Hi, I hope this isn't considered rude.

My friend wrote this really excellent article some time ago and I wanted to share it with people I figured might be interested - it's about the contradiction inherent in a size 0 model advertising ice cream and the pressures and problems it can cause dieters.

(full piece - it's two pages long!
Playtime - an Arts and Culture Magazine » Blog Archive » A Conspicuous Lack of Consumption)
***
Every year around May, Walls ice cream endeavour to persuade the British public that, despite black skies and torrential rain, it is actually summer and therefore time to consume large quantities of frozen dessert.

This year, the face of their Magnum campaign is the immaculately coiffed Eva Longoria Parker (5’2”/ 24” W/ 32”B). She smoulders against a warm chocolate background, limbs artfully arranged at an impossibly uncomfortable angle, wearing a black silk dress carefully selected to walk the tightrope between sexy and classy and couturier cut to emphasize her tiny waist (24”!). She clutches the ice cream determinedly, the glitter of a massive engagement rock on her delicate left hand offset by the one tiny chunk of yellow vanilla that’s visible beneath the barest and most ladylike of nibbles. She is supposed to be the woman who “has it all”: designer clothes, a designer body, and a designer boyfriend. The master sign of her empowerment is the phallic ice-cream she’s grasping. Her relationship to it is carefully ambiguous, balanced with precarious post-feminist precision. Is she appropriating the commodity and lending it her star status? Or is the ice cream yet another of the material signs that signals her specialness? Further, is the chocolate giving her pleasure, or is she pleasuring it?

The advert’s illogicality is daring. In Longoria’s hands, the ice cream looks about as convincing as the microphone clasped by a lip-synching chanteuse. Yet there’s not even the slightest attempt to hide the obvious disjunction between her famous physique (5’2”/ 24” W/ 32” B!) and the Magnum’s nutritional composition (260 cal/26.7g carb/15.5g fat). Because she’s not just a size 0 – oh no! that would be positively plebeian! - she’s a 00 – a super-special size only reachable by a stratospherically successful starlet. When she recently gained weight, reaching the positively porcine proportions of an ordinary size 0, the celebrity media hyperventilated their way to hundreds of headlines. Was she unwell? Pregnant? Desperately unhappy? Poor Longoria (now 5’2”/ 25” W/ 34”C) was forced to release a statement that she was actually method acting, gaining weight in order to look more ordinary. Like an overworked housewife, in fact. The whole inch she put onto her waist was actually a sign of her Very Serious Dedication To Her Craft.

That is so funny. The pressures and problems that an ice cream ad featuring Eva longoria would cause dieters? lol ok

That article makes no sense. What's the point supposed to be? That advertisements make food look and sound temptingly delicious, causing us to have a desire to by their product and eat it? That's what advertisements are supposed to do, sooooo...

i agree though - that sometimes ads can be too persuasive and lead us to the wrong path - However that is where self-control comes to a test, u can't simply believe what others say- YOU are responsible for ur actions, and u better take them independently without any external interfearence

I don't understand what the deal is? So she's eating ice cream, so she looks beautiful and so she is tiny? There is the possibility that slim people eat ice cream and slim people might engage in exercise.

Put it this way, would it be better if an obese person was eating the icecream? Or does it even matter, it's an ice cream. This is what adds are about, you make the choice if you want some, just don't be greedy.

You don't have to be overweight and eating ice cream, you just need to be in control with your whole diet to look a particular way and be able to have some indulgences.

It's well written. Awesome alliteration too.
I like it because it calls out the junk food industry for being as ridiculous as it is.

The reason they have skinny people, is not to be realistic, but because it sells more. I'm also not sure that Eva Longoria abstains completely from ice cream, she could eat it occasionally and exercise on a regular basis, making its effect nearly non-existent.

Hahahahaha XD ... eva longoria and ice cream? the question is.. who eat who?