Beach Body Ready?

I’m a little behind in posting this, but I’ve been busy (hey, retirement isn’t the bed of roses I thought it would be – but I digress).

Anyway, a little while back there was a brouhaha in the UK over a weight-loss company’s advertising campaign.

A petition calling for the removal of Protein World’s campaign on the grounds that it aims “to make [people] feel physically inferior to the unrealistic body image of the bronzed model” has received nearly 60,000 signatures.

The petition and related protests have caught the attention of the government agency that regulates advertising in the UK. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ordered the weight loss supplement campaign removed from Underground (subway) stations and banned it from appearing again “in its current form.”

The ASA will now determine if the campaign “breaks harm and offense rules or is socially irresponsible.”

Here’s the ‘socially irresponsible’ ads.

So the feminists and body-image activists triumphed over the evil, patriarchal corporation, effectively censoring what they deemed an “unrealistic” and “unhealthy” body standard.

Here’s what the head feminist had to say about the matter.

Writer and co-founder of the Vagenda blog, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, had returned from Cuba to jarring reverse-culture shock in the “dark, putrid bowels of London’s underground system.”

It was only after visiting Cuba, a totalitarian country where there are no advertisements, that she realized “how much my field of vision is occupied without my consent by images and messages that want to sell me stuff (and, being a woman, it’s usually based on claims that it will make me look better).”

Vagenda Blog ... sigh. Anyway:

The backlash against the ads by feminists and body-image activists became so virulent that the company received at least one bomb threat.

Richard Staveley, head of global marketing for Protein World, (said) there been "violent and physical threats" on the company's head office.

He said: "We've had a bomb threat. That's been reported to the police and is currently being investigated but I can't say anymore than that."

Isn’t that a little extreme? Whatever happened to peaceful protests?

Oh, wait ... never mind.

So we have death threats and government censorship against a company that did nothing but use a bikini model in a weight loss advertising campaign. Has everyone over there lost their friggin' minds?

The protesters may or may not have a valid point about unrealistic body images in our culture. But they’re way off base when they object to their ‘field of vision’ being occupied by what they feel are offensive images. To paraphrase an old saying, "Offensive Images are in the eye of the beholder."

Heck, my field of vision is occupied by plenty of offensive images daily.