Despite what the commercials claim…

[brigid]

Mirrored from brigidkeely.com/wordpress.

Despite what the commercials claim, dieting isn’t going to fix all your problems.

No, joining weight watchers isn’t going to prevent jerks from slamming into your desk and spilling coffee all over your shirt. Nor will joining weight watchers prevent rain from falling from the sky and getting you wet.

I just… what?

Dieting isn’t some magic fix that will repair everything that’s wrong with your life.

Also, if you are an adult, don’t be surprised if a child’s size chair is too small for you. No amount of Special K magical special diets will turn an adult’s butt into a child’s butt.

Adults and children are different sizes. Children are smaller than adults. Yes, there are especially large children and especially small adults, but in general, child-sized things are child-sized because children are smaller than adults.

As baffling as the weight watcher’s commercial was (seriously? coffee spills can be solved by losing weight? only fat people spill coffee when jerks bang into them? rain, which once fell on the just and unjust alike, now targets fatties?), the Special K commercial seems more harmful. There’s the push to shrink female bodies, to reduce them to non-adult sizes. There’s existing rhetoric about how dieting mentality infantalizes women by removing their ability to chose what to eat, that dieting mentality punishes women for defying the ideal feminine norm and growing hips and butts and breasts (you know, secondary sexual signs). But now the message is coming clear: adult women are fucking hose beast lard bags if they don’t fit neatly into furniture scaled for children. Women: they need to remain child like and child sized or they are useless and terrible and need to be fixed. Adult women: there is something wrong with them.

The hell?

Note also that both commercials show conventionally attractive women who do not appear fat, or even chubby, and who have children. Ahh, true womanhood. Hot and fertile.

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Comments

[ankaret]

I fucking hate the Special K ads. There's one over here where a woman keeps finding little post-it notes on food saying things like 'Be good!' and 'Stay strong!' until she finds one on the Special K saying 'Go ahead!' and whilst I think it was meant to be that she'd written them for herself (back when, y'know, she still had the energy to hold a pencil) I just kept thinking 'Get out of this relationship, your partner is a nasty controlling piece of work with serious issues'.

There's another one where Special K allows a woman to look youthful and dewy at a pool whilst surrounded by (actually mostly quite average-sized) older women in a lot of stylised slap. Because, I don't even know, Special K stops you ageing now? It's nonsense.

I also noticed that this week's Radio Times (a TV listing magazine) was recommending a diet programme or a 'look at this 400lb person!' programme pretty much every day. I will not be watching any of them; I can't wait until the New Years Resolutions season is over.