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Gold.

Rusty

Keep up the great articles Melinda.

Severin

What to one person seems confident can to another seem arrogant. Perhaps the most objective assessment is "is this person's self-concept accurate?" I suggest that many of the 99% of women who think they could be better looking are fairly right. That less men are dis-satisfied with our looks is something that women should be proud of.

Thanks Melinda for telling it like it is.

Lovable claims to be making these grand changes to our culture of eating disorders and body image issues. Yet they continue to objectify women to promote their products. They promote the tall, skinny, model type figure, a body type that only a tiny percentage of women have naturally, and many others try to starve themselves into. The images they have used are overly sexual, e.g. licking ice cream dribbling down, finger in mouth, etc. The message I get from this ad is: to be hot, I need to be tall and skinny, and overly sexy. I thought this was for underwear that was being marketed to women. It looks strangely similar to the cover of FHM (magazine).

Lovable could have used different models, of all different body types, heights, breast sizes, etc. They could have come up with a campaign that is more real than soft porn. There are many things they could have done differently if they are indeed trying to change our culture's unhealthy obsession with appearance. And this is what they used.

Lovable's talk of positive changes is all talk. They are a part of the problem.

You're observations are spot on Melinda - this is another typical example of a marketing campaign selling sex to men (luring them to buy the product for their partner in the hope they might look more like Jen H /'sexy' model), and to women (to remind them that they need the product to appear more like Jen H/the 'sexy' model for their partner). Its pretty easy for Lovable, the rest of our media/popular culture has done the hard work for them - they are just being 'cheeky', the new euphemism for sexualisation...

No wonder our society is dealing with young girls' self esteem issues and sexual provocativeness - their own parents generation keep sending them messages through media/pop culture that they need to be worried, but somehow us adults just don't seem to get it - what we do know is that good sales make good salaries, and good salaries mean we can buy more stuff, so of course we take the easy 'sex sells' road.

The worst thing about Lovable is that they are trying to pretend they aren't doing anything wrong - if they didn't harp on about all this self esteem promotion no one would be saying anything. Keep pressuring them, there are people out there who don't want their daughters growing up thinking they are sex objects.

honestly "of a marketing campaign selling sex to men" - really?

MTR seems to think that the images are targeted at men as well.
I really doubt it. My guess is that most women do the bulk of their own underwear shopping.

The validity of that view lies in where the add's are run, a piece of information I don't have.

Are they run in publications targeting men or ones targeting women? On the odd occasion I bother looking at women's mag's there is clearly no shortage of advertising in a similar vein.

My guess is that the images are designed to appeal primarily to women. Trying to make it about men's sexual interest distracts from understanding what this is really about.

MTR's distaste for sexuality and in particular men's sexual gratification clouds her understanding of much of what she tries to write about. She makes some good points about the double standards of the public claims vs the reality of the advertising but by assuming that the images are there to appeal to men I think she misses the point. Strange as it man seem to MTR women can have sexual feelings of their own.

Whilst I often have doubts about the ethics of a lot of advertising one thing they rarely mess up is demographics. Marketing women's underwear to men sounds like a hard way to sell a product.

R0bert