We need an “Are they real” option in the poll!
How else is a company selling diet supplements supposed to market their product?
“Hey you. You’re okay. You look great. And, gosh darn it, people like you. But if you do feel like dropping a few hundred pounds, boy do we have a pill for you.”
Sadly, the supplements are nothing more than sawdust and ground-up beans. Yes, I’m talking about the pills.
It’s not a matter of sexy ladies in ads. And it’s only in the TiL subways. The issue is "unrealistic or unhealthy body shapes. Take another look at the image in the ad. Now, tear your eyes away from her surgically assisted ()(), and look at her waist and rib cage.
If the image is not Photoshopped, the young lady won the genetic lottery for thinness. 99% of the girls and women in the UK and US could not get that thin, even if they worked and starved for years. And yet, this is the shape that all the girls and women who ride the Tube see every day. The message is a meter from their eyes; it’s hard to look away from the bright yellow sign, when you’re trying to avoid eye contact with the other passengers.
The poster is not obscene or otherwise unlawful so far as I can tell, so if it were in my state, I’d have no problem with it being displayed in public on that basis. It may or may not improperly attribute medical benefits to an unapproved substance–that’s not my practice area and I won’t opine on that aspect of it.
I question how effective the poster may be as an advertising campaign–it doesn’t make me want to rush out and buy their product, and I don’t want to look like a blow up sex doll at the beach or anywhere else, but that’s just me.
The ad is fine (unless the product is untested or dangerous).
Does a mayor of London even have the authority to have ads removed because he doesn’t personally like them? Is the mayor voicing his personal opinion, or a religious (sharia-type law?) opinion?
It’s an aspirational poster. It’s selling you an idealised version of yourself. It’s not meant to be realistic. To me, it’s no more shaming than those eye-rollingly godawful motivational posters that were all the rage a few years ago. Didn’t people realise just how shaming those posters were to lazy, talentless people like me?
True. And yet there aren’t ads telling men that they shouldn’t go to the beach unless they’re Photoshopped supermodels.
I don’t think it should be legally banned or anything, but I do think it’s bullshit.
My ideal solution would be for ninja anti-bullshit warriors to cover up the photo of the woman on every poster with a giant pic of a bottle of sunscreen, which is the one thing you actually do need in order to be beach-body ready, but that’s probably not going to happen.
‘Have a day at the beach, a diet pill, and a wank!’
Definitely better.
It’s an ad for a product whose very purpose is to give you a really great body. So of course they’re going to use a picture of someone with a really great body to advertise it. This isn’t like the GoDaddy commercials where they have sexy women for no reason whatsoever: It’s perfectly relevant.
Now, does the product actually work? I don’t know. If it doesn’t, then that’s a perfectly valid reason to object to it. But it’d be just as valid a reason regardless of the ad.
He set a policy regarding ads on public transit, which is government property in London. It doesn’t apply to private property. So there’s little reason to fear Londoners being deprived of posters of an ultra-skinny woman in a yellow bikini.
I’m of two minds about the question. I can understand people wanting a bit less aggressive sexuality in advertising. On the other hand, the wording of the policy seems so vague that it could be interpreted as ban on nearly anything:
From next month, TfL will not allow ads which could reasonably be seen as likely to cause pressure to conform to an unrealistic or unhealthy body shape, or as likely to create body confidence issues, particularly among young people.
…
Sadiq Khan, said: “As the father of two teenage girls, I am extremely concerned about this kind of advertising which can demean people, particularly women, and make them ashamed of their bodies. It is high time it came to an end.
“Nobody should feel pressurised, while they travel on the Tube or bus, into unrealistic expectations surrounding their bodies and I want to send a clear message to the advertising industry about this.”
I don’t think people’s problem is with the picture of the woman (which is pretty standard ad fare). Mine isn’t, anyway. The problem is with the caption, which suggests that unless you look like this you shouldn’t go to the beach.
But that’s not what this ad is saying to women (unless it’s in the smaller print that I can’t read in the linked image).
It could well be argued that that’s what this ad is implying. But it could also be argued that that’s something that we’re reading into it. And I’m not sure which side of those arguments I’d be on.
Do they even HAVE a beach in London?
Welcome to the brave new world.
I’m also disturbed by the ‘new speak’ aspect of the complaint. Shaming by conventional definition would be criticizing bodies a lot different than that of the model, not celebrating hers. If this was a poster of a fat person saying ‘don’t be like this when beach season comes’ I could see complaints though govt action would still be a higher hurdle. But trying to link together multiple thought steps in people’s minds then take public action against them has a creepy dystopian feel to me. You might like a picture like that, as someone sexually attracted to females or not, and not have destructively negative feelings about females who don’t look like that, whether yourself or others.
Some responses have focused on the possible good of people being ashamed of not looking like that. But I think the missing piece is showing why someone would be particularly ‘shamed’ by that, except by lots of people repeating again and again over the years that it’s such a self image problem that images like the poster are common in ads and entertainment. Who actually ever proved that has a causal relationship to self image problems to begin with?
She could lose a couple pounds. But other than that, it doesn’t bother me.
Eh, we had that one up near me a while back. We compromised; they were welcome to put the stupid thing up, but the locals vandalised the hell out of them with funny/surreal slogans and edits.
I heard this story on NPR, and one of the issues that Mr Khan had with the ad was that it was on the Tube, where people can’t simply change the channel or turn the page. He said he wouldn’t have had as big a problem with it if towers on a billboard or in a magazine; but felt that ads on the Tube deserved a higher level of scrutiny because they are targeting a captive audience.