Okay, it's time we talk about the thing we're all too scared to talk about.

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Millennial women have had the generationally unique experience of growing up with a foot in each world across so many different cultural moments. 

We're the generation that became digital 'natives' while being old enough to remember childhoods free of the internet. We were raised by boomer parenting but have adopted a radically different approach with our own children.

And when it comes to body image, we came of age in the era of extreme diet culture, then had to unlearn much of its most damaging lessons in a new era of 'body positivity'. 

But in 2025, we've been propelled right back into a much slimmer ideal, with the waistlines of colleagues and celebrities alike shrinking as fast as the presence of size diversity in the advertisements we're served online.

Watch: The hosts of Mamamia's Well discuss weight loss drugs. Post continues below.

With the release of the second Wicked film, and with it a publicity tour on which Ariana Grande is getting more attention for her appearance than for the regular sobbing she does during interviews, we've shrugged off the pretence that we're not supposed to comment on celebrity weight loss anymore.

Now, the line between "reveals new svelte frame" and "has fans worried" is blurrier than ever when it comes to the euphemisms we employ to talk about body size. But whether it's Mandy Moore's "unrecognisable" appearance or Lily Allen's "frail" figure, the tongue-in-cheek media code is unanimous in its determination to criticise the star herself, and not the thinness industrial complex in the context of which her weight loss occurred.

Of course, anyone with even the most basic understanding of the politics of beauty standards understands that women's bodies have been co-opted as vessels for both trend and status since time immemorial. 

In the Renaissance, buxom, full figures were revered and celebrated in works like Peter Paul Ruben's The Three Graces, giving rise to the term 'rubanesque' to describe a woman whose body transported admirers into feelings of wealth, abundance and health in a time when food scarcity shaped the social narrative. 

By the late 1800s, we were strapping our waists into tiny corsets to accentuate hourglass hips and thighs, contorting our mid-sections into ever-decreasing circumferences. 

The early 20th century brought the roaring twenties, and suddenly flappers with narrow hips and boyish figures were in Vogue, celebrating youthfulness and the exuberance of women's increased access into public life. 

On and on it went, women's bodies shrinking and expanding not with evolution or changing nutritional environments, but at the whims of each society's values and priorities. 

The 'heroin chic' ultra-thinness of the nineties coincided, surprise surprise, with the height of extreme dieting, where women's magazines would confidently advise us to eat six almonds if we were feeling hungry, and supermodels would confess to "drinking a lot of water and getting a good night's sleep" in order to maintain the protractor-edges of their hipbones. 

We were teenagers then — devouring a singular message about our bodies (and little else) while wondering what was wrong with our stubborn, fleshy thighs and tummies that refused to hollow out.

And then a course-correction around 2010 brought terms like 'bootylicious' into the lexicon, with the fetishisation of non-white bodies almost passing for something like body positivity. 

The explosion of the internet and access to multiple narratives about bodies that weren't driven solely by fashion maisons gave rise to new ways to talk about women's bodies.

For many of us, this felt like revolution. Naming diet culture as the predator felt like we might have been winning against it for a while. Far more radical fringe ideas began to take shape. Fat activism found a more receptive audience. The work of the health at every size (HAES) movement began to soften the edges ever so slightly of a medical system also entrenched in fatphobia. 

Listen to the full episode on Well for all you need to know on the rise of weight-loss injections. Post continues below.

We congratulated ourselves for being more evolved than the tabloid editors of the early 2000s. We told ourselves we had stopped critiquing women's bodies. In reality, we had just become better at euphemisms.

We stopped calling celebrities "scary skinny" and started praising their "era of wellness." We swapped "diet tips" for "gut health protocols." The critique didn't vanish, it just went underground, buried beneath the vernacular of empowerment.

Working in women's lifestyle media for the past 20 years, perhaps the unspoken truth has always been closer to the surface. As an editor in an online newsroom with access to the backend numbers, I saw in real time over and over again the way any piece promising weight loss 'secrets' — however illogical — would shoot to the top of the readership charts. And then the mask slipped completely.

The moment a pharmaceutical shortcut to thinness became available, the fragile truce we had made with our bodies evaporated. The arrival of GLP-1 agonists on the scene heralded an acknowledgement of the elephant (or in this case, a much skinnier animal — perhaps a meerkat) in the room: we never actually stopped valuing thinness or control over body size. We just didn't have a reliable way to buy it until now.

And this is no argument against these drugs. Nor is it a criticism of any individual choice, made by a celebrity or otherwise, to use them for whatever reason.

But to ignore the proof we've been handed — that we are currently witnessing the perfect efficiency of a system designed to overpower us — is to ignore the reality that individual choice has always been far less of a factor in the shape of women's bodies than we'd like to believe. 

The pharmaceutical industry is more than happy to medicalise normal human variance for a monthly subscription fee. The fashion industry will abandon its brief flirtation with size inclusivity as soon as it becomes financially viable to do so. And binding these two power brokers together, always, is the patriarchy — which has always preferred women to take up less space.

We never stopped talking about women's bodies, but perhaps we shouldn't, either. Perhaps we should be talking more about what's behind the relentless obsession to control and contort them, and who benefits when we do.