Last week, I got an email from someone named Amanda, who wrote me from a subway car in New York: “I was doing OK until these #WeightWatchers ads hit the subway. Now it feels inescapable — they are on every screen in this car, they flash and draw attention, and it’s hard to keep reminding myself not to look. I’m fat, in recovery from a long history of eating disorders (over 20 years), and dealing with mental health issues and physical health issues related back to the ED... I feel like the WW ads are so much worse than those ads that showed thin white torsos with needles. Those were kind of gross, but these are more ads that look like people I relate to, most of them aren’t skinny and look like a size that {my brain thinks} should be actually attainable for me, and that’s somehow more triggering to me personally.”
The damage being caused by these ads is not just about the sheer inescapability of them. It’s that the ads are deploying a flavor of fat-shaming/fatphobia that’s new to us. We’re no longer in the era of overt fat-shaming. We’ve entered the era of covert fatphobia.
Like implicit racism or implicit sexism, it often has a positive, hopeful, uplifting, pitying, or helpful tone. It wears the language of empathy and empowerment. Yet, it produces the same outcomes: it perpetuates the idea that it is products that fat people need to change our bodies, not a culture free from weight stigma.
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