Giving dieting a bad name
posted 2007/03/01 at 20:51
You know, as much as I may dislike it, I've come to accept that companies will continue to market their products in ways that reinforce traditional gender stereotypes. The marketers responsible for this kind of advertising will say that it tests well in focus groups, that it allows them to segment their marketing efforts across easily identifiable lines, and that they aren't the ones who should be responsible for instigating social change through the command they have in modern media. I disagree wholeheartedly, but at the same time I've resigned myself to the fact that this isn't going to change any time soon.That being said, NutriSystem's latest television advertising campaign couldn't be worse if it tried. It doesn't help that they're running different-length versions of the same two commercials, one of which features only men and one only women. In the women's campaign they've got a bunch of beautiful but unrecognizable faces, but in the men's campaign they signed all these sports people like Dan Marino, Don Shula, Cris Carter, John Kruk, Bob Golic, and others (but, of course, with a heavy focus on football players because football's a man's game). While the men talk about the hearty portions of "man food" Nutrisystem sends you, the women fawn on how wonderful the chocolate tastes. It's almost comical the way the commercials bring up and reinforce all these old gender roles that have been a staple of American culture for so long in such a patently obvious way.
What isn't funny is how, in the women's commercial, one of the woman says something along the lines of, "My husband says he's glad that he's got his real wife back." America has certainly latched onto this notion that "you can never be too thin" long before I was born, but women have it far worse in this regard than men, and the problem has only seemed to get worse over the years. If a man is carrying a few extra pounds, he's just "husky" and others will likely think he's "earned" the right to proudly carry extra weight because he used to play football. A woman who doesn't fall neatly into her "ideal" BMI, on the other hand, will be chastised for being slovenly, and overindulgent, and not fulfilling her primary role in life, which is, of course, to be attractive to her husband. Men certainly get bad messages about body size, I'm not denying that, but this commercial by NutriSystem spells out, in as direct a manner as I can recall, how much worse women have it; women just aren't considered "real" in this country unless they're rail-skinny.
Perhaps I shouldn't say that I've gotten used to this kind of unethical advertising, but it's certainly something that I'm not expecting will disappear anytime soon. Like I said before, for the men in the NutriSystem commercials to be throwing around footballs while the women go on and on about how wonderful the chocolates are is, on a level, kind of amusing, especially since whoever wrote this advertising campaign didn't seem to make the slightest effort to camouflage the appeals to these old gender stereotypes. For a woman to come out and say that she wasn't a "real" person because she wasn't super-skinny, though ... that honestly offends me. It's not like I have the money to afford NutriSystem in the first place, but after seeing these commercials all over the place there is no way I would ever fork any of my money over to them.
joepet at 1/3/07 23:51: