okay not to fit into arbitrary beauty standards invented by random people you don’t even know and will never meet. These are CHILDREN’S movies and that is why they hold so much conviction: at the end of the day, their message is one that we understand the core truth of from a very young age, it’s just something we are told to conveniently forget along the way.
Nothing I’ve said here is groundbreaking, and that’s the point. Shrek is a great movie, you know this. The world is burning and beauty standards are terrible, you know this. I feel bored even just typing out the words “beauty standards” again and again and again. This conversation has layers (like onions and ogres), but at the end of the day you’ll have to choose to be yourself over and over again, a million times in a million ways, because sometimes, remembering to like yourself is enough activism for today. That’ll do, donkey, that’ll do.
Who wrote this?
Bryer Oden is a writer based in Wellington, NZ. She loves to use her Master’s in Linguistics and BA in Media Studies to focus on the way we use language online. Her passions are body politics, pop culture, food, and feeling nostalgic about Tumblr in 2014. You can find her being chronically online in the following places: @healthsensation on Instagram & Tiktok for Food recs, Cheap CBD Lunches and Scone Reviews, or Bryer Oden on Substack and Instagram for more writing xxx
 | A guest post by
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Hi guys!! Just wanted to jump in say that people’s comments about using Ozempic as medication and for health reasons are completely and totally valid!! This piece is specifically about celebrities who are taking it only for the purpose of weight loss and extremely thin aesthetics, and not as actual treatments (and therefore it making it harder for people who genuinely need it to get access to it.) I also wanted to highlight that it’s so easy to go in circles debating what’s ethical or not, and how I think the best way to get out of this endless loop is to keep things really simple and make sure you’re making decisions for your own wellbeing and not for how other people will perceive you. Thank you all sm for reading!! 💚
I dropped 60 pounds on semaglutide - it worked after nothing else did. And sure, I wanted to look better, but more importantly I did it to be healthier. Stop shaming people for taking advantage of something that leads to all kinds of health benefits. I’ve been able to come off my blood pressure medication and a statin. I don’t believe in using it if you’re at a healthy weight — but for many, many people it is truly lifesaving.