One of the most offensive ads I've ever seen

Click ad to enlarge image

Shape Liquid & Powder ad from 1970

Thanks to Vintage Ads for posting this

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that advertising is one of my niche areas of interest within feminism. I spend a lot of time looking at advertisements - both vintage and current - trying to dissect the meaning of ads and figure out what the company is trying to tell us and sell us. I've seen some pretty horrific ads in my time - but this one is right up there with the worst. When an ad is this offensive, I've gotta get my rant on! Below are the three worst sentences/paragraphs from this ad, and why they piss me off.





“Beneath that floppy sweatshirt she’s a little overweight. You knew that. Because right now, you’re a little over weight, too. That’s bad. This year’s bathing suits hide nothing. Unless you start losing some, you may spend your summer in a sweatshirt, too. Face it, you’ve got to stop eating.”

• The girl in the shirt IS NOT OVERWEIGHT. Not even close. By stating that she is, the advertisers are planting a seed of doubt in every reader's mind that she too is overweight. If a young, slim girl like that is “a little over weight,” then almost every woman is.
• Being overweight is “bad”? And they've already implied that almost every woman is overweight… so now they’ve got 95% of the female readership feeling like bad people. This is a common advertising technique; advertisers make you feel insecure about something, then offer their product to fix your problem. In most cases, the “problem” is something completely natural, like grey hair, cellulite or winkles, but we’re made to feel so ugly/guilty/old/fat that we are desperate to fix it… and we’ll try any product that “guarantees” results.
  
  
• “Face it, you’ve got to stop eating.” Wow. Really? That's a pretty blatant promotion of eating disorders.
  
  

“… you can substitute Shape for one or two meals a day. Or, if you’re really serious, four Shape meals a day for a while. And no other food.”

• Are you fucking kidding me? This promotes unhealthy eating habits and essentially tells women who are “serious” about losing weight (and who wouldn’t be serious about it after you’ve already called us fat and told us that's bad?) that they shouldn’t eat.
  
  
• What the hell does "four Shape meals a day for a while" mean? That's a pretty unspecific amount of time. If I consumed Shape four times a day and ate nothing else, how long do you think it would take before I'd collapse from lack of energy or some other ailment? Not to mention it would fuck with my digestive system.
  
  
  
  

“If we made Shape taste any better, you might start sneaking it now and then, and you would get fat on it.”

• WTF. Terrible copywriting, just terrible. If you’re advertising a product that’s supposed to make women slim, why would you then state that having too much of it will make you fat? This sentence is just bizarre to me, and confirms the fact that the people who developed this ad were complete fucking idiots.

If this isn't skinny, I don't know what is

The feminist blog-o-sphere is up in arms about the new cover of Shape magazine. This month's cover girl is Kim Kardashian - looking smokin' hot (although probably highly photoshopped) in her purple bikini. So what's the problem? Well, read the words printed next to her left bicep: "I'll never be one of those skinny girls."



Hortense, a writer at Jezebel comments, "As if we're supposed to find this admission believable and heroic as it sits next to an airbrushed picture of, uh, a 'skinny girl' who is currently a spokeswoman for the Kardashian QuickTrim diet pill system, a program she claims, in commercials for the brand, will help you create the body you deserve... In celebrating and promoting Kardashian's statement that she'll "never be one of those skinny girls," even though she very clearly already is, the magazine is essentially telling its audience that Kardashian doesn't represent thinness, which is ridiculous."



Sociological Images also has some great comments about this magazine cover - be sure to check it out.

Relationship Advice from Sexist Assholes

AskMen.com has an incredibly sexist and downright insulting article on their website. The article, Top 10 Subtle Ways to Tell Her She's Getting Fat, basically advises the partners of chubby women to humiliate them into losing weight.

Here's a sample of some of the stellar advice:

• Take her to places where she has to wear a swimsuit
• Leave "now" and "then" photos lying around
• Sabotage her chair
• Ask her to wear an old dress
• Buy her clothes that are too small
• Sign her up for yoga under the pretense of "stress relief"

Here's my own little bit of advice for men: Have an open and honest conversation with her about it, and provide her with positive support. Sure sounds a lot easier than sabotaging a chair or making her feel shitty about herself - which would likely have the opposite effect.

Fuck Dieting. Seriously.

Some fantastic leaflets were handed out at the Calgary Anarchist Book Fair this weekend. One of them was an excerpt from (one of the greatest publications EVER! R.I.P.) Sassy Magazine, circa 1994. The excerpt is from an article entitled, "Thirteen Reasons Not To Diet". It reads,

Starving yourself is complete and total lunacy. Stop it this instant.

I felt it would be nice to post a few of my favorite reasons not to diet from the article. Affirmation that dieting is usually pointless and somewhat degrading is always a great way to empower ones' self against the industry-perpetuated illusion that every one of us should have flawless bodies which, if it were possible, would be terribly unexciting.

Here are my favorites:

Dieting slows down your metabolism. Your body has a weight it inherently wants to be, and your metabolism - the speed and efficiency with which it burns calories for fuel - constantly adjusts to keep you weighing just that much. Eat more, your metabolism speeds up and burns extra calories to compensate; eat less, it slows down. When you buck biology to try to get below your natural weight, your system fights to keep every pound. Your metabolism becomes so sluggish that it's hell to lose an ounce. Basically, your body is reacting to being starved. It wants you to live, dammit! It is on your side!

It makes you boring. As anyone who has had a conversation with a fan club president knows, when you talk endlessly about the object of your obsession, it is tiresome to the listener. Calories, fatgrams and grapefruit are not innately interesting subjects. Get away from me.

You'll gain it back. Ninety percent of all dieters who lose 25 pounds or more on a diet revert to their old weight in two years. Which again indicates that the fault is with dieting, not you.

You're always hungry. It's a myth that fat people eat more than thin people. Nineteen out of 20 studies indicate that obese folks eat the same number of calories as their thin counterparts. To lose weight, you'd have to eat tons less than thin people. To keep it off, you'd have to do this forever. And then you'd be cranky. Having a constant gnawing in your gut and hallucinations about pork rinds is not a merry thing.

You feed the evil diet industry. Which is practically unregulated. Diet programs have no legal obligation to provide evidence that they work - convenient, since they usually don't. These companies rely on return customers who believe regaining the weight is their own damn fault. But why, I ask you, do we blame ourselves, never the diet? When you buy sneakers from a catalog and they're shoddy and have glue globs on the rubber, you don't berate yourself. You get pissed off at the company! Besides, not only are diet foods ineffective (how will tasty shakes for breakfast and lunch teach you to eat normally?), but most ooze sodium and are chemically processed to within an inch of their lives.

I found the article pretty entertaining, but in reading it, I also felt strong and reminded of how important it is to stay educated about what goes into my body. Since we women - and often men, too - are so preyed upon by the diet industry at large, it's good to come across little reminders like this one that we are fully capable of fighting the norm and loving ourselves, no matter how much we eat.

Why feed the industry instead of feeding yourself? How does it deserve any more attention than your body deserves from you? It's not easy for many of us to convince ourselves that we do deserve to be fed but, truthfully, it's a matter of common sense. Many nutritional experts will tell you that a healthy body equates with a healthy mind, so if you want to exercise your mind and be able to put it to good use, you're going to have to give it some fuel.

Thanks to the folks at (the now defunct) Sassy magazine for the article and to the Food Not Bombs Calgary cats for having this leaflet on hand at the book fair.

I hope several of you were able to make it to at least one of the book fair events this weekend. If not, be sure to keep your ears and eyes open for next year.