Serena Williams talks weight loss and stigma

The US Open starts on Sunday, and tennis GOAT Serena Williams is making headlines, but not for her sport. She told PEOPLE magazine that she used a GLP-1 drug to lose 31 pounds, and she is teaming up with telehealth company Ro to promote the weight loss drugs. I’ve said before I don’t really care about people using Ozempic to lose weight, outside of the stress it puts on the supply for diabetics and other people diagnosed with insulin deficiencies that require that drug to manage their health. But beyond supply chain issues, I don’t care. 

You can’t stigmatize fatness and then get mad when people find ways to stop being fat. I mean, except for how fatness has never been treated as a health issue but as a personal responsibility issue, and the stigma is about perceiving fat people as failures and then dinging us for not suffering for thinness when we DO lose weight. The game was always rigged.

Serena is speaking out about the stigma, saying GLP-1s are “not a shortcut”, that it’s about recognizing when you need help. She talks about being post-partum and in her 40s and how her body wasn’t responding to the routines that worked before. Weight loss drugs just helped her cross the finish line. The bigger conversation for me is the stress on women to “bounce back” after having a baby, but people have never not even once been normal about Serena Williams’s body, so I’m not going to lecture her when I cannot imagine the daily pressure she feels in that regard. Anyway, here is Serena in New York ahead of the US Open, as Coco Gauff gets her reps in on the court. Tennis, baby!

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What else happened today…

Ooooh, college friendships and class privilege, one of my favorite topical Venn diagrams. I went to school with very wealthy people, and I learned two things: 1) where real wealth exists, there is no true progressivism, and 2) it is hard to maintain friendships across deep class divides unless you both really, REALLY want to be friends. There are just a lot of differences, cultural, financial, social, never mind life expectations. 

One of my college friends is the child of billionaires. We’re still loosely in touch, but after graduation, life took us in very different directions, and we don’t have a ton in common. There’s only so many times you can turn down a trip to Greece because you don’t have the vacation days before they stop asking, feeling rejected. (We eventually hashed that issue out, but rather than make him an advocate for labor issues, he just never asked a working friend on vacation again. We’re not fun, I suppose.) It’s good to have friends from all walks of life, but I have found friendships across the class divide the hardest to maintain. (Popsugar)

Cristin Milioti in a little red dress that is, somehow, disappointing. She’s so pretty and cool, why is this dress so bad? (Go Fug Yourself)

Sydney Sweeny is in The Wall Street Journal magazine. She compares her bathwater soap to Jacob Elordi’s bathwater in Saltburn, saying how it was mostly girls ragging on her soap, but they loved the Saltburn bathwater. I mean, one was a fictional titillation playing on taboos and desire, the other was dirty water sold to slavering men. I support women securing their bags, but between that comment and another she makes about lacking a mentor in Hollywood, I sort of don’t think Sydney understands why some, maybe even a lot, of women don’t jive with her. 

You know what a mentor will often do? Tell you stuff you don’t want to hear. I don’t get the impression Sydney Sweeney is open to that. And maybe she doesn’t need to be, she’s booked and busy and making plenty of money these days, her way is clearly working. But the more I see from her outside of acting, the more I suspect she’s just…not a girl’s girl. I hate that term, but we’ve all known women who cannot, for whatever reason, get along with other women. 

Everything Sydney says here reminds me of that kind of woman. Everyone’s against her, no one supports her, she’s doing it all on her own, never mind the many women along the way who TRIED to help, or even just be there as a cheerleader. It’s that old saying, if you meet an asshole in the morning, you met an asshole. You meet assholes all day, you’re the asshole. Sydney Sweeney sure meets a lot of assholes. (Celebitchy)

It’s been a tough week for film criticism once again, as Michael Phillips was let go from The Chicago Tribune. They eliminated their film critic position entirely, the seat once held by Gene Siskel. They’re just the latest media outlet to dump their critics. It’s truly dispiriting to see, not even as a film critic myself, just as someone who genuinely loves to read and think about great criticism. Here’s Robert Daniels, one of the best critics working today, pondering the fate of criticism and the arts after the Locarno Film Festival. 

“If criticism is allowed to, through an informed knowledge of film technique and history, and as the expression of one human’s experience, it can help the viewer empathize with a story they never knew existed, a viewpoint they never once considered, or a party that’s never been heard.” (RogerEbert.Com)