Kenneth has recently made something of a name for himself thanks to anti-fat comments he has placed on Twitter. By Kenneth’s reckoning, all girls should sign up for ‘managed anorexia’ to keep them skinny. He also proposes women should ‘get thin or die trying’ and claims to have devised a pill which will make all its users size zero.
I have no way of knowing this pill even exists, but assuming it does, it’s quite obvious Kenneth is using shock tactics (and social media) to advertise his unnecessary and unpleasant medication. But this is just an extreme example of advertisers’ tendency to manipulate and worry the populace into buying their stuff, using body weight as the lure.
The Special K brand has always played on its health giving properties, but in recent years has really hammered home a fat loss proposition. It runs something like this: replace two of your daily meals with a bowl of Special K and you’ll see your weight reduce within two weeks. I should say you will. You’ve cut out two meals and replaced them with something that seems to be more air than anything else. It surely has nothing to do with the ingredients of the cereal.
And that’s the catch. The pressure on consumers to conform to some template of perfection is such that we are often quite prepared to accept a particular product has magical slimming properties. We will all lose weight if we eat less and exercise more, but we want the magic bullet and there is no shortage of quasi-medical products claiming to deliver the no-effort fix: Adios, Cyclotrim and Alli are just three.
Whether these treatments work or not doesn’t really concern me. What is depressing is the constant demand for physical conformity. Primarily because it causes so much anxiety and misery in so many people, while creating vast amounts of money for those claiming to provide it.
Hold on, though. Why should the advertising of diet products be so much more dubious than any other strand of marketing? Well, promoting a style or brand of watch may well persuade an audience their social status will be elevated by this particular timepiece. Nevertheless they are unlikely to have been bombarded, from childhood, with images and messages suggesting their worth as a human being is directly linked to their choice of wrist adornment. When advertising flogs expensive watches, people buy them or they don’t. When it critiques their bodies, the impact on lives can be quite profound.
Even advertising which isn’t pushing a means to slenderness
is entwined with the cult of the slim. Holiday commercials
never feature the extra flesh most of us display in a swimming
costume. Nor do beer ads show young folk with distended
bellies brought on by consuming pints of the brew.
The expectation of bodily ‘beauty’ is marbled through
almost all marketing communications and, almost without
realising it, we are engulfed by a fantasy world, populated
with impossibly shaped beings.
Ridiculously, side-by-side with this compulsion to look like an army of mannequins, there are powerful temptations to indulge in the very habits which cause the opposite. Alcohol, burgers, cakes, chocolate and sugar are all heavily advertised (always by underweight models and actors) – so when commentators, moralisers, politicians and celebrities pontificate so righteously about our disgusting bodies, they would do well to consider why we’re all so flipping mixed up.
It is hardly surprising the government funded ‘Change For Life’ campaign was such a dismal failure when it was simply a tiny voice of healthy advice drowned by a deluge of ‘lose weight you freak’ and ‘buy our delicious fatty, creamy, cheesy goodies’ contradictions. The messages are both confused and overwhelming.
I think most of us know in our guts (whatever size they may be), that being very, very skinny is as dangerous as being truly enormous – but to be at some point between the two is really okay. If you wish to be a ripped and muscled fitness icon, you are most welcome. Should you happen to be a regular person with a bit of a tummy, no-one really minds or cares. Knowing and believing this really does begin to negate the unfair body fascism so often seen in advertising. And although I work in that same tainted and rapacious business, I would be delighted to see such a lazy and damaging practice challenged.
One more thing. Obesity doesn’t discriminate, but the social coercion on which marketing thrives, certainly does. The vast majority of weight-based advertising is pitched at women – and most anorexia sufferers are also female.
In 1978 Susie Orbach wrote a book called ‘Fat Is A Feminist Issue’. Thanks to advertising, the media and Kenneth Tong, it still is.
Magnus Shaw, January 2011
This article originally appeared on creativepool.co.uk
