On dietary dreams and the power of choice

At one point during my grandfather's wake in 2011, my grandmother took me around the room, introducing me to various neighbours, family friends, and long-lost cousins. Her introduction was consistent - "This is my granddaughter, Meaghan. She's the real smart one. She's gotten all kinds of scholarships from the university." This was largely met with empathetic smiling and nodding from well-wishers who really couldn't care less about my academic endeavours. "Well, she must get that from you," one distant relative kindly replied.

"Don't be so foolish. I never got to go to university," was my grandmother's immediate response.

It's a moment I'll never forget. My grandmother's answer was instant, matter-of-fact. There was no hesitation in her voice, no palpable sense of regret. I didn't get the impression that she had wanted to go to university but had been financially or intellectually unable (and let me assure you that the latter was most definitely not the case). Instead, the implied subtext was that university, quite simply, wasn't an option for girls of her generation like it is for girls of mine. That choice wasn't even in her cards.

I quickly realized that this idea of "choice" is integral to my definition of feminism. The ability to choose to get married. Or not. To have children. Or not. To opt out of university. To bypass beauty products. Or to wear Spanx under your graduation gown as you accept your Master's degree. The belief that people deserve the freedom to have choices, opinions, dreams, and the limitless ability to enact them without fear of prejudice is, for me, part of what it means to be a feminist.

So the latest Weight Watchers ad campaign is deeply troubling to me.

Each ad opens on a little girl enumerating her dreams for her adult self. "When I grow up, I want to float around in my big, pink bubble," one quips. "I want to be a dolphin tamer, and I want to swim to the bottom of the ocean," another declares. The tone of these commercials is silly, but optimistic and hopeful. These girls have opinions, unrealistic as they may be, on where they want their lives to go. They have unabashedly fantastical visions for their future selves, visions that are in no way restricted by their gender or their bodies.

The entire point of the campaign is about daring to dream. About capturing and reclaiming the boundless optimism that defines us as children. About refusing to let our own fears and feelings of inadequacy keep us from dreaming and hoping big and large.

Remember when you thought anything was possible? It still is.

It's about women making choices for themselves. And the choice is clear.

To be thin.

I'm not dismissing Weight Watchers' validity as a weight loss program. I know people who have achieved great success following Weight Watchers, and I do believe it's one of the better diet plans out there - inherent to the program isn't the idea of denying yourself food, but of instead learning healthy and balanced eating habits.

But there's something grossly disturbing about conflating the innocent and unapologetic optimism of a little girl with a grown woman's dissatisfaction with her body and her desire to fit the mainstream definition of beauty.

And this is very much a women's issue. None of the prospective clients in this commercial is visibly male. In fact, Weight Watchers is an exceptionally female-centred diet plan - out of all of its celebrity endorsers, I can't think of one who was a man. The entire brand centres on women encouraging women to lose weight, and if it's true that "real men don't diet," then the implicit suggestion is that real women do. And should. Nay, it's something we should all dream of doing one day. 

(Source)

I'm very confused by the marketing here. Do women, by contrast, not eat real food? Or achieve real weight loss? Is this man somehow superior to the riff-raff women who subscribe to plain ol' Weight Watchers? Does his penis make his diet theoretically better than mine? SO MANY QUESTIONS. 

What bothers me the most about these commercials is that they aren't depicting women who look as though they require a diet plan at all. I honestly don't think I would be as offended if the women in these ads were obese and desiring to make healthy changes in their lives - not because society expects them to be skinny, but because they, as people, have decided that they want to embrace a healthier lifestyle. Of course I know that "thinness" is not synonymous with "healthiness." But this commercial would be very different if the narrative suggested that by believing "anything is possible," women can believe in their ability and determination to take control of their lives and develop a positive relationship with food. If this were about aspiring toward healthiness, about Weight Watchers being a healthy choice, then that would be a positive, empowering message I could get behind.

Except the word "health" isn't mentioned once in these commercials. Neither is "nutrition." Or "empowerment." The image that the viewer is instead bombarded with for thirty seconds is of already thin women being inordinately excited at the prospect of getting thinner. The suggestion is that the little girls in these ads are merely part of a cycle - that one day, their sense of wonderment at their own boundless potential will subside, and that they too will look in the mirror and be dissatisfied with what they see. That it's inevitable. That we all end up hating our bodies eventually. The entire campaign feeds on women's ubiquitous sense of bodily imperfection - "You've always dreamed of being skinny, and now's the time."

The first time I saw this commercial, it made me truly and deeply sad.

I want so much more than this for my future daughter, or granddaughter, or daughter-in-law. I want her to have dreams and goals that aren't shaped by a socially-imposed sense of inadequacy. I never want her to stop being amazed by her body and her mind and what she can do with them. I hope her power of choice and her ability to dream is never compromised or sullied. 

And I hope that this post will seem as archaic to her as my grandmother's exclusion from university seemed to me.