WTFacebook

I was puttering around Facebook one afternoon, like I do on the slow days at work, and was ambushed out of nowhere by the following advertisement:



Oh where do I begin with this one? The cruelty? The reinforcement of unrealistic stereotypes?

The person in the photo is not disgusting by any means that I can see. Her stores of fatty tissue seem to me to be perfectly normal, and even healthy. Nowhere near the outer bounds of weightiness, she is not obese in any sense of the word except maybe the sense believed by worshipers in the stick-thin cult. It is good to have some fat about one's person, after all. Really, when a person with cute love handles is attacked for being "OMG Disgusting!", the culture needs to do some serious self-examination. Bodies generally have a natural weight and shape that they will generally hover around, given that the person is active and the diet isn't insane. Nothing disgusting about it. There is no merit in being extremely skinny, nor is there any shame if one comes by it naturally. I personally think that some flesh on the bones is a very good thing - breasts are made of fat, after all - and I think I may be in the majority. The real majority, that is, not the manufactured majority produced by the odd fluctuations of our cultural ideals. Hell, we're all used to being bombarded with the unhealthy diet ads and the pressures to look like Twiggy, but I was a bit blindsided by the fact that it was Facebook. I hadn't noticed Facebook's ads being blatantly discriminatory, offensive, and maddening before this. I'll look harder. And send emails.