Karen Carpenter starved herself in public; today’s celebs have pharmaceutical help
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Folie à deux
Cynthia Erivo plays Elphaba, although her knife-edged cheekbones and six-inch acrylic talons are less witchy and more “Nosferatu.” The actress certainly seems to have the strange, self-absorbed charisma of a vampire, wasting away before our eyes even as she mesmerizes Hollywood into all manner of unnatural acts. Like casting her as Jesus in “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
But it is in Erivo’s jarring relationship with fellow extreme ectomorph Ariana Grande — who co-stars as a young Glinda the Good — that we really sense the vampiric.
Like Erivo, Grande seems much frailer than she did just a few years ago. The two appear in public as if they were sewn together at the hip. In nearly every press interview for their “Wicked” movies, Erivo clicks her claws around Grande’s neck and head, fiddling with her jewelry in a creepily proprietary way. Or the two are holding hands as if they were waifs being introduced to grown-ups for the first time outside the orphanage.
Celebrities looking and acting weird. Big shock, right? This is Hollywood we’re talking about. The town is a magnet for dysfunctional people. Neglected, abused, and exploited children run for the big city lights so they can be beautiful, adored, and good enough in a way they could never be for their parents.
Eating disorders, addiction, and declining mental health all stem from these childhood circumstances, and they are worsened for those who choose fame as a means of “getting over” them.
The influence of anxiety
This is not to say that Erivo or Grande suffer from any of this or even that they use Ozempic. But their alarmingly thin bodies and their brittle, performative intimacy do not exist in a vacuum. While young people have been entranced by celebrity culture since the mid-20th century, the desperate absorption and imitation of every star’s psychiatric distress by ordinary American kids has never been as extreme as it is in 2025.
One can make a reasonable argument for using the semaglutide drugs to lose weight when one’s health is in jeopardy and other methods have not worked. Every patient has to run that calculation for herself and consider it with her doctor.
But I fear we are watching a replay of what happened in the 1970s and ’80s, when anorexia nervosa spread rapidly through the culture and clinicians noted that the intense public focus on Karen Carpenter’s illness seemed to accelerate the trend.
But this has a pharmaceutical assist that will give a “normal” brand name to what is just old-fashioned self-starvation.
All-ages contagion
British researcher Gerald Russell first described bulimia nervosa (binge eating, followed by purging, usually vomiting) in some of his anorexic patients in a paper published in the 1970s. He later shared his alarm that his paper, and the spread of terms and diagnostic language around the condition, may have caused it to spread among women in the Western population.
Russell was arguably correct, though he can’t be blamed for trying to help sufferers. Young women are especially vulnerable to trends and fads; they will do almost anything, no matter how potentially dangerous, to keep up with what their friends are doing. If Becca manages to keep her figure by discreetly puking up her lunch, why shouldn’t Caitlin?
Michelle Obama has recently displayed an alarming weight loss on a frame that didn’t have much to lose. On her Instagram she shared an behind-the-scenes image from her recent shoot with photographer Annie Leibovitiz.
At 61 years old, Obama is dressing in teen-style distressed jeans and clingy, skin-baring tops, showing off how her female curves are melting away.
Look at her face. Does this woman look healthy or happy?
No one left to notice
The problems that celebrities, normal young women, and some men and boys face about body image aren’t about a particular drug or a time-limited fashion trend. What we see today in Hollywood is not different from what we have always seen in the entertainment industry and among the kids and teens who consume it.
The problems begin at home — the home that no longer exists. Fatherlessness, divorce, and normalized neglectful, hands-off parenting have left today’s kids even more vulnerable to self destruction than those of my generation in the 1980s. And if you are old enough to remember what that was like, you remember plenty of screwed-up kids from screwed-up families.
It’s worse today because we’re pretending that it’s not wrong, that it’s not unhealthy. It has brand names and “rizz,” and besides, everyone is doing it. How can it be wrong?
In 1983, adults spoke about what happened to Karen Carpenter with alarm, and they said it out loud. Today, cool moms get glammed up along with their daughters in officially licensed Wicked(™) outfits and stand in line for tickets to watch the actresses perform “fun” while their minds and bodies decay.
Isn’t modernity wonderful?
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