One More Thing! No. 3
be mad at a Super Bowl ad with me, be ungovernable, be the bread-guardian to my bread-maker
Hello readers, welcome back to One More Thing!, a special feature in which I supplement essays from the Medusa’s Body archive with new developments and fresh takes.
Private companies marketing pharmaceuticals as social justice… This is America!
I was stunned by the Hims & Hers Super Bowl ad. The ad, called “Sick of the System,” begins with a jarring montage of processed foods, context-free obesity stats and footage from the 50’s/60’s that suggests America didn’t used to be so fat. The voiceover says “Something’s broken, and it’s not our bodies—it’s the system.” Childish Gambino’s “This is America,” which is literally about systemic racism, plays in the background. At this point, my jaw is on the floor because I think I’m about to see Big Food and/or Big Pharma (and/or the government’s lack of effective oversight over them) get skewered.
Imagine my shock when the frenetic montage stops, soothing music begins and the Hims & Hers logo appears: Big Pharma making weight loss drugs expensive is the problem, and discounted weight loss drugs are the solution. Compounded drugs will liberate you from the system that keeps you “sick and stuck.” Obesity is not your fault, but it’s up to you (and your wallet) to fix it.
I understand seeing accessibility and affordability as revolutionary concepts, especially when it comes to medicine, but a for-profit company using the language of social change to take business from other for-profit companies is outrageous. “This is America” came out in 2018 to huge critical acclaim—I remember being pleasantly surprised to see major publications run long explainers on the imagery and allusions in the music video—and became an anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement after the 2020 murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The use of the song is a prime example of how capitalism audaciously co-opts people-power political concepts, waters them down and redeploys them to manufacture consent for more of the same bullshit. Indeed, to keep us “sick and stuck” in “the system.”
Only a few days after Hims & Hers proudly claimed “not anymore” to the expensiveness of weight loss drugs, the company’s business model hit a snag. Compounding pharmacies were only allowed to sell copies of Ozempic and Wegovy because semaglutide was in shortage, and the FDA removed the drug from the shortage list on Feb. 21. Since the drug is patented, compounders have to stop selling their copies in the next month or two or face the wrath of the pharmaceutical industry’s pack of vicious IP lawyers.
Hims & Hers said in a regulatory filing it cannot “guarantee that we will be able to continue offering these products in the same manner, to the same extent, or at all.” The telehealth companies that popped up during the year-long semaglutide shortage will figure out how to continue making money, patients will continue getting f*cked over, and “the system” will carry on. Here’s an excerpt from my 2023 essay on the GLP-1 online-prescribing boom, When Big Pharma Meets New Media:
[Would] getting more people on GLP-1s improve national health outcomes in the long term? Would increased government spending on weight loss drugs lead to decreased spending on treatments for heart disease and diabetes? Doesn’t weight cycling (losing weight and gaining it back) make people more susceptible to disease? Would it be more cost-effective to address childhood food insecurity, which leads to obesity in adulthood? Or to improve access to education, which is related to obesity rates? Would a universal basic income reduce chronic stress, which promotes fat storage? Would it help to break up Big Food monopolies and regulate ultra-processed foods? Would it help to train doctors to understand how genetics, zip code, sleep and trauma relate to weight?
Health is an incredibly nuanced topic, but capitalism flees from nuance. Despite all the scientific and technological progress being made in America’s world-class research institutions every day, many pharmaceuticals remain temporary, incomplete treatments for complex problems.
The revolutionary capacity of the childfree
I recently read an essay from Antonio Melonio of
that helped me think differently about the book I discussed in The Capacity to Begin. The book—What Are Children For? by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman—seemed reluctant to take seriously the societal and political concerns many people bring to the decision to have children. (It also felt thin due to its methodology: The book relied heavily on phrase- or sentence-long quotes from interviews, which amounted to “an assemblage of glimpses rather than comprehensible chapters of lives,” per an essay by for .)
Melonio argued that having children is “not only a moral dilemma, but also most often the end of radical sentiment and, in many ways, freedom itself.” We’ve all read our Foucault and Fanon and understand why declining birth rates are very scary to the ruling class: Capitalism needs laboring bodies and surplus bodies, and as war and disaster and disease churn through both, it needs yet more bodies, so for god’s sake don’t let them have birth control and safe abortions. I was glad for the reminder that it’s not just our reproductive capacity that is of concern to state power, but our revolutionary capacity. We are less interested in—less willing to be catalysts of—radical change, both political and personal, when we have children:
It is very hard to protest, organize, riot, and set police cars on fire when you have mouths to feed and mortgages to pay; it is much harder for women to divorce and break up when young children are involved, even if and when the relationship turns abusive and violent; it is harder even to crave any sort of significant political change, no matter how unjust and parasitic the system becomes. In short: children — not growing older, as is usually stated — make you more conservative.
One last thing
I cannot adequately express how happy I am that
(the best thing about twitter back when twitter was tolerable) is writing about etymology on Substack and posting these delightful charts on Notes: