i still want to go to brazil someday but maybe…now, a little less (who knows, maybe someone like me wouldn’t even be allowed in the country for fear of bringing down the overall hotness level of the country?).
anyway, yesterday i was highly amused by certain advertisements. mind you, i hate commercials but am sometimes fond of print advertising. what can i say, i have a soft spot for the graphic design and production that goes into it all.
but i digress, because as much as i’m a fan of some humorous advertisements, i must never forget that for every single mildly-amusing ad there is out there, about 15 more insulting or just plain stupid ones exist. and they’re springing up by the hundreds every minute.
also, i don’t know what it is but lately i hate being female more and more. or rather, i have no major problems with being a girl — no more than usual anyway — but i definitely hate being a girl in today’s world. it’s not feminism breaking free and taking over my mind, making me into some sort of man-hating pod person; it’s that i fucking hate stupidity and douchebaggery, and the world today is overflowing with both. with a heaping helping of assholery on the side.
meh.
to get on with it, this woman is supposed to be so revolting women in brazil will run screaming for their low-fat, diet yogurt and hit the treadmill double-time so as not to die alone & unloved in their horrid fatness. it’s part of a new brazilian ad campaign for low-fat yogurt in which iconic film images are re-imagined with fat women where thin women used to be.
the tagline of this ad reads:
Forget about it. Men’s preference will never change. Fit Light Yogurt.
(the following pictures are also in the ad series, also women who are supposed to revolt you into dieting)
i don’t know…obviously she’s no twig, but she’s not some hideous cow that should be reviled. in fact, i think she’s really cute…kinda sexy even. hell, i wouldn’t mind looking like this woman. or even having a shred of her confidence, because you couldn’t pay/threaten/bribe me enough to ever sprawl out amongst a few strategically placed rose petals and actually let someone take a picture.
i really don’t know what the hell this advertising company is playing at. do they want to trigger mass eating disorders? are they so desperate to increase yogurt sales that they’re grasping at straws? do they think so little of women in general that they believe this kind of mental manipulation will work?
women will be so worried about what men think about their bodies that they’ll just dash themselves into a thousand squishy, fat pieces unless they consume yogurt by the gallon (except, the better method would be starving, right?).
i suppose they never stopped to consider what women will think about their own bodies. i mean, i may be crazy, but i’ve learned to operate by worrying about how i feel about my own body over the worthless opinions of any number of random men out there. because, i can’t please everybody…hell, i can barely please myself! do you really think i got the time to worry/obsess/fixate on whether or not i can conform to some predetermined idea of beauty/appropriateness/loveability? cuz, i don’t. and while i know there are countless women out there who do, i just can’t. look at any magazine cover or watch television for a few hours and you’ll see that the inundation of the “female ideal” is so widespread that the efforts against it are nearly always futile.
all i can do is work on myself one bit at a time and hope i eventually get to where i want to be, and what makes me happy. and who fuckin’ knows whenever that will be.
what i do know is ads like this are insulting. this, and in a way, the dove ads with all the women in underwear an such. campaign for real beauty, it’s called. and they spout all this rhetoric about how they’re not using the “model standard” and going away from rail-thin/emaciated/uber-airbrushed glamazons in their advertising campaign and including “normal” and “larger sized” “average” women.
bra-fucking-vo.
look at them? even the largest woman in the dove ad campaigns is not all that big. i’ve not seen anyone prancing around in white undies that is above maybe a size 12, maybe. the rest of them? thin, fit, disgustingly pretty. some of them just plain depressing to look at if you’re not so thin, not so pretty, and no where near the “normal” standard. dove wants to use real people, but they really only are highlighting just how skewed the image of real beauty is. they haven’t actually bothered to go that far from the industry standard, maybe just with less makeup. i would kill to look like any of the plain, heavier, normal women in the dove ads. (of course, again the same no amount of money/bribery/etc. could get me to pose for pictures in underwear clause still applies)
and the women in the yogurt ads, gorgeous but for an entirely different reason. they’re confident, and sexy, and they know it. for a different campaign it would be entirely better, use them to show you can be happy without being the ever-coveted size 2. but, i wonder how they felt when they actually saw the final copy of the ad. i wonder if they knew what it was exactly that they were posing for. did they do it willingly? knowingly? i kind of hope they didn’t.
maybe everything is far more different than i could imagine in brazil…
it’s depressing when everywhere you look the media, the news, the world is telling you that you’re not good enough, you’re not smart enough, you’re not pretty enough, you’ll never be thin enough; and because all of these things you will never be successful in life, no one will ever love you, and you will die sad and alone and a failure. and sure it’s easy to “rise above” and ignore it and maintain your self esteem and self worth and realize it’s just what the media wants you to think so you spend money on gadgets and fad diets and low calorie, low fat, low sugar, low flavor, low [blank] things to spend your time trying to fit into the image of some ideal. there’s the part of your brain that says “they’re using you, they’re warping your mind, this is what they want you to do.”
and then there’s the part that looks in the mirror and sees every single flaw and extra pound and imperfection and remembers every single struggle and frustration and tear and wasted effort and thinks…
“they’re right”
