Not thin? Okay, you're fat!

This blog post is written in response to the article “Social Lubricant: How a Marketing Campaign Became the Catalyst for a Societal Debate” by Rob Walker. It focuses on some advertisements by Dove that feature the Dove Girls, who are women of all shapes and sizes photographed in their underwear. It has created chatter in the media, and all because they are using average and curvy women.

Mr. Walker does an admirable job attempting to explain Dove’s motivation for the campaign, and why it is a refreshing sight. He refrains from calling it a publicity stunt. He and I agree that most Americans have grown tired of seeing nothing but too skinny models gracing the covers of fashion magazines, while we check-out at the local grocery store.

My problem with his assessment is the use of the word “fat”. Now, I wasn’t born yesterday, and I know that the use of the fat joke is, and probably always will be acceptable in American society. However, in a story about a company using normal, everyday women in their ads, I find its use to be a bit classless. Even the first word of the story is fat.  I know that he only uses it twice, but I feel that the whole article could have been written without it. At one point, he even mentions that maybe their next move should “to show up in a Burger King ad, enjoying an Enormous Omelet Sandwich.”  Maybe, it could be my own personal struggles with weight loss that makes me so sensitive to the subject. But this could be a story about the beauty in the common woman, but instead, he turns it into an article about “fat” girls.

Now we know what his opinion of a normal woman is