Does This Mean the End of Half-Naked Chicks on Billboards?

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Plus-sized women have always lamented the fact that size-26 clothes were pulled and pinned and glued onto size 6 models for catalogues and in-store signage.  It seems we’re not alone.  Apparently, we’re not the only ones who hate false advertising. A recent study by Warwick Business School found that women actually reject products that are sold with big pictures of skinny models and celebrities airbrushed to high heaven.  The reason? This marketing ploy triggers scorn -- a defense mechanism that women have cultivated in a desperate bid to feel okay about ourselves in a world of digitally-enhanced beauty that nobody -- including those in the pictures -- can attain.

Though it's massively unfortunate that the climate around beauty encourages women to develop scorn for one another, there are still ways that this study might be good news.  Perhaps it’s a first step to demanding that we see women of all sizes, ages, colors and abilities represented in the media and advertisements. Maybe size-26 women can finally see the clothes marketed to them on a size-26 model. Maybe size-6 women could see the clothes marketed to them on a size-6 model.  At the very least it’s a first step in pushing back against the tsunami of self-loathing that passes itself off as advertising.

There is a corporate machine that works hard to keep women in a state of desperation -- believing that we are never enough, buying diet products that have and will never work, going into debt to buy anti-aging creams and cover-ups, risking our lives for surgeries that suck fat out of our asses. They use models to hawk products so that by using the products we feel somehow closer to the Photoshopped stereotype of beauty and feel better about ourselves for a minute.  That machine runs on our time, money and energy.  We feed the beast and we can stop anytime we want.  If we stop buying crap that is sold to us using techniques that were created to take our self-esteem, cheapen it and sell it back to us at a profit, then businesses will stop trying to sell things to us that way.   

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