I mean, yes, we rear them on a steady stream of unusually thin actresses, musicians, and models, with hardly any size diversity in evidence (and the thin-only aesthetic seems extra pronounced in shows targeted at teenagers).
At the same time, we make sodas and chips and candy available in their school vending machines (with the schools taking a cut, arguably because education is insufficiently funded by us) and we slash P.E. programs as a way of cutting back expenses.
Plus, there's the way we adults sometimes talk about our own bodies, disparaging our thighs while gnawing on a lettuce leaf. Some of us even criticize our daughters for their weight, and many of their peers will do it too. So yeah, we do a pretty good job of setting them up with distorted body expectations and few tools for pursuing a healthy lifestyle.
But is it enough? Sure, eight-year-olds go on diets, and our young women develop eating disorders, or at a minimum engage in disordered eating, patterns which often dog them for their entire lives. Yet couldn't we do more? Can't we start actually marketing ineffective and fraudulent diet products directly to them, so they can really start the cycle of desperation minus information early on? Don't we need to do more to make sure they desperately swallow one bottle of snake oil after another in a futile search for the magic cure for their imperfect, loathed bodies? Shouldn't we be teaching them to fall for one quick and often unhealthy fix after another as early as possible, instead of occasionally trying to promote informed food choices, daily physical activity, and realistic body acceptance?
Oh but wait: Thank you, Pink Patch! Because not only are you a total crap product, but you also market directly to young girls and women! The Pink Patch, in case you missed it, borrows the idea from things like nicotine patches used for quitting smoking, but minus the actual effectiveness. It purportedly has some seaweed blah blah metabolism enhancing hoosie whatsit in it, and a bunch of other ingredients. Of course the amount of each ingredient is a proprietary secret, so it's kinda hard to evaluate. But hey, does it work? Let's see: It's unregulated by the FDA, it has no clinical trials supporting it, and it has not been sufficiently reviewed by independent consumer groups. The FTC has filed suit against similar weight loss patch products, and there may have even been consumer complaints about it. But hey, they have positive reviews on their website (which I won't link to, sorry) and I'm sure you can totally trust those. Like this one:
"I spent most of high school being teased for my weight. The popular girls seemed to have everything: the gorgeous bodies, the cutest boys. I was not going to feel that way in college too! The summer before I left, I tried the Pink Patch. I lost 15 lbs! It changed my life completely. Now I'm in my sophomore year and I'M the popular girl. Thank you Pink Patch!"
Wow. The pink patch won't just make you thinner---you get popularity and happiness too. It changes your life. No exploitative advertising there, of course. No selling sad dreams to the lonely teenagers, the insecure girls who feel ugly and are told they are ugly and assume they have only themselves to blame, themselves and their flawed, imperfectly-sized bodies. It's not like adolescence is a vulnerable time and all... Why this is just spot-on for our girls. Excuse me, I have to go hit something for a minute...
Back again, and I've regained my composure I think. Now, any lack of evidence supporting the effectiveness of the patch shouldn't stop the manufacturers from advertising on Facebook and other youth-trafficked sites of course, using pictures of very young women. They gotta target those young girls, because how else are you going to get rich on the backs of our anxious daughters? In fact, they'll keep sending you pink patches if you don't cancel your subscription, so they have a built-in way to make money off kids who fail to read the fine print or who aren't perhaps especially savvy consumers (you know, the kind who might fall for a diet scam in the first place.) And it's so cute, the pink patch, the little rosy crap sticker that magically melts that offending weight away. Hey girls, soon all your friends will be using it! Course they say you have to be 18 to use it, and on the internet, no way some young girl is gonna get her hands on a product while underage, especially when the models in the advertisements look more like 15. Cough.
Maybe when my daughter gets a little older, she'll be taken by something like this. That thought doesn't make my blood run cold AT ALL. Grrrrr.
So congratulations, Pink Patch makers. In an age where offensive and ridiculous diet charlatanism is endemic, you actually managed to truly disgust me.
To read more and see the antidote, click here.
