Fat Advertising

Since the beginning of time humanity has been set to a standard. “Only the strongest survive” and in some ways this slogan has become timeless, with only slight changes in words.  Such as in the industrial Revolution when new technologies took over man power and the slogan became “Only the smartest survive.”   In today’s world humans are pursuing the standard set by MTV, Cover Girl, Cosmo, and many other fashion or life-style orientated programs. This new bar of success has been set so high that it’s impossible for some to reach and this failure is hard for many to handle; especially women.  As pointed out in this article “Fat is an Advertising Issue” by Susie Orbach many women of today’s society have a negative perspective on their lives/bodies because of the seeming perfection of the models in the advertisements. Does marketing really have to go to the point of lowering one’s self esteem in order to sell a product? I feel that this is heartless gesture in which producers put their product over another individuals wellbeing.

                As stated in the article girls were seeing these pictures of models and taking their frustration, of not being perfect, on their own bodies. One instance that particularly made me cringe was the paragraph speaking of the young girls living in Fiji. “11.9% of adolescent girls were puking into the toilet bowl trying to change their Fijian build to those of the Western images they saw on TV.” This gave me the impression that producers didn’t care about any moral problems their product might cause, they only cared about the gross income from sales.

                Thankfully I found out, from the remainder of the article, that some people actually still care about their fellow man. The article went on to talk about how Dove was trying a new source of advertising to create the sense that everyone is beautiful in their own way.  I was comforted by this until I came to the final paragraphs of the article, when I discovered that other companies were following Dove’s  lead because the advertising was successful. The part that bothered me was that the other companies only followed suit because Dove was making a better profit! The other companies didn’t care about their ad’s moral consequences; they continued to simply care about their product. It’s sad to think that companies can be that emotionless and separate from the rest of humanity