Pursuing Perfection: Faith and the Female Body

Maja Whitaker reflects on the latest trend in pursuit of the body beautiful.

In the recent cinema awards season, the scrutiny of celebrity bodies has taken a new turn. The Golden Globe Awards was jokingly described by the host as ‘Ozempic’s biggest night’[1], referring to the popularity of the new weight-loss drug Ozempic (semiglutamide, also sold as Wegovy). Fans and critics have scrutinised photographs for signs of ‘Ozempic face’, a gaunt look due to the loss of facial fat, and compared them with past images to decide who is “cheating” with Ozempic to manage their weight. But is this ‘cheating’? Or is it just another tool in the beauty game or the ‘war on obesity’?  A tool that is radically effective and has, perhaps, shifted the rules of both game and war.

This could be good. The use of Ozempic promotes weight loss without the need for strenuous exercise and diet control, factors that many in the Western world know that they “should” be trying harder at. It would make thinner bodies accessible to more people, and surely that’s a good thing—or so the thinking goes when we are assuming that thinner bodies are healthier bodies and simply better bodies.

But there are concerns about the side effects of Ozempic both known and unknown, particularly over the long-term. These do not stack up so well unless they are weighed against the health benefits of better managing an existing health condition, such as diabetes. That is, the risks of taking a drug like this for cosmetic reasons alone should give one significant pause for thought.

The social ramifications could be profound. In late October 2024, The Economist published “The economics of thinness (Ozempic edition)”,[2] a follow-up article to the original published in 2002.[3] The argument was made that the economic and social benefits of a thinner body could be mitigated by the widespread use of Ozempic, and that thinness itself will become less desirable.

Historically, larger bodies have been desirable in times when food is scarce because they signify wealth. In present times, thin bodies are desirable because they signal the possession of the time, money, and education required to maintain that shape, in addition to the freedom from other pressures that allows a person to devote themselves to disciplining the body thus. This is not a matter of mere aesthetic preferences, there are very real effects of weight-based discrimination on vocational success and earning power. Ozempic could confound this: if it becomes easy to be thin, thinness could lose its social value. Perhaps another kind of body shape will become more desirable?

Yet, what seems to never be desirable is the body that we already have.

Ozempic seems to be changing everything, but it also changes nothing. In one sense it is just another tool to shape our bodies, the felt need for which is founded on the assumption that the bodies we have are not good enough as they are.

This assumption can be traced through the Christian tradition, a gnostic thread that emerged more from Greek philosophy than a biblical worldview but which has profoundly shaped the way that most Christians think about bodies in general and their own bodies in particular. That is, that bodies are somehow problematic and must be controlled and constrained as we await the ultimate escape from them into some kind of disembodied eternal life. Women’s bodies have come under particular scrutiny. Ever changing and porous by its very nature, the female body has supposedly required special efforts at control to reign in its dangerous fluidity and fleshliness. All this is simply unbiblical; from beginning to end the grand narrative of Scripture affirms embodiment as good and part of both God’s good creation and his plans for its glorious eschatological consummation.

This troubling thread in the Christian tradition has meant that Christians have been poorly equipped to face the myriad cultural forces that act upon our experience of our bodies, underwritten by the lucrative beauty, fitness, and even health industries. Many women daily bear the burden of the supposed need to coerce their bodies into a shape, appearance, or performance that reflects an ideal that is far distant from the reality of most women’s bodies. This is costly work: self-defeating, expensive, and dangerous; it erodes our sense of self, distracts us from greater goods, and risks our health.

In the new book Pursuing Perfection: Faith and the Female Body, the authors face squarely these issues and their roots to offer a hope-filled affirmation of the body’s goodness. The collection of established and emerging scholars explore the different ways that women’s bodies are deemed not good enough—size, weight, beauty, sexual performance, and disability—through philosophical reflection, robust engagement with biblical scholarship, theological work, input from nutrition science, and consideration of the intersections of various forms of discrimination. The question of what kind of body is ‘perfect’ comes into focus as the nature of the resurrection body is considered—must it be normalised towards certain aesthetic standards, or could it remain fat, blemished, and impaired but glorious nonetheless?

The authors generously share from their own lived experience, articulating their wrestling with body shame, and inviting the reader to reflect with compassionate realism on their own experience. Each chapter includes questions for personal reflection and group discussion to help readers ground the content in their own life and context. The book is designed to confound the assumptions of diet culture and the other patterns of this world that are so deeply entrenched in the way that we think about our bodies and the bodies of others.

Whatever celebrity culture might celebrate, the good news is that your body is good, just as it is.

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Pursuing Perfection is available to pre-order here, with 20% off during February.

Revd Dr Maja Whitaker is the Academic Dean and a lecturer in Practical Theology at Laidlaw College, New Zealand, and an ordained pastor in the Equippers network of churches.

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Image credit: @viniciusamano at Unsplash.com

[1] McIntosh, Steven. “Host Nikki Glaser's Best Jokes at the Golden Globes.” BBC News. 6 January 2025. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c708yjy8plyo.

[2] “Economics of Thinness (Ozempic Edition).” The Economist. 24 October 2024. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/10/24/the-economics-of-thinness-ozempic-edition.

[3] “The Economics of Thinness.” The Economist. 20 December 2022. https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2022/12/20/the-economics-of-thinness