This'll go nicely with my stress-induced bingefest

[mothwing]

Big women like sexy underwear, too? And there are ads for that underwear? Neat, I thought.
How did the network react? "Omg, it's a fat person in underwear, cover your eyes! Take it down!"

This is the ad in question:

Also, this post about going to the OB/GYN while fat made me incredibly angry. It shouldn't have, after all the other nice stuff I've heard about people's GYNs (sexual harassment, violation, humiliation, scare tactics into submitting to a procedure, dismissing concerns and pain as "this doesn't hurt, ever, so pull yourself together" etc., and that's just the people I know offline).

Yes, I get it. Fat people ought to blob along elsewhere and not subject themselves to the innocent eyes of other people (even though, as junkscience claims, this will make perfectly thin women worry about their body image so deep, deep down that even they themselves don't realise). Yeah. I'll go do some homework and let my lifesaving chocolate nuts prepare me for boobquake.

Comments

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

I read some of them, and yeah.

I am pretty small and definitely not boobtastic, and I don't think at all that boobs=sexy in real life. But in the media mind, they are used as shorthand (although I don't think that's all of what's going on here--the women in some of the Dove commercials have similar figures, and I don't think those are meant to be sexy).

But also something shocking in the media about a larger woman (defined really loosely because this is the media!) being confident and actively sexy--because larger women can maybe, maybe be pretty, but should be pretty in an unassuming, insecure, grateful for male attention way. And the woman in the commercial does not look grateful for having a date, she looks like she knows she's awesome.

Does that make sense? I may be reading too much into the commercial, because I identified with it more than I normally do with underwear commercials not because I look more like her (I don't look anything like her or regular underwear models) but because she appeared to be actively sexy and confident rather than artistic sexualized decoration arranged sort of abstractly. Like--I guess I felt like this commercial was trying to sell WOMEN underwear, and VS commercials are trying to sell MEN women's underwear.

[bronnyelsp.livejournal.com]

But also something shocking in the media about a larger woman (defined really loosely because this is the media!) being confident and actively sexy--because larger women can maybe, maybe be pretty, but should be pretty in an unassuming, insecure, grateful for male attention way. And the woman in the commercial does not look grateful for having a date, she looks like she knows she's awesome.

Does that make sense?

Definitely. I think how I would put it is that she is sexual rather than sexualised. Other people are saying a sexual agent rather than a sexual object, which I could go for too.

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that. I am chronically tl;dr.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

While I do think that she's still sexualised, I do agree with you about her having an unusual sense of agency and purpose for a woman in an undies ad. I like that.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Underwear models are usually not sexy, they're just kind of...there. Like modern art. Victoria's Secret commercials are many things, but I do not think sexy is one of them.
Like--I guess I felt like this commercial was trying to sell WOMEN underwear, and VS commercials are trying to sell MEN women's underwear.#

Yes, that's what I got from it, too, although I can't say I can put my finger on why that is, that is to say, why the VS commercials aren't sexy, even though I think they're intended to be sexy. Maybe it's an element of sensuality, and, as you guys point out, agency that's missing in the VS ads, as well as the fact that the body types that usually feature in those ads are so similar that they stop registering, in a way. She definitely does appear to be more focused than the women in VS ads I've seen who just basically loll around beds in their dessous, in poses not aimed at a female audience.

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

I think the agency part is huge, although it's kind of a hard thing to define. It's hard to find non-subjective markers.