CAUGHT BETWEEN 'OZEMPIC FACE' AND A HARD PLACE.

• Author: Farsad, Negin

I'm not exactly sure what women are supposed to be doing right now. I'm not even exactly sure if we (I'm a woman) get to decide it? I'm not sure if we're supposed to celebrate normal bodies or be skinny. And if we're trying to be skinny, are we supposed to celebrate being skinny or are we supposed to critique women who are trying to be skinny?

I'm not sure if we're supposed to love our aging faces or if we should feel "empowered" to challenge our sagging skin? Are we supposed to feel "emboldened" to not wear makeup? Or "empowered" to wear makeup with abandon? I've been in conversations where it's both deeply feminist to wear makeup and deeply antifeminist to wear makeup. So, which is it?

My point is, I am truly at a loss.

The depth of my confusion occurred to me when I was on the stage of Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me, NPR's lovably nerdy and comedic news quiz show. I was a panelist alongside the wonderful Brian Babylon and the inimitable Maz Jobrani. Peter Sagal, our excellent leader-in-jokes, brought up the phenomenon of "Ozempic face." Have you heard of it? Oh, it has been relentlessly claiming faces since its inception.

Ozempic was designed to be a diabetes medication, and taking it can make you drop the pounds very quickly. That's when celebrities latched on and started losing even more weight than they normally have to lose, and it appeared as though a miracle drug had come to save them. Hoorah!

Except, Ozempic, as it turns out, also sucks the fat out of faces. So Ozempites ended up being hot in the bod but Machinist in the face. Unwilling to accept this particular Sophie's choice, victims of Ozempic face would then go to their friendly neighborhood plastic surgeon and get a bunch of stuff injected so that they would have more face on their face.

It's a vicious cycle, though, technically, at some points in this cycle, some people looked really hot.

It was this phenomenon that we bantered about on the Wait Wait stage when I pointed out that, it's not surprising that women would take Ozempic. The skinny ideal has been our reality for centuries! But then Babylon pointed out that this couldn't be true anymore because we're in the time of Lizzo! Things are different now! The audience erupted in applause. I would, too; Lizzo has that effect.

But after the show, I kept...