ICYMI: This Is A Weight Loss Ad
How Hims and Hers coopted Black culture and fat activism to sell weight loss at the Super Bowl. Plus, an apology.
Hi Burnt Toasties,
I’m resending Friday’s essay because we published the original draft with a major reporting mistake: I misidentified Chiefs’ quarterback Patrick Mahomes as white. In fact, Mahomes has a Black father and identifies as Black. Mahomes has also used his public platform to advocate for the Black Lives Matter movement, another detail I should have included in my reporting.
It is never okay to make assumptions about race and ethnicity, and I apologize for my error—especially in the context of a piece about the intersection of anti-Black racism and anti-fatness.
Some of you also raised questions about my aligning Mahomes with MAGA. It is true that Mahomes has never publicly endorsed Trump, and while he did say it would be “cool” to play in front of Trump at this year’s Super Bowl, he didn’t sound overwhelmingly excited about it. But it’s also true that his wife, mother, brother and sister have been public in their enthusiasm for Trump, and that Trump has been vocal in his appreciation of this, which is why I describe Mahomes as “MAGA-adjacent.” I did not mean to imply Mahomes supports Trump or that he’s responsible for his family members’ opinions—only that his public persona now lives in much closer proximity to MAGA than it did a few years ago.
As always, I appreciate how thoughtfully this community engages with complicated issues — and how you hold me accountable when I mess up! Thank you.
-Virginia
PS. For another excellent take on the Super Bowl weight loss ad, be sure to read this piece by The Liberation Collective from Chrissy King
“Thin” Is Not the American Dream You’ve Been Denied.
Midway through the Super Bowl last Sunday night, the pharmatech company Hims and Hers dropped their now-notorious commercial: A chaotic collage of scales, measuring tapes and fast food, interspersed with a photo of a Black woman sitting by a community pool in a swimsuit, a headless torso shot, and then a group of racially diverse, small to mid-fat folks, dressed in mildy coordinating earth tones. What we hear is even more confusing: A rapid fire explanation of the ob*sity epidemic—74 percent of us are overweight! Ob*sity leads to over half a million deaths each year!—punctuated by “This is America” by Childish Gambino.
“Something’s broken and it’s not our bodies. It’s the system,” says the narrator. “This system wasn’t built to help us. It was built to keep us sick and stuck.”
So let’s talk about everything that’s wrong with this. Starting with those shamelessly bad statistics.
That 74 percent figure is based on the Body Mass Index, a notoriously racist and terrible barometer of health.
The claim that ob*sity causes 500,000 deaths per year is rooted in a fundamental misinterpretation of basic science, which I wrote about here.
And the headless fatty shot is, of course, a staple of anti-fat media.