Women's Hunger

It was never about physical size.

A culture that teaches women to suppress their appetite will eventually teach them to suppress their desire, and a world without women’s desire is a world that lacks the Mother.

I came across Appetites, a brilliant book written almost 25 years ago by Caroline Knapp. Her commentary on cottage cheese reads like a warning for 2026. After her eating disorder’s roots that lay in relationship to women’s wants, I imagine she would be appalled to see its facelift and elevation.

Cottage cheese was seen as diet food in the 80s. For women who wanted to slim down, it was a holy grail substance. It was the symbol highlighting the limited appetite women were allowed to express 40 years ago. Today, the food has become a staple for how much we love ourselves, that we eat for growth—because protein—mothers especially need the nourishment.

Our obsession with nutrient density and food quality can be another kind of eating disorder. A way to demonize “bad” food the same way we do our “sins,” like appetite or pleasure.

Culture no longer tells women not to eat. It changed the rules for what is acceptable to consume. But the control over women persists in a new form; it becomes more sophisticated, more disguised as empowerment, health, optimization, longevity. The good girl of the 80s ate cottage cheese to be slim. The good girl of today tracks protein, balances glucose, and optimizes her metabolism. The same pattern, with a new face (pun intended here). I am looking at you Botox and fillers.

Cottage cheese still sucks whether it is the good girl of diet culture or the queen of your macros.

It is still a food prison we’re locked in for different, but ultimately the same, reasons.

Just as lumpy cheese mirrors the depth of a woman’s hunger, the newest good girl of diet culture, in the name of health, comes along to permanently alter your hunger just as cottage cheese was signaling decades ago.

Ozempic culture reflects the collective’s appetite. It mirrors the hunger we’re allowed to want for our life. Not coincidentally, Ozempic research is showing it inhibits or lowers desire. A quick search shows its effect on the dopamine release centers in the brain, which “mute cravings and pleasure, sometimes causing apathy or reduced motivation for previously enjoyed activities.”

Translation: kills creative life force energy.

Appetite is not just about food. Appetite is about life. The same force that makes us hungry for food makes us hungry for love, beauty, sex, children, art, meaning, God, experience. Appetite is the engine of becoming. To dull appetite is not just to eat less—it is to want less, to reach less, to risk less, to create less.

When cottage cheese isn’t enough to dull the palate, we have a drug for intrinsic physiological dampening to lessen our hunger across mind, body, and spirit.

This conversation matters beyond weight, beyond health, beyond food. Appetite becomes desire, desire becomes creation, creation becomes birth. Not just of children, but of art, homes, families, communities, culture itself. When you suppress appetite, you set the bar on how hungry you can be. Less appetite means less creative energy, less change. Existing on crumbs makes a sad beige world.

Ozempic thrives when humans are conditioned to want things fast without the depth of experience of transformation. This speaks directly to the human condition as it is right now.

We want the result without the process. The body without the hunger. The success without the risk. The transformation without the dismantling. Nature does not work this way. Birth does not work this way. Creation does not work this way. Desire does not work this way.

I am having regular conversations with my children on the value of process and how much it adds to our lives. Who are we without our experiences and the hunger that leads us to them?

I am watching the world put aesthetics on pedestals without substance. I see the preference for biohacks over authentic relationships with the sources of our healing and becoming. The world relies on program promises versus the transformation that awaits us when we say yes to the soul longings of pleasure.

True desire dismantles you.

Desire rearranges your life. It summons your greatest bravery. You leave what is comfortable. You create what does not yet exist. Desire is the beginning of every birth—every idea, every child, every home, every piece of art, every new version of yourself.

It takes you on a journey, and your world is restructured into something beyond the emptiness and thinness that our Ozempic-crazed culture wants for you.

I get more likes and comments on posts about lavender lattes than I do about desire.

I want my lavender honey lattes.

I DESIRE the aliveness that is only accompanied by the terror that wakes me up at night with insistent whispers of what really matters.

Real desire is not aesthetic. It is not neat. It is not optimized. It is not efficient. It is wild and inconvenient and time-consuming and sometimes painful and always transformative. Which is exactly why a culture obsessed with convenience, speed, and control does not know what to do with it.

This is especially devastating for women who account for 70–75% of Ozempic users. Our desire is the origin from which everything gets created. There is now a weapon that can precisely target our life force and reduce our already shrunken allowable capacity to be the hungry creator beings we were designed to be.

Appetite has always been dangerous, because appetite leads to creation.

The soul isn’t seeking thinness.

She’s fucking starving.

Are you going to feed her?

Mothercraft is my 9 month container taking women through the cycle of birth with their desire. You can read more about it here.