juss
New member
Hi, I hope this isn't considered rude.
My friend wrote this really excellent article some time ago and I wanted to share it with people I figured might be interested - it's about the contradiction inherent in a size 0 model advertising ice cream and the pressures and problems it can cause dieters.
(full piece - it's two pages long!
)
***
Every year around May, Walls ice cream endeavour to persuade the British public that, despite black skies and torrential rain, it is actually summer and therefore time to consume large quantities of frozen dessert.
This year, the face of their Magnum campaign is the immaculately coiffed Eva Longoria Parker (5’2”/ 24” W/ 32”B). She smoulders against a warm chocolate background, limbs artfully arranged at an impossibly uncomfortable angle, wearing a black silk dress carefully selected to walk the tightrope between sexy and classy and couturier cut to emphasize her tiny waist (24”!). She clutches the ice cream determinedly, the glitter of a massive engagement rock on her delicate left hand offset by the one tiny chunk of yellow vanilla that’s visible beneath the barest and most ladylike of nibbles. She is supposed to be the woman who “has it all”: designer clothes, a designer body, and a designer boyfriend. The master sign of her empowerment is the phallic ice-cream she’s grasping. Her relationship to it is carefully ambiguous, balanced with precarious post-feminist precision. Is she appropriating the commodity and lending it her star status? Or is the ice cream yet another of the material signs that signals her specialness? Further, is the chocolate giving her pleasure, or is she pleasuring it?
The advert’s illogicality is daring. In Longoria’s hands, the ice cream looks about as convincing as the microphone clasped by a lip-synching chanteuse. Yet there’s not even the slightest attempt to hide the obvious disjunction between her famous physique (5’2”/ 24” W/ 32” B!) and the Magnum’s nutritional composition (260 cal/26.7g carb/15.5g fat). Because she’s not just a size 0 – oh no! that would be positively plebeian! - she’s a 00 – a super-special size only reachable by a stratospherically successful starlet. When she recently gained weight, reaching the positively porcine proportions of an ordinary size 0, the celebrity media hyperventilated their way to hundreds of headlines. Was she unwell? Pregnant? Desperately unhappy? Poor Longoria (now 5’2”/ 25” W/ 34”C) was forced to release a statement that she was actually method acting, gaining weight in order to look more ordinary. Like an overworked housewife, in fact. The whole inch she put onto her waist was actually a sign of her Very Serious Dedication To Her Craft.
My friend wrote this really excellent article some time ago and I wanted to share it with people I figured might be interested - it's about the contradiction inherent in a size 0 model advertising ice cream and the pressures and problems it can cause dieters.
(full piece - it's two pages long!
)
***
Every year around May, Walls ice cream endeavour to persuade the British public that, despite black skies and torrential rain, it is actually summer and therefore time to consume large quantities of frozen dessert.
This year, the face of their Magnum campaign is the immaculately coiffed Eva Longoria Parker (5’2”/ 24” W/ 32”B). She smoulders against a warm chocolate background, limbs artfully arranged at an impossibly uncomfortable angle, wearing a black silk dress carefully selected to walk the tightrope between sexy and classy and couturier cut to emphasize her tiny waist (24”!). She clutches the ice cream determinedly, the glitter of a massive engagement rock on her delicate left hand offset by the one tiny chunk of yellow vanilla that’s visible beneath the barest and most ladylike of nibbles. She is supposed to be the woman who “has it all”: designer clothes, a designer body, and a designer boyfriend. The master sign of her empowerment is the phallic ice-cream she’s grasping. Her relationship to it is carefully ambiguous, balanced with precarious post-feminist precision. Is she appropriating the commodity and lending it her star status? Or is the ice cream yet another of the material signs that signals her specialness? Further, is the chocolate giving her pleasure, or is she pleasuring it?
The advert’s illogicality is daring. In Longoria’s hands, the ice cream looks about as convincing as the microphone clasped by a lip-synching chanteuse. Yet there’s not even the slightest attempt to hide the obvious disjunction between her famous physique (5’2”/ 24” W/ 32” B!) and the Magnum’s nutritional composition (260 cal/26.7g carb/15.5g fat). Because she’s not just a size 0 – oh no! that would be positively plebeian! - she’s a 00 – a super-special size only reachable by a stratospherically successful starlet. When she recently gained weight, reaching the positively porcine proportions of an ordinary size 0, the celebrity media hyperventilated their way to hundreds of headlines. Was she unwell? Pregnant? Desperately unhappy? Poor Longoria (now 5’2”/ 25” W/ 34”C) was forced to release a statement that she was actually method acting, gaining weight in order to look more ordinary. Like an overworked housewife, in fact. The whole inch she put onto her waist was actually a sign of her Very Serious Dedication To Her Craft.
