I’m holding a pile of Tupperware and thinking about control. Somehow there are eight pots and 10 lids, and none of them fit, and while the search for metaphor here might be an enjoyable distraction it will not help me decant my pulses into easily stackable containers, which I can proudly document online so honestly what is the point?
Once upon a time there was currency in party pictures: evidence of hedonism, sloppy nights, mornings after. Today, the closest most come is a selfie following a brisk 5k, wet and legginged. Influencers post their grain-based breakfasts and the internet eats them up, or their perfectly labelled skincare shelves, or their ordered kitchen cupboards under hashtags like #PantryPorn. These are the things that get us off in 2023: images of control, of matter in its place.
I have tried to precisely locate the feeling I get watching videos of women decanting their children’s crayons into little boxes or steaming their cotton sheets, but it’s too deep within my meat to access. It’s like Tennessee Williams when he wrote about the feeling alcohol finally brings; that mechanical thing, that click that brings peace. I find it sometimes on Stacey Solomon’s TV show about decluttering, which the BBC invited her to present after one of her videos went viral. It was a tour of her kitchen cupboard, decked out with a curtain rod on which she’d hung individual packets of crisps. Aspirational!
To dip into such videos, the kind where women with manicures efficiently file away charging leads, works for many of us like a brief meditation. Most viewers, surely, don’t simply lust for these influencers’ tidy homes, but thrill at the sight of a different kind of brain at work – one that sees solutions to the sharp mess of a modern life. Even if I had all the plastic containers in the world, I’d still walk on Lego and run out of rice and lose my shit. The most successful cleanfluencer in the UK is Mrs Hinch, who finds pleasure (and profit) in dirt, and has recently branched out into writing children’s fiction. Her most radical act, it emerges, has been finding a way where she will be paid handsomely for housework. Millions buy into her brand in search of that click, in search of control.
That same quest for control can be seen in the flurry of excitement about “skinny jabs”, our newest weight-loss trend. “Everyone” in New York (a subset of a subset) has started taking semaglutide, the active ingredient in the diabetic medication Ozempic, which triggers a feeling of fullness. A series of breathless articles about the drug has appeared already this year, skittering over such irritations as its vomitous side-effects, cost, long-term impacts, and the idea that instead of chasing thinness, we might try to live peacefully inside our existing bodies and alongside our various hungers.
The drug is being sold as an alternative to dieting, a way to paper over disordered eating; it’s an injection that allows users to avoid having to identify the roots of their anxieties, appetites or wonky desires, and quickly gain the gaunt appearance of extreme control. Nobody wants to diet, but then, of course, nobody wants to obsess over their weight, or be judged for the way they look, or live in shame, or feel constantly scrutinised for the shape of their body – we have been bred to do so, in part so that we can be sold quick-fix solutions like this.
My Tupperware collection was born in a series of darkish moments across the past decade: early motherhood was one, raw with exhaustion – where I felt the need to contain and manage more than simply leftover pasta, but Amazon didn’t yet sell money or therapy. When our lives feel chaotic, there’s a kind of peace in finding the few things you can control. This is often how eating disorders are triggered – . During the pandemic, researchers reported that people with eating disorders returned to disordered behaviours “to compensate for a perceived loss of control”. But that’s not to say this points at a problem solely with the person. Instead, it’s usually a reaction to complicated experiences and an environment that feels unsafe. The “Ozempic era” (as the New Yorker has labelled a moment that has seen such a rush on the drug that supplies have dwindled) sees us in just such an environment.
It feels unsafe, still, for many people to eat the foods they want to eat at the times they want to eat them, or live in fat bodies, or live without feeling shame about their bodies, or shake off the misconception that lower weight signals better health or higher weight signals laziness. But an injection that offers control over your appetite – the opportunity, perhaps, to stop thinking about food or your body for the first time since you were nine – only works as long as you take it and, crucially, it only works for you. The weight comes back; the wider problem never goes away. And that’s one of the issues that comes with the purchase of control: it can’t remove the chaos of a life, or a body, or a culture. The most it can do is contain it briefly beneath an ill-fitting lid.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
