Co-authored by Heather Widdows and Jessica Sutherland, University of Warwick<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been over 10 years since Protein World\u2019s notorious “beach body ready<\/a>” advert received spontaneous pushback from the British public. The large yellow advert showed a beautiful blonde in a yellow bikini staring down the camera. It asked in large black letters, “Are you beach body ready?” <\/p>\n The emphatic response was\u2014give us a break, sod that! In one way or another, people objected. The adverts on the London Underground\u2014the metro\u2014were routinely defaced. Sometimes, Protein World was told where to go; other times, the advert was answered, “Yes, you are.” Pushbacks included “your body is fine just as it is” and “your body is not a commodity.” When the campaign transferred to the U.S., it was greeted in the same way. The campaign went viral with the hashtag #eachbodysready. The UK\u2019s Advertising<\/a> Standards Authority received 378 complaints, and a change.org petition demanding the advert be removed amassed over 43,000 signatures.<\/p>\n Ultimately, the Advertising Standards Authority didn\u2019t uphold the complaint, ruling that<\/a> \u201cthe headline and image were unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence\u201d and that they did \u201cnot consider the image of the model would shame<\/a> women who had different body shapes into believing they needed to take a slimming supplement to feel confident wearing swimwear in public.\u201d1 Despite doubling down and defending their advert, Protein World ended up pulling it over concerns that its health claims were not substantiated. The bottom line, no pun intended, is that it was ill-conceived, exactly the wrong message for the time. <\/p>\n But a decade on, things are different. In 2015, at the height of body positivity<\/a>, #everybodysready wasn\u2019t the only hashtag to go viral; others included #EffYourBeautyStandards, #CelebrateMySize, and #LoveYourBody. Over the decade, the pressure to be perfect has grown. Impossibly perfect glass skin is ideal, as are perfectly round peachy buttocks on slim legs, Barbie-esque snatched waists, and gravity-defying breasts. No longer are cosmetic procedures extreme, something done only by the rich or the vain; they are normal and normalised. Injectables are expected parts of beauty routines, necessary upkeep, with trips to the clinic as essential as trips to the hairdresser and dentist, and sometimes even done at the same time. And it seems like everyone is using GPL-1s as the tyranny of thinness bites like never before.<\/p>\n If many of us were asked today, “Are you beach body ready?” the answer would almost certainly be “no.” Very likely, the “no” would be a resigned “no,” with no shouting or defacing, an inevitable recognition that our bodies are far from perfect and we know it. How did we go from there to here? Part of the answer is the pandemic. Part is the move to a visual culture. And part of it is that the new ideal is global, normalising beauty practices and turning these practices into health and hygiene practices.<\/p>\n But these are partial stories. Underlying all of this is a change in what we value, how we identify, and what we think appearance means. In a very real way, our bodies are now ourselves. We may value appearance more than ever before. Preteen girls are influencers teaching other preteen girls how to get perfect skin, even though their skin will never be more perfect. Women in their 20s are having preventive Botox, and men are feeling the pressure, too<\/a>. The pressure to be beach body ready doesn\u2019t seem as outrageous today as it did then. The world has changed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Co-authored by Heather Widdows and Jessica Sutherland, University of Warwick It\u2019s been over 10 years since Protein World\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":667006,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-667005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667005\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/667006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}