This is a Weight Loss Ad

How Hims and Hers coopted Black culture and fat activism to sell weight loss at the Super Bowl.

Midway through the Super Bowl 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.