Elastic Wai…t A Second What The Hell?
I have been reading Elastic Waist daily since it launched; especially since my friends (including BFD contributor Weetabix) write for the site. I have been on their “daily special” show and have even written a guest post or two for them. However, the fact remains that it is a corporate-sponsored site, a Conde Nast site, affiliated with SELF magazine. And it seems like that fact has come back to haunt us.
Imagine my dismay when I visited the site yesterday and saw this ad. “Be sexy & sleek in 4 weeks / Shed 8 pounds / Sculpt flat, sexy abs / Lose the baby weight.”
Okay, we could talk about what’s wrong with this ad ad nauseum, but what really bugs me is the use of the word “sexy.” It’s used twice, both times emphasizing that if you lose weight, you will be sexy, and implying that if you don’t, you’re not sexy. What’s more, you have to lose enough weight to give you “flat abs,” which certainly won’t happen if I lose the advertised 8 pounds, and probably wouldn’t happen even if I lost 80 pounds.
A while back, Weetabix said this:
Is the goal of this site to fix our heads on the perceptions of weight, or is it to do a subtle Folger’s taste test switch on you and when you think you’re getting a size-acceptance blog, you’re really getting some subtle brainwashing to lose weight?
God, I hope not.
I hope not too. But maybe the best way to describe this ad is “subtle brainwashing.” So what is it they’re really selling?
I love my friends who work for EW and I love their work for the site; obviously it isn’t the bloggers themselves who are responsible for the content of the ads. But how can Elastic Waist as an entity purport to be part of the solution if its also part of the problem?
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Advertising, Cold Hard Cash, Fatism, Feminism, Magazines, Media, Meta
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It is a bit jarring, but I’ve learned to mentally screen out messages like that. For example, I just looked around on your page here and noticed (for the first time) a set of GoogleAds that include ‘enticing’ messages like “Drop 10lbs in 72 hours” (irony, hello!)
I hadn’t noticed that before, but I suppose it’s because I ‘tune out’ anything that’s not part of the main block of content on a website.
Firefox + Adblock means I don’t see most ads when I view a site. The internet is a much less visually abrasive place this way.
I’ve noticed this on sites like this one where the blog is all about fat acceptance but the ads on the page are for weight loss, it’s just an unfortunate side effect of having google ad placements since they choose ads based on content in the blog. I just tune it out.
Google ads, I believe, are generated by keywords. So while MoPie or even myself might write the sentence “there is nothing wrong with being fat”, the Google AdBot is just going to pick up the word “Fat” and spam you with self-hating gibberish.
It’s unfortunate, but the fact is that most of the blogs that are involved in FA are free blogs – which means they automatically come with ads, otherwise LiveJournal, Blogger, and WordPress wouldn’t be able to offer them for free.
Me? I just ignore it.
In the sidebar of this entry is an ad bar for the “BlogHer network” and it has “How to Lose the Belly Fat” so you may want to look into how you get your own ads (it has a horned burger reaching out to hug me– what is that? “finally, a diet that really works” — really? is that the message I came here for?).
This is the first day I’ve noticed diet ads on one of my FA blogs and it ironically is on an entry complaining about such things happening.
I want it stopped in all FA blogs. No diet ads, please.
It isn’t a problem with Elastic Waist, it’s a problem with google ads, adsense, and other “automatic” ad generators that look for key words and fill in the ad. There are ads for “losing your belly fat” on this site, there are ads telling us to “stop abortion now” on Pandagon, of all places. I can see how you don’t always notice it because it changes everytime, but it does happen… even here at BFD.
Hello all, this is my first time posting here! Love the site, and I am new to the concept of FA, but it’s my current obsession and I’ve been reading all I can.
I also tend to ignore these, since ads are everywhere anyway. I subscribe to Self magazine, which kind of makes me wonder if you can be Fat Acceptant, but still want so badly to lose weight (as I do; I also attend Weight Watchers meetings). Anyway, when I was reading it yesterday, I thought the same thing about the “flat abs in a month” promise… They must assume you’re pretty thin to begin with if they think that is a possibility for just anyone.
But what I really wanted to comment on was a similar kind of contradiction. I just started a new job at a very large, well known corporate type company. I’ve worked for such places before, but only as an off-site contractor (helpdesk/call center work). This is my first time working in a very corporate office, and I’m kind of shocked by the amount of “get fit and healthy” propaganda all over. There is a gym on-site and I actually think that’s great (although I can’t use it, since I’m a contracted worker), but there are also signs about it everywhere and daily emails. It’s kind of off-putting but doesn’t really bother me.
What DOES bother me is the scale in the doorway going in and out of the cafeteria… I would understand it in the gym, obviously, and maybe even forgive having it in the bathroom… But the cafeteria? It seems very inappropriate to me, like saying “hey fatty make sure you can afford to eat that cheeseburger!”
Kate: There is a SCALE in the doorway to your
CAFETERIA?! Are you KIDDING ME with this? I’ve never been in the corporate world – is this a common practice? The mind, it wobbles.
I don’t think there’s anything subtle about the ad at all. But, at the same time, that makes it easier to disregard….it is almost campy in it’s attempt to get attention.
It’s true, I noticed that myself last night. I have weight loss ads explicitly blocked on both BlogHer and Google ads, and yet sometimes they appear anyway. Making this whole post very ironic!
Actually, today I had to update the BlogHer ad code (it took me all week to figure this out, by the way) and I just took out the Google ads because they were bugging me. I think this particular post triggered a lot of weight loss ads and, just, bleh. I can’t be part of the solution and part of the problem either, right?
BlogHer is better about not putting any weight loss ads on the site, although sometimes the links that live under the main ad are weight loss related.
I saw that the other day as well. And while I agree that sometimes one cannot control what ads show up, I would think that a Conde Nast site would have a great deal of control over what other Conde Nast publication they are advertising on said site. I do think it was in poor taste and thoughtless.
This is one of the reasons why I just don’t accept any commercial advertising on my site at all. People might think that I somehow endorse the product or services advertised and I just don’t want to create that kind of conflict of interest.
But how can Elastic Waist as an entity purport to be part of the solution if its also part of the problem?
That’s just it. I don’t think Conde Nast or Self magazine “purport to be part of the solution” at all, either explicitly or implicitly. They are in it simply for the profits and if women want to read about body-acceptance, they will be all about body-acceptance; if women want to read about dieting, they will be all over dieting. This isn’t the personal and moral issue for them that it is for us; to them, it’s simply a matter of what pays.
And Rachel hits the nail on the head. While the people at EW might be interested in promoting Fat Acceptance, their parent companies, which decide on what advertising goes where, are only interested in promoting Fat Wallets – specifically their own.
Advertising on a site isn’t bad, nor is having advertising on your site. But if you don’t understand your target market, you’re only going to piss people off.
Several months ago on Elastic Waist, Weetabix posted a strong response to an article written for, I believe, _Glamour_ magazine. As I recall, the man who wrote the article in question made some ridiculous claims about the female body, dating, and plastic surgery, and Weetabix offered a pretty sharp retort to this guy’s editorial. However, almost immediately after I read Weetabix’s piece on Elastic Waist, it disappeared. I’ve no proof that this is the case, but there is a part of me that believes Weetabix’s critical response to an article published in a fellow Conde Nast publication had to be suppressed or removed. I’m not trying to stir up unwarranted controversy, especially as I do not know the reason why Weetabix’s response disappeared. I’m also not naive when it comes to the often problematic relationship between editorial control and advertising dollars or publishers (Gloria Steinem’s “Sex, Lies, and Advertising” sums it up), but, I admit, my reading of the Elastic Waist site is mildly affected by this incident. I guess it concerns me because if Weetabix did, indeed, have to remove her response because of a Conde Nast conflict of interest, what else can’t she, or any contributor to Elastic Waist, write in response to the general cultural wallpaper, especially if it appears in _Glamour_ or _Allure_ or _Self_ or … something else in which Conde Nast has a vested, financial interest? It’s telling that Steinem’s solution to the advertisers/publishers vs. editorial control tension was to make _Ms._ a reader-supported, ad-free magazine.
Weetabix’s response may have vanished for a completely unrelated reason, however. And I can’t remember enough of the specifics in order to do a thorough search of the Elastic Waist site. If I’ve somehow missed it, and Weetabix’s response is lurking there somewhere, I apologize for speculating too wildly about its absence. I just know I couldn’t find it almost immediately after I’d read it, and subsequent returns to the site soon after did not produce it either.
And, for the record, I’d pay to read ad-free Big Fat Deal and Elastic Waist, if that’s what it came to in order to retain editorial freedom and/or too-intrusive advertising.
Emily
Correction:
And, for the record, I’d pay to read ad-free Big Fat Deal and Elastic Waist, if that’s what it came to in order to retain editorial freedom and *avoid* too-intrusive advertising.
Emily
I think I have now become totally ad-blind.
Though earlier today I was reading a blog post which contained the words “guinea pig” in its metaphorical sense, and the ads were all to do with guinea pigs! Since I have three of them, this probably struck me as funnier than it really merited…
But yes, the ad-selection software does seem to be a terribly blunt instrument.
On the TV Tropes Wiki site, there’s a page in the “character tropes” section that discusses ways in which fat characters are depicted in various fictional media, and the ads are split between “Lose the Belly Fat” types and “Gay Chubby Dates” types. Neither of which is really particularly relevant as far as I recall.
I certainly don’t like that ad, but I feel that messages like that are fortunately harmless to me personally. It’s just like when you see that ad that says “Make $10,000 a month from your bed!!!!” I know that it’s not true, and that even if it were it wouldn’t make me a happier or a better person in the long run.
There are people out there who are easily influenced and who still think thin=sexy, but hopefully most people see that thin=thin, and that’s all.
She started to cum for. She lifted her. mujeres peludas Had.