
Whitney Thompson is, to date, the only plus size winner of
America’s Next Top Model. Cycle 10, B.A.(Before Angelea.)
Unlike many
ANTM winners, Whitney has done anything but fall off the radar… or marry a Brady.
Thompson has been a working plus size model signed with Wilhelmina, was the 2010 Ambassador to the National Eating Disorder Association, involved in the Love Your Body & NOH8 campaigns, and has started her own line of jewelry and candles.
Color me impressed? Absolutely.
When I came across a news story claiming Whitney’s ad had been banned from the Super Bowl, I was outraged.
Was this a repeat of the 2010 Lane Bryant debacle, where ABC and FOX foolishly banned the commercial for the retailer’s Cacique line of plus size lingerie because they claimed it was too sexy?
Where are my outrage panties, because I’m about to be outraged, y’all.
So I dug deeper.
Thompson recently launched a dating site geared specifically toward plus-size women,
The Big and The Beautiful. Thompson claims to have created the site so that a curvy woman can feel free to be herself and post pictures, knowing full well the men on the site are there “for — not in spite of — her physical attributes.”
Ahem, okay. This whole plus dating thing hasn’t sat well with me since FOX’s ill birthed
More to Love, featuring a plus-size man deciding,
The Bachelor-style, between a group of plus-size women.
Why can’t the general population date the general population, regardless of size?
I mean, I’m way more plus-size than my husband, but he found me just wandering around with the regular-sized people, and just up and agreed to marry me, anyway.
Thompson making a place for curvy women to feel comfortable is great, but at the expense of sidelining equality and acceptance among women of all sizes makes me squeamish.
So, the ad for The Big and The Beautiful was nixed, and Thompson is crying foul. Is the NFL size-ist?
Just click on the link below to watch the commercial and judge for yourself.
http://youtu.be/L4G6k5ZeHkg
While no one can know for sure why the NFL rejected the ad, if I had to take a guess, I would say because it’s, well, horribly shot
and horribly offensive to women,
all women.
Is that the message we want to put out into the world? Attractive douche bags in suits are tired of picking up thin and sexually experienced women on the normal-sized person dating sites, so now they’ll do their lady banging shopping on a site specializing in curvy women who… by obvious definition are not as sexually experienced… because we’re unattractive… or we’re secretly horny if only someone would pay attention to us…. or we’re the only option because all the skinny girls are in comas… or um… honestly, somebody stop me when any of this makes sense.
I’m all for lifting up women and empowering them to love their bodies, but to me, this is an abuse of size discrimination to drum up some buzz for, what equates to, a fetish site.
Frankly, I will be happy for women and teens not to see this ad during the Super Bowl. Now, what can we do about those ridiculous GoDaddy commercials?