Serena Williams, GLP-1 and Mary Douglas

 

Watch the full ad here. 

Describing the image

This is a screenshot taken from a Super Bowl Commercial called “Healthier on Ro,” featuring decorated 23-grand-slam tennis player Serena Williams. The image has a blue background with a slight gradient shade. In the middle is Serena Williams, donning a light blue outfit that strikes a balance between athletic and fashionable, as the stylistic pleated skirt is reminiscent of a tennis skirt, while the top’s one-shoulder silhouette, although not common tennis wear, has appeared in special collections from athletic apparel brands, previously donned by Williams herself (Storm 2018). Williams is posed very intentionally. In one hand, she’s holding a GLP-1 Pen, which administer hormone that purportedly curbs appetite and aids in weight loss. Instead of letting her arms hang down, as we typically do when receiving injections, she holds one arm up, placing a hand behind her head, while bending the other, her muscled biceps curled into satisfying shapes. The curled arm pressed the Ro pen into the underside of the other arm. Behind her, a wavy fluorescent line goes downward, serving as an illustration for the important statistic above it  — “34 lbs” accompanied by a downward arrow, communicating the pounds Williams lost on GLP-1.

Contextualizing 

The commercial — aired during the Super Bowl, which is watched by millions — advertises Ro’s GLP-1 products, including the self-injection pen and pills. GLP-1 has been a contentious topic; some hail it as a miracle weight-loss drug, while some are concerned about its long-term effects. Regardless of GLP-1’s medical qualities, the medication sparked an interesting sociological debate that we can turn our attention to. In another Ro’s ad, Williams said, “[GLP-1] is not a shortcut. It’s science” (Ro 2025). By doing so, she endorses one side of the debate on whether the drug should be considered a justified form of scientific support, making GLP-1 akin to revolutionary medication whose usage meets no social resistance — for instance, nobody would bat an eye if you say you are on statin, which has prolonged millions of lives of those with high cholesterol. Biomedical enhancement refers to any substances or procedures that improve the quality of our life through bodily advantages or increased performance. It is a vast category that can range from genetic engineering to coffee. Importantly, biomedical enhancement unsettles our collective understanding of what should be achieved by pure human efforts and grit,  and what deserves extra support from science.

One of the reasons we are drawn to competitive sports is that we admire the fortitude, consistency, and tremendous effort that athletes put into building their skills and the bodies that execute those skills. Serena Williams, unparalleled in her tennis achievement, is an embodiment of such natural, unassisted human strivings. We think of her body, which has done impressive feats, as an undisputedly healthy body sculpted by hard-earned effort. This commercial, in which Williams confidently announces that she’s on GLP-1 and injects it into her toned bicep, thus unsettles her position as a symbol of athleticism and grit. A host of questions emerge. If Williams’ body needs enhancement, what should be considered a healthy body? Is it justified to use medication to achieve the body we desire? Should we desire a certain type of body in the first place? 

Mary Douglas

This is where I call in the support of Mary Douglas to perhaps help me out of my spiralling crisis about our relationship to the body and how it mirrors changing collectively-held values. She disagrees with the psychologists’ tendency to link the body-related rituals that certain “primitive” cultures carry out to the individual’s underdeveloped neurosis. Douglas writes, “So far from using bodily magic as an escape, cultures which frankly develop bodily symbolism may be seen to use it to confront experience with its inevitable pains and losses” (1966: 148). Here, she’s arguing that the rituals that involve the body and its refuse do not reflect some sort of infantile sexuality; rather, they reflect an effort to organize our environment and social order while eliminating “dirt,” or as she defines it, “matter out of place.” This organizational tendency is universal, present in both our modern cultures and cultures cast as “primitive.” The body is a complex structure and thus, “affords a source of symbol for other complex structures” (1966: 142). It follows that the matters we allow to go in and out of our bodies carry symbolic weight, as they represent the maintenance or restructuring of certain social orders. 

GLP-1 as a purity ritual? 

Keeping in mind social preoccupations with exit and entrance as reflected in body-related rituals, we turn back to Williams’ Ro ad. Through self-administration, the drug enters her body, and what supposedly “exits” is the pounds she wants to shed.  In the ad, after injecting herself, she dances cheerfully while saying “Healthier on Ro,” indicating that her body is energized and perhaps, “purified.” Applying Douglas’ lens of purity and danger, the weight-loss drug is no longer a pollutant that taints the integrity of the human effort to achieve the desired physique. Instead, the drug is transformed into an acceptable scientific assistance, a welcomed guest in our systems, both physical and social. This transformation suggests that the users of GLP-1, whether for medical or appearance reasons, do not need to hesitate about the social implications of using the drug, because GLP-1 does not pollute; it is pure, and even purifying because it helps one shed unwanted weight, which in this case is considered “dirt.” Social order is thus reorganized: people who use weight-loss drugs are not vain or lazy, they are among the pure and the good with Serena Williams on their side. Eliminating the extra weight with the assistance of medication is thus a legitimate effort to “reorganize” the body. Extrapolating from the body to society, the wider implication might be that science and technology are a valid and even encouraged means to restructure social orders, which is especially relevant if we think about how A.I. is transforming our lives and institutions. 

A side thought. Mary Douglas’ examples in the reading focus more on rituals that involve body orifices (mouth, anus, sexual organs, and so on), which also prompted me to think of why the ad does not show Williams taking the pill form of GLP-1 (also a popular Ro product) and instead just the injection in the arm. It’s possible that the company Ro simply wants to prioritize selling the pen over the pill, hence the spotlight on the pen. But I’m wondering if the sight of taking in the drug through the mouth might appear as too exposed an entrance. “Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolise its specially vulnerable points,” Douglas writes (1966:150). By showing Williams taking in the drug through the skin instead of the mouth, the distance between the body and the drug is still somewhat maintained. The distance is helpful because we do not want to be perceived as dependent on the drug, letting it take over our personal project of shaping our bodies into desired forms; some degree of individual effort and bodily autonomy must be protected. All in all, our relationship to biomedical enhancement continues to be contested, with companies treading carefully in their handling of the purity of the body, and more capaciously, of the category of good citizenship. 

Work Cited 

Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.

Ro. 2025. “Serena’s on Ro.” YouTube. Retrieved (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBaDgCN3hRU).

Ro. 2026. “Serena Williams Super Bowl LX Commercial ‘Healthier on Ro.’” YouTube. Retrieved (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqXOcRtZoow).

Storm, Meg. 2018. “Serena Williams’ One-Shoulder Off-White X Nike 2018 U.S. Open Dress.” Us Weekly. Retrieved (https://www.usmagazine.com/stylish/pictures/serena-williams-one-shoulder-off-white-x-nike-2018-u-s-open-dress/).