Breaking down Megan Thee Stallion's Nike ad

There's always a message behind the message.

Screenshot from the Planet Fitness ad — is that a lil Nike Easter egg I spy?

Hello! Welcome to my bestselling Substack that I run entirely by myself on the side of my full-time job, because I love it and you! If you’d like to support this endeavor and have access to my paid posts, won’t you consider upgrading for $5/month or $50/year? Thank you!!!

---

If you watched any of the New Year’s Eve “entertainment”¹ broadcasts on the major networks this past Dec. 31, you were likely subjected to a maddeningly repeated ad for Planet Fitness featuring Megan Thee Stallion, dubbed “Mother Fitness” for marketing purposes. Planet Fitness has sponsored the Times Square New Year’s Eve celebration for the past nine years; you may notice that the maniacs who gather to shiver and hold their pee for 10 hours are bedecked in ludicrous PF merch², because their willingness to take Ls apparently knows no bounds.  

Imagine that I am grabbing you by the shoulders and pressing my forehead against yours: I love Megan Thee Stallion. She’s on the gym playlist, she’s on the vision board, she’s on the list of people I’d pick to plan and manage my last night on earth if I was given the chance to have one more good time before I go³. But her Planet Fitness commercial left me torn: On the one hand, I appreciate that it’s calling out “toxic instructors, shady scammers, and fitspo fakes” — if a gym’s marketing signals that it will be a less intimidating and more welcoming space, I’m all for it; anything to get more people going to the gym! Planet Fitness’ whole thing is that is a “Judgment-Free Zone,” and while the corporate powers that be cannot guarantee that (people observe and judge each other in the gym no matter what, and in fact I’ve had more men, because it’s almost always men, barge into my personal space to comment on/“correct” what I’m doing at Planet Fitness than in any other gym), if people feel their concerns about judgment or toxicity or whatever are being addressed, they’re likely to spend money on that gym. Cool, fine!

On the other hand, it annoys me when celebrities shill stuff they clearly don’t use or do themselves. Megan Thee Stallion — are you sitting down? — definitely does not work out at Planet Fitness. Go look at her Instagram: Girlfriend is in the presence of a freestanding barbell and a SkiErg! Meanwhile, if you so much as whisper the word “barbell” into your locker at Planet Fitness, they will stun gun you and drag your body to the soundproof lunk jail in the basement.

So yes, it’s great that a celebrity woman who lifts weights is encouraging people to join a low-cost gym that’s perhaps more egalitarian than your Equinoxes or even your Gold’s, but she’s not doing that because she just loves Planet Fitness. She’s doing it because a company paid her a lot of money. There will always be something sus about this to me because of the psychological machinations at play: Megan’s been working out like crazy in non-PF gyms; she’s got the time/money/access/genetics to look the way she does as a result; PF capitalizes on this to make her a spokesperson; people subconsciously feel that if they work out at PF they could look like Megan, which of course is not necessarily true. Once again, I remind you that for this and many other reasons, no celebrity can be a body image icon.

Anyway, now Megan has a new ad for Nike:

nike

A post shared by @nike

First, I love the segment in which a (plus-sized; the body diversity must be noted) woman considers whether she should have a green juice or a bag of chips, and Megan encourages her to have both. Yes! Hello! This is great! It is frankly astonishing how much marketing has changed in our lifetime when commercials like this are what aired when I was a teenager. 

It’s also nice to hear Megan say that we should focus on loving ourselves. That doesn’t really mean anything specific in this context — and as Samantha Irby has said, the “tyranny around loving yourself is bonkers”; sometimes it feels like the pendulum has swung so far away from “you must constantly work to change yourself” that now we’re meant to fully love everything about ourselves OR ELSE, which creates a lot of pressure and is unrealistic for many people — and is 2024 marketing speak that rings a bit hollow, but considering how advertising for decades has been predicated on implicitly or explicitly telling us to hate ourselves, yes, it’s just nice to hear.   

But Megan also says we should “focus on [our] wellness.” OK, what does that mean, exactly, when the commercial begins with Megan telling another woman that she should want to be “cheeked up”? Right away, the implication is that exercise is primarily for looking a certain way (having a shapely, muscular ass). The thesis of the entire ad is that women should adopt “the hottie⁴ state of mind.” I’m sure Megan herself would say that the hottie state of mind doesn’t mean looking a certain way, that it’s about confidence, self-love, attitude, etc. Fair, but again, advertising is about psychology, it’s about emotions, it’s about the subconscious and the subliminal⁵, so when the primary visuals and statements in the commercial are about being hot and cheeked up and your spokeswoman is a woman with a big butt, small waist, and big boobs, well … what do you think people’s takeaway is re: what a “hot girl” looks like and what exercise is primarily for? 

I am not saying that wanting to grow your glutes or change what your body looks like is in any way “wrong” — hello and welcome to my newsletter, where I write about my experience of losing a lot of body fat as I recovered from binge eating disorder and becoming more muscular via strength exercise — but my whole thing is talking about how the non-aesthetic benefits of exercise are way, way more beneficial, meaningful, and lasting than the aesthetic ones, so we can enjoy how exercise makes us look, but what it’s ultimately for are the mental and psychological effects that our culture is so, so bad at centering in conversations about exercise. 

This ad touches on other elements of “wellness,” to be fair: Wellness should prioritize balance (the chips + the green juice) and reducing stress (the breathing exercises Megan and some other women do at the end of the spot), so credit where credit’s due. But if we want more and more people, especially women, to feel that exercise is for them and is for whatever they want it to be for, I think we should do away with mentions of building a bigger ass or significantly changing the look and shape of body parts, because the reality is that this is not easy or possible for everyone. Some people could spend hours in the gym every week working on their glues and never have a bubble butt because genetics is a bitch. Some people don’t have access to a gym, period, or much time to work out — do we want them to feel that they should spend their precious exercise minutes mostly on butt exercises because that’s going to bring them closer to the hot girl look du jour? Nah.

While exercise at an individual, personal level absolutely can be for aesthetics and the internal benefits — in Megan’s words, it’s giving both! — when it comes to commercials that will be seen by millions and that ultimately have a role in shaping our body culture, it feels crucial to de-center the idea that what any of us should want from exercise, first and foremost, is to make our body parts more closely align with the trendy look of the day. 

What do you think?

1. I was staying at a rental house with friends and we had the New Year’s Rockin’ Eve thing on; the pre-countdown segments were so cringe that people started just going to bed. Let the hosts get drunk again!

2. I have nothing against Planet Fitness, it’s where I started lifting for the first time! It will always have a special place in my heart. But I’m sorry, this is a bridge too far.

3. See also: Jemima Kirke, Olivia Coleman, Dave Grohl, these little creeps.

4. Megan’s fans are known as “hotties,” mom.

5. Didn’t anyone see “Josie and the Pussycats” for god’s sake?!