Marketers and advertisers have not so subtly preyed upon the rampant insecurities of women for ages now. While some of these insecurities may have to do with having the ?right? material goods, the majority of what marketers and advertisers have chosen to exploit is a woman?s or girl?s fear of not having the ?right? physical goods, and nowhere is this more evident than in the fetishization of all things slim and skinny.
The average American woman sees 400 to 600 advertisements per day, and by the time she is 17 years old, she has been blasted with well over 250,000 commercial messages through various forms of media. It goes without saying that this constant exposure to female-oriented advertisements often influences women and girls to become increasingly more self-conscious about their own bodies and to obsess over their physical appearance as a measure of their worth. This influence is made most obvious with the target marketing in commercials advertising various food products.
Most of the time these commercials, which send an unrelenting message of the joys and benefits of living the skinny active lifestyle, run without incident and reverberate on a subconscious level throughout the female world. However a recent Yoplait commercial fell under a fair amount of scrutiny and was electively pulled by Yoplait?s parent company, General Mills, after the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) cried foul.
The ad in question (lets just call it the Cheesecake Dilemma) reveals the inner dialog of a slim woman standing in front of an open fridge holding a raspberry cheesecake. The woman desperately tries to justify the eating of a slice of cheesecake with all of the penance and exercise she will do to make up for such a transgression. Then a slightly thinner, less tortured, woman comes along and grabs the presumably more healthful option, Yoplait?s Raspberry Cheesecake Yogurt, and our tortured protagonist is shamed into the yogurt alternative (see ad below):
?[For those with eating disorders], opening a refrigerator is like walking off a bridge,? said Lynn Grefe, president of NEDA. ?And to see this behavior in a commercial tells people with eating disorders, see, it?s even on TV. It?s ok and normal for my head to go through all these mental exercises.? Dissatisfaction with their bodies causes many women and girls to strive for the thin ideal. The number one wish for girls ages 11 to 17 is to be thinner, and girls as young as five have expressed fears of getting fat. Nearly 80% of 10-year-old girls have dieted, and at any one time, 50% of American women are currently dieting.
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