Gillette decided to insert itself in yet another unnecessary controversy of its own making, this time tweeting out an advertisement of a morbidly obese model.
Go out there and slay the day ?? ? Glitter + Lazers pic.twitter.com/cIc0R3JfpR
— Gillette Venus (@GilletteVenus) April 3, 2019
While no one ought to be mocked or vilified for their weight, the trend of normalizing morbid obesity under the guise of “body positivity” is dangerous and unhealthy. Why would anyone want to trade one body extreme for another?
Here’s a novel idea: what about featuring an average-sized model?
By design, runway models have to be interchangeable, wafer-thin, and extremely tall. That won’t change just because the woke brigade demands it, but there’s a legitimate void in commercial modeling for women who fall in the middle range of weight and height distributions.
The average runway model has a body mass index of 16, between being “severely” underweight and “moderately” underweight, according to the World Health Organization. Again, the functionality of having androgynous models, who look more like coat hangers than people, benefits the frenetic environment of fashion shows, but there’s no real reason for women so thin or obese that they lose their menstrual cycles to be lionized by the advertisement industry. Don’t believe me? Just look at the data.
A 2012 study found that Caucasian men consider a body mass index of 18.8 as ideal. For reference, that would mean a 5’6″ woman would be 116.5 pounds, while her runway counterpart would be under 100 pounds. The average supermodel has a waist-to-hip ratio, a key component of secondary sex characteristics, of just 0.68, but men in the study prefer a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.73. A 2018 survey of 1,000 Americans found that while the average woman considers a body mass index of 21.3 ideal, the average man would prefer she had one of 24.3.
And a 2004 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that, all modeling be damned, the ideal female body has a normal body mass index, ranging between 18.5 and 24.9, and a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7.
Some companies have begun to catch on to the lack of normal women in fashion. In the first quarter of 2018 alone, sales at Aerie, a lingerie brand which famously casts average — not obese or emaciated — models, grew by a whopping 38%. And Victoria’s Secret notably replaced Adriana Lima with Barbara Palvin, who’s a dress size 2 or 4, on their “Angel” roster.
The “ideal” woman is still smaller than the average American, but that’s because America has a crisis of obesity, not because our aesthetics have changed. One in 4 Americans suffers from obesity, costing the country $147 billion annually and leading to the top causes of preventable, premature deaths. Why celebrate a condition that kills in the name of wokeness when the science shows that everyone’s attracted to healthy, fit women?
