"These people who promote the perfect body really don't care about you at all. They purposefully make you feel like less of a person so you'll buy their stuff and they'll make money."-- Kelsey Hertel, high school junior, and a participant in the Body Project - a program that cures girls of eating disorders by helping them understand how they're being manipulated by TV and fashion magazines - as reported in TIME Magazine
Ooh, Baby! You so fiiine! I likes a girl with some bones on her bones!
Very disturbing. Anorexia is deadly, in case this isn't obvious already.
ReplyDeleteI applaud that young girl (Kelsey) for her insight. The fashion and advertising industry are, by and large, obscenely and in-your-face anti-women. This does not affect just young girls, of course, but they are the most vulnerable.
There is one recent commercial that really gets me every time I see it: It is for the Nivea anti-cellulite cream. It features a bunch of super-skinny teenage girls (no older than 18), flashing their perfect, cellulite-free legs to the audience and extolling, presumably, the miraculous effects of the cream. This is so unreal one does not even want to laugh. These girls are 20 years and 20 pounds away from cellulite, cream or no cream. (And, BTW, no cream. Such is the reality of cellulite. But it don't matter as long as you can sell, sell, sell.)
The truth is that the overwhelming majority of TV programming directed at women, including TV ads and not only fashion-related, is at best an (almost) total crap, and at worst deceptive and genuinely harmful total crap.