serena
on not going to the root
September 2022. I went to George’s to watch Serena’s final winning U.S. Open. It was clear that if she won, the next match would be harder, so this could be it — her final win. I sat at the bar on a sunny weekend day in September drinking club soda. The man next to me was having a debate with the bartender about who was the GOAT, Tom Brady or Michael Jordan. After a while, I couldn’t help but mention that the woman up on the screen had won the Australian Open while pregnant. “Those guys ever do that?”
I have missed Serena since then and haven’t gelled with any of the women players who have come up since. But I see a lot of her these days. Seems like every time I watch TV she’s there injecting her belly, upper arm, or thigh. I was just in Chicago, and she looked down at me from an expansive billboard. As always, she looks strong and cool. But now, instead of chasing the next win, she is announcing her weight loss and encouraging us to follow her lead.
I have SUCH mixed feelings about GLP-1s. Maybe you do, too. On the “wow” side, they are:
a reminder of how much we can benefit from the natural world we are actively destroying;: GLP-1s are derived from peptides found in anglerfish and hormones in the gila monsters;
beneficial for way more than weight loss and their originally studied purpose of controlling Type-2 diabetes, including substance use and psychotic disorders, seizures, neuro-cognitive disorders like dementia, multiple cancers, and several respiratory conditions. As one science writer said, a decade from now, weight loss may be viewed as a secondary reason for taking GLP-1s, with brain health and cancer protection much higher.
My issue is not with the drug. It’s with the marketing of it, the capitalizing on our collective fear of and disdain for fat. It’s with the belief that easier is nearly always preferable. And, most of all, with our stubborn refusal to look at root problems.
The root problems not being considered in Serena’s ads are acceptance that most women gain weight as they age and, especially after having children — she’s had two. Women are praised for looking “amazing” if they’re back to their former size within months — sometimes weeks — of giving birth.
It’s that larger bodies are denied the right to be sexy and successful in the public spotlight. That women are encouraged to be strong in a narrow way — sleek and biceps, yes; thick and looks like she could kick anyone’s ass in an alley fight, definitely not. Serena looked like the latter at that last US Open — and it was thrilling. Now, she’s safely in that first category. Boxed back into an acceptable kind of strength.
There’s also Trump-like nepotism going on as she peddles the key product of a company in which her husband is a major investor. There’s the root problem of where companies like Alexis Ohanian’s (he founded Reddit) choose to spend their money, often rubbing sand into our collective anxieties and capturing our attention rather than in addressing our underlying pains.
Imagine if Serena were looking down from that billboard with her two daughters with a message of strength for women and girls, a message calling out the sexualization and abuse of female bodies in our world that’s come to a zenith with the Epstein files. Or if the billionaire couple was buying land and giving it to black and indigenous farmers, trying to right the extreme unequal distribution of land.
My mom died of a very rare cancer two months ago. What caused it will never be known, though years of smoking were likely the main culprit. It is a cancer that’s not usually discovered until it’s too late for any kind of full recovery. In hindsight, though, one of the symptoms was her loss of appetite.
This was much harder to notice because she’d gone on GLP’s a year or so earlier to to address pre-diabetes. Her appetite disappeared overnight. Someone who had always had enthusiasm for food now nearly reprimanded waiters when they delivered her meal: “That’s too much!” She loved desserts but stopped ordering them. Her refrigeration was often quite empty, minus beverages.
By this winter when other symptoms — exhaustion, a pain in her shoulder — were appearing, we’d all grown so used to her lower appetite that we didn’t mention it. It wasn’t until I realized that she hardly eating — a single container of pudding constituting her main meal — that her food consumption, or lack thereof, was officially noted to doctors.
The drug masked a very real problem. We live in a world of so many masks — people who aren’t what they seem, companies touting easy fixes, euphemisms to help us forget the severity of our problems. In 2017, The Guardian revealed that staff at the US Department of Agriculture were instructed to blacklist terms such as “climate change,” “climate change adaption,” “reduce greenhouse gases,” and “sequester carbon.” Instead, they were instructed to use “weather extremes,” “resilience to weather extremes,” and “build soil organic matter.”
We’ve been sold ease. We’re addicted to it. All under the guise of fun characters, sleek celebrities, sugary relief from our woes.
We don’t even know the depth of our addictions until something pushes us to expose them. When the older woman from rural Iowa who shared a hospital room with my mom awoke from surgery, all she wanted was a Pepsi. The nurse explained repeatedly that she could only have clear liquids. “PEPSI!” she hollered and proceeded to throw in some impressive expletives.
I think about my mom’s many years of eating poorly. She loved McDonald’s and often went without meals in lieu of a Diet Coke and some cookies. Starches and red meat were more her style than salads and fresh fruit. And also - wine. What if she’d spent most of her life eating really healthy foods?
What if? What if?
The question arises after so many deaths. But it seems this question, which rears its head when I watch Serena pedaling RO, has tentacles far beyond my mom and her longevity. Because those healthier foods would mean healthier soil, more diverse and smaller farms that keep smalltowns alive and don’t reward the mass-scale monocultures that need glyphosates and other inputs to keep them growing - and which then flows into our waters and through our taps and into our bodies where it causes cancer.
Two weeks ago, I attended an organic farming conference. It was so energizing — so much talk of change and action and the word “revolution” used with sincerity instead of as a tossed out word gimmick.
It was unsettling, then, in the midst of all this enthusiasm to hear my state repeatedly brought up as the fallen child, the dark example of what can happen when you give agribusiness carte blanche. “We’ve seen what this looks like in Iowa…” “Iowa is the canary in the coal mine.” “It’s not too late to avoid becoming Iowa.”
Iowa: a full-throttle extraction economy is the truth.
Iowa: feeding the world through sunny farms, kids drinking out of hoses, fields of swaying-in-the-wind corn is the mask.
I crossed the state line from Wisconsin back into Iowa with a new heaviness. I saw this place that I already knew was in a bad way and wondered: Is it too late? What if? What if?
Inspiring Me
A new term I learned this week: watershed death spiral . This and other water stories are told by Zach Weiss on his ingenious Water Stories website that explains many aspects of our current and growing water crisis. Listen to his interview on the Green Dreamer podcast.
Tabitha Arnold makes labor-intensive art. Her largescale tapestries — up to 7-feet tall — depict the radical past and ongoing struggle of working people. She’s inspired by the history of the labor movement, as well as her own direct experiences as a worker, organizer, and artist coming of age during a wave of unionization and class-consciousness.
I enjoyed reading this. 🫶🏾