Today, a bit of creepy irony, courtesy of Janet Bloomfield’s JudgyBitch blog.
Yesterday, Bloomfield put up a post (archived here) with the title “Feminists borrowing from terrorists now?” The source of her outrage? The anger directed at the now-notorious “Are You Beach Body Ready” ads posted in London tube stations by a weightloss powder company called Protein World.
The ads’ detractors, many of them feminists, think that the ad campaign contributes to fat shaming. Some of these critics have — gasp! — written on the ads with magic markers to express their dissatisfaction, acts of minor vandalism that the company’s CEO indignantly denounced as “terrorism.” No, really.
The company has also, it claims, gotten a number of threats, including a bomb threat. That’s a lot more serious, and completely indefensible; bomb threats are indeed intended to terrorise.
The irony? When I went to take a look at Bloomfield’s post last night, this was the first comment left on it:
I’m sorry, but that’s pretty fucking creepy. And it’s now been up on her site for a day.
I’m not quite sure how Bloomfield figures that bomb threats are terrorism but a comment warning feminists that “I’ll have my vengeance” is fine.
What do you think JB calls siccing her fanboys on other women by lying about things they’ve said and done? Are MRAs threats and harassment not terrorism?
Ugggggghhhhh, I really hate the phrase “sex sells,” because it’s always applied to images of female bodies. It not sex that’s being sold, it’s a unattainable image of perfection. In any case, the ad is presumably aimed at women, most of whom would be attracted to men.
Lea
“Now, if a bomb threat is terrorism, what are campaigns of sustained death and rape threats meant to drive women offline and out of certain communities?
What do you think JB calls siccing her fanboys on other women by lying about things they’ve said and done? Are MRAs threats and harassment not terrorism?”
Actually It’s about ethnics in satireism
YES. Women’s bodies are not sex personified. Women are not consumable sex products.
I’m delighted to see people speak out against ads like this, ads that prey on people’s insecurities about their bodies! It should happen more often. I really believe the younger generation today isn’t going to roll over and take this kind of shaming.
fruitloopsie ,
High five!
http://www.sickchirpse.com/betasite/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Cat-High-Five-.jpg
The other thing about “sex sells” is that effectiveness does not equal ethical responsibility. Crack sells too, but most people are fine with it being illegal to sell crack because the product is so harmful.
Imagine, if you will, the model being a man in swimming trunks. Ain’t gonna happen .
@isidore13, tell me about it. I hit my early teen years and the weight came on like a tidal wave. I was given dexidrine – an evil amphetamine – and put on more diets than you can shake a stick at. No matter WHAT I went to a doctor for, it was always either all in my head or entirely due to being fat.
Like all larger-then-“normal” people, I was told that no one could ever love me, no one would ever want to look at me. I was made to feel ugly, stupid and insane for simply being an unpopular size.
Because of doctor anti-fat and anti-woman bias, I almost died from micoplasmic pneumonia. And no matter why I went to see a doctor, I was given diets. BLEAH! Finally, at the age of 56 – eight years ago – I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Disease, a disease of the thyroid. For all of those decades, even though my thyroid numbers were in the damned basement, I was called a glutton, a pig, an ugly fatto…and this by the same medicos who were reading my charts!
No one should EVER be fat- or slut- or ANYTHING-shamed. But, of course, it will continue. It has always amazed me that so many people seem to feel it is their right to make anyone who does not fit whatever “standard” THEY have feel as though we do not belong and should just crawl away.
Given the exaggeration of the “threat” posed by fuck-you graffiti, I have to wonder if that “bomb threat” is even real, or if it’s just a sympathy ploy/free-advertising strategy on their part. You know, like Paulie and his made-up feminist threat to his widdle shindig in Detroit.
Yes, I went there…because they are all just so damn sleazy that I wouldn’t put it past them.
Lea
Two high fives
http://gdidetroit.com/wordpress/slides/images/high-five-cat.jpg
Samanthas
Hugs if you want them
In 2005, over 50 people died and over 700 were injured in a London terrorist bombing. I’ve personally seen an actual terrorist attack and an endless amount of defaced public advertisements in NYC.
Protein World’s CEO is a huge asshole and deserves a mountains of bad press.
This ad is awful.
In regard to it being exclusively about fat shaming/selling an unattainable image of perfection, as opposed to *not* selling sex because it’s aimed at women, I must disagree. It is both.
Ads like this *are* aimed at women and pressure them/us to conform to the fuckability mandate to be sure, and the product it’s pushing, a weight loss product, makes it especially toxic. BUT these kinds of ads also objectify women and enforce the notion that women within patriarchy are consumables.
This kind of imagery is a HUGE part of keeping women and sex as inseparable and degrades ALL women, not just women who don’t fit the thin mold. Victoria’s Secret, for example, is ostensibly aimed at women, but their marketing caters to the male gaze. This ad is about the male gaze.
Men see these things and think “Oh, that’s what women are supposed to look like (for me!) and that’s what women really care about, and if they don’t care about it, why are there so many ads like this? They *must* want to make my boner happy!” It is oppressive brainwashing/propaganda. And here’s yer rape culture, too.
Yes, “sex sells” and this is very deliberately deployed with laser precision in advertising day in and day out. As much as we loathe it, corporations with mostly male CEO’s keep it going and bank on it. Jean Kilbourne would certainly have some harsh analysis of this particularly vomitive piece of crap.
This ad and the many others like it buttress what is the backbone of patriarchy; women are the subordinate sex class.
@samanthas *fist bump* Hashi’s here too. Getting diagnosed is NOT easy. Hope you’re feeling good now!
And yet I still her the menz cry “We’re objectified too! Women like to see big burly muscular men! We’re objectified just as much!”
And yet…If I Google “Sexy [insert noun here] ad”, and I only see women. Huh. Fancy that.
Sexy Burger ad
Sexy Car ad
Sorry in advance if these don’t work. : P
“I’ll have my vengeance, etc.” = I’m going to sit here making empty, impotent threats while rage-wanking and imagining all the hambeast thighs quivering in sudden terror at my superior masculinity!
Can I put in another angle on the “unachievable” appearance of models like this. I presume there’s a bit of photoshopping-airbrushing going on here.
There are people like me and a friend of mine who’d never look like that regardless of weight. We literally look like starving refugees when we’re thin. Knobbly knees, visible rib cage, protruding shoulder blades, hip & pubic bones.
Her partner describes her emerging from the shower as “like the centrefold from Orthopaedics Monthly”.
It’s funny, but a bit disheartening that no matter how ‘desirably’ thin you get, you’ll never achieve that smooth, effortlessly slender look.
RoscoeTCat: Oh, men get ads for BS weight loss too. And are judged by our abs, as strenuously and cruelly as (if not worse, much worse, than) women for their thighs and hips.
As an unwilling fat guy, I’m just offended by the protein miracle cure nonsense. Eat small meals and be active every day – there’s no AMAZING SECRET to that! So, it doesn’t put money into the pockets of weasel salesmen and marketers who, in the words of (now reformed fat guy) Penn Jillette, “are the same assholes who made you feel bad about yourself in high school. Don’t get fooled again.”
Even models don’t look like “models”:
Oh, and behold the miracle of Photoshop:
AHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH! You’re too funny. By which I mean: You’re really not.
Here’s the thing about fat men: You’re allowed to exist. You exist on television, you exist in the media, you’re allowed to be fat and exist at the same time if you’re a man.
You’re not encouraged to be fat, that’s true, because our society hates us fatties as a whole, but men are not judged as hard because they don’t have abs. Most certainly they’re not treated as any less than human.
Meanwhile, women, on top of being treated as lesser than because of our gender, are treated even worse when we’re fat. We’re told that “men don’t like that”, and thus, we’re pushed to starve ourselves or go on diets that will fuck up our bodies for the rest of our lives because there are boners to be pleased, and us being “fatties” ain’t gonna do it.
Here’s something for you: Two experiments where two skinny people put on fat suits and go on dates with people from Tinder. One’s a man, and one’s a woman.
I’ll let the videos speak for themselves:
Fat Woman Tinder Date
Fat Man Tinder Date
Notice anything? Here, I’ll point it out: Notice how the men reacted to the fat woman, and notice how the women reacted to the fat guy.
The fat guy was way more “successful” in his dates. The women stuck around, actually spoke to him, and even set up more dates later on.
The fat woman was less successful, because the guys made every excuse in the book to leave.
But yeah, guys have it so much worse.
Look, Max, I don’t doubt that you have good intentions, but I think you’ve kinda got this all backwards.
@Paradoxical
Uh, actually, only one made an excuse to leave. Very rudely by saying he thought he was meeting a thin woman and complaining that he wasted gas to get there. If I remember right, one guy left before he even talked to her and one guy had to go to the bathroom or something and never came back.
All the women stayed and the subject of him being fatter than his picture was either timidly brought up or not at all.
So, yeah.
Still, my point stands. The men were quick to hightail it out of Dodge the moment they found out she was fat.
Oh, and one guy stuck around and was very polite, especially compared to the rest of the douchenozzles.
samanthas, ugh, so sorry you’ve had to deal with all that shit, and glad you finally got the correct diagnosis. .
Also, fatmax, I’m not sure what you’re talking about. As a fat dude I really haven’t had to deal with any of that from anyone other than MRAs, etc.I wasn’t fat as a kid, so I didn’t get bullied for that, but as an adult, aside from a few remarks from “concerned” relatives, and a couple of emails roughly 15 years ago sent by readers mad at something I wrote I’ve basically encountered zero fat shaming in my life other than the shit I get now from MRA types. . .
I did go through a few years in my 20s in which I worried I was too fat, but that was inesecurity; it wasn’t a response to anything anyone was saying to me. (And I wasn’t actually fat then; I just wasn’t the string bean I had been as a teenager.)
Every woman I know, and not only the fat women, have dealt with orders of magnitude more fat shaming than me. And as much shit as I get from MRAs now about it I would get a many times more if I were a woman.