Protein World: "Body Positivity" and a lesson on how not to motivate people

[Popido]

The company isn't even 2 year old yet, so they don't give a fuck about feminists trying to shame them. Infact, this controversy boosted their sales, which is why they went on to twitter to keep it going.

Got any figures to back that claim up?

Nope. Stumbled on Breitbart article on this while surfing the waves.

And in a comment that will surely pour vinegar into the protester's wounds, Staveley claims the protest has actually helped his company's brand profile and increased sales.

"I couldn't have dreamt or hoped of having our advert reproduced more times across the news networks and social media as it has been done," says Richard. "This protest has been absolutely phenomenal for us and entirely counter-productive for them.

"At the height of the protest, myself and the CEO took over the Twitter feed from our usual girl, and it was hilarious. They were saying, "ooh, somebody's getting fired tomorrow" - but it was us: the CEO and head of marketing. We had a good chuckle at that.

"We're not a faceless corporation, and 99 per cent of the time it's great. At times we will be sailing close to the line - and perhaps overstep the mark. But that's entirely part of the strategy.

"We were answering these tweets from the airport in New York and by that time it was 'bugger off, this is stupid'.

"That's the brand. By this time, people were watching our Twitter feed as a source of entertainment. Our customers adored it and now are even more behind the brand. We've added 5000 new customers. Sales are booming."

 

[DrWut]

I think the largest logical error I have seen regarding this add is claiming that if I say that being thin and strong is good I am saying being fat is horrible and shaming all fat people and saying they should not go to the beach. Expressing one's aesthetic preferences is not condemning people who don't fit them.

Yeah that is generally the case. There is a large population on tumblr and twitter who thrive on making something out of nothing. Finding insult where there is none. Shouting down people who disagree with them. The sad part of this, when someone has a legitimate issue it gets kicked down as SJW stuff because of how much social outrage there is over every little thing.
Still Protein World's PR behavior was idiotic in the extreme. Buying in is exactly how they get you.

Well, as much as I enjoy being stubborn I can't say I don't agree with you a bit there. It looks like they decided to go about with a "come at me bro" attitude and that is going to overclock the outrage machine.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

I'm not saying that the joke lead to actual violence. But as a trans person I can see exactly why the trans community took offence to it. It's a sensitive issue, in no small part because being trans makes you a target just because you're trans.

Understanding something does not equate to agreeing. I can understand how an old guy in the south can have racist tendencies but that doesn't mean I still don't find his views reprehensible. There is a problem with violence against trans-people, but that doesn't mean it has anything to do whatsoever with the joke in question. It's an appeal to emotion rather than reason with very faulty reasoning behind it, so I'm not going to regard such a reaction as legitimate in any way.

In the context of the joke I never said it was the cause of any violence, nor related to the violence. Still it's a joke that references transpanic. Which is when a straight person goes to bed with a trans person for sex with out knowing their partner was trans, when they find out they panic. That's what happened in this joke. Regardless of it explicitly saying the person was trans, or not, it's heavily implied. That's also part of the joke, implying that someone slept with a trans person. That's where the outcry came from in part. It's also an apparent suicide joke, again something that's poor taste to people who have had issues with suicidal thoughts.

Now I've said before that this whole little issue got way out of hand. It was basically a cry for Obsidian to redact the joke over it's inherently offensive nature to certain parties. Still I actually found it worth a chuckle because of how off color it was. Was I offended? Yes. But that's kind of why it was a little funny to me, because it was offensive to me personally, and I can take a joke. Others apparently can't, but that's neither here nor there.

 

[Strazdas]

1) More than that hormones also play a rather massive role.
2) Apples and oranges. Also the health/fitness nuts are constantly playing a blame game with the overweight. Still the social pressure on overweight people can be debilitating to some. To your logic the "suck at math" types also shouldn't be expected to perform at the level of a math genius. So fat people shouldn't even try?
3) To some what is self inflected is also a compulsion that cannot be helped.
4) One person's experience does not equate to the experiences of everyone who happens to be in the same situation. Many large people have difficulty with activity.
5) For the two out of three. Tell that to people with Type one Diabetes, especially adult onset. Some people also acquire Type two while at optimal weight. Also I know far more fit people who have suffered heart disease than obese ones. Stress is also a major factor, and many medical professionals believe it to be the leading one.
6) Well the media and advertisements sure are, as well as quite a few health food and fitness Junkies. Though with any reasonable person it's a fair point that it does take time and is a process that people work towards. Also "willpower" is a variable, once again one experience does not equate to the experience of a entire group.

1) looked into it and the best i could find is lower Estogen during menopause. thats about it. care to share more information? Also your claim here seems to contradict statistics. CDC data [http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db82.pdf] shows that 35.5% of men and 35.8% of women are obese. For the women who make up that 0.3% of the population, this is obviously important, but in the big picture, that's not exactly a huge difference - not enough to prove that women are "more prone" to obesity than men in any significant amount of way.
2) Hardly. In both cases somone is not good enough at something (your example - loosing weight, mine - mathematical equations) and are trying to blame people who are good at it for that. Fat people should try. they just shouldnt blame people who aren't fat for not succeeding.
3) If you cannot stop eating - go to a doctor. Elsehow that is self-inflicted case here. I mean i admit there are people with mental compulsion disabilities and some of them may be actually unable to stop eating, but they are so rare finding one is usually news-material.
4) Fair enough, my example was anecdotical. Though id be much more willing to believe that its the other way around. People that have difficulty with activity get fat. Not that activity is necessary to not be fat. Loosing weight is mostly diet, not exercise. Exercise is more the healthy part in this case.
5) i never claimed that everyone with diabetes got it from being overweight, i said its a larger factor in getting diabetes to begin with. Do note that American Diabetes Association claims that Type One diabetes only happens in 5% of Diabetes case. which makes it a fringe group in already fringe group. It also does not prevent person from loosing weight if he is taking his insulin appropriately. I understand this being a big problem before modern medicine, but not so anymore. And who is bringing anecdotical cases now? I too know more fit people who suffered heard disaese, but thats simply because i know more fit people overall and not because its more common. in fact obesity and heart disease has already been directly linked by medics. its not something you can just brush off.
6) Ok, i cna give you that some media is quite crazy when it comes to those things. the latest "how is this still a thing" was when they had to save a life of a popular singer here because she was thinning herself with a stomach parasite. I do understand that such extremism should not be supported. but that wasnt the case in this thread to begin with. noone told people to starve as far as i saw and i tried to read every post so far.

In that case, I wasn't solely talking about the ads. I agree that people were overreacting to them, which you'd know if you'd cared to read past my first sentence.

What I was reacting to was the complete absence of professionalism on Protein World's part. No, I do not care in the slightest how tired you are of false accusations of body images and sexism; If you[footnote]As in, general you, not you specifically.[/footnote] represent a company, you should always strive to act in a way that reinforces a positive image of that company. I expect a worker to not sink to grade school levels of pettiness.

Dismissing and insulting potential customers is not gaining you any fans.

As already mentioned in response to OP, i do agree that the responses werent the best, but i dont agree that the intents behind them were wrong.

Dismissing people that talk nonsense is perfectly fine, even if it comes from companies PR (which is most often actually minimum wage no education person "responsible for social media". No insults were made by companys PR that im aware of. unless i missed something, then please do point out.

Was this comment really neccessary? Like, did you really have to say this? Of all the things to point out in my post, this was worth your attention?

Necessary? no, it wasnt. Its just that i found that phrase very funny and wanted to see if it was meant to express something in particular or just accidentally happened. please dont take it as me trying to be snark, i mean no offence by this.

Uh... No. There are several countries where to this day, being fat is seen as beautiful. Tonga is one example.

And honestly, anybody can see why being fat would make you extremely attractive as a partner in times of starvation. When there's no food to go around, you wanna be with the one who still manages to stay spherical.

Once again, it is not done out of sexual attractiveness but as a form of status - being rich enough to have enough food in this situation.

If you paid attention, you'd know what sparked this whole mess was the counter controversy spawned by Protein World. Basically they stooped to grade school level petty bullshit, because someone spoke out about finding the ad offensive and sexist.

No, what sparked this is a vandalism made on their advertisement posters (and yes, it is vandalism by its legal definition). Some people posted snark comments and nonsense on twitter and PW basically told them off.

Just check out this hot beauty from the stone age!

ps. You do realize that evolution literally means that things aren't hardwired and change over time...

Ah yes, a fragment of a statue is your proof of fat people being sexually attractive! Its not as if a statue could be made for any other reason than as a ancient version of porn, right?

Its not like this was a religiuos idol that isnt supposed to represent actual human or something.... oh wait, it was.

By hardwired i mean that you cannot change it yourself. Its not something you decide on. its in your genes. And as i explained already, evolution is way too slow for your "couple centuries" to have an effect. for evolution thats less than 10 generations, which is nothing. you need thousands, millions, of generations for such large changes.

Well, just like some people certainly are trying to make people feel bad about being attracted to lean and skinny people the original post I was commenting on certainly was saying that there wasn't any variety in what was considered ideal over time. That attraction to lean and skinny was in fact hardwired and a constant in the human species.

I'm mainly against the notion that somehow evolution has magically stopped since the stone age and that we now have set-in-stone tastes, preferences and instincts than can be fully explained from a modern-day retrospective of what we believe hunter-gatherer society was like (which is somehow magically 100% accurate). AKA evolutionary psychology.

Reality, including human sexuality and attraction, is a tad bit more complicated than that.

less hardwired to lean and skinny and more towards looking heathy, which as it turns out is not overweight.

You have to realize that the couple thousand years we are using to run through our civilizations is like a second on evolutions scale. evolution is very slow compared to our conception of time. large changes take millions of years. This is why we have a lot of left-over instincts from the hunter-gatherer society times that sometimes malfunction on us in modern life. we dont have to run from a tiger every other day, but the instinct is still there and sometimes it misfires.

It wasnt, nor needed, to be 100% accurate. Just more accurate than the alternative.

 

[Hagi]

less hardwired to lean and skinny and more towards looking heathy, which as it turns out is not overweight.

You have to realize that the couple thousand years we are using to run through our civilizations is like a second on evolutions scale. evolution is very slow compared to our conception of time. large changes take millions of years. This is why we have a lot of left-over instincts from the hunter-gatherer society times that sometimes malfunction on us in modern life. we dont have to run from a tiger every other day, but the instinct is still there and sometimes it misfires.

It wasnt, nor needed, to be 100% accurate. Just more accurate than the alternative.

I do agree on there being a strong preference for healthy although I would note that there's most definitely additional biases in play preferring a subset of said healthy.

That said, I do think you're underestimating evolution. One thing recent research is increasingly finding is that genes aren't nearly as static or slow to change as we previously believed. Not to mention that genes alone don't give the full picture, but rather how they express themselves which is something that can change even within generations (most strongly during pregnancy and very early childhood but even afterwards things can change).

Given significant enough change (naturally not an extinction-level event) evolution can occur more rapidly and likely has in our past. Certainly artifacts of old times will remain, but I do believe our instincts today are measurably different than those of humans thousands of years ago.

 

[Best of the 3]

I'd be interested to see where the backlash is mainly coming from. UK Backlash never really happens, we just grunt and moan a lot but never really do anything. And feel free to hate this add all that you want. I found this whole "controversy" rather funny.

 

[Strazdas]

That said, I do think you're underestimating evolution. One thing recent research is increasingly finding is that genes aren't nearly as static or slow to change as we previously believed. Not to mention that genes alone don't give the full picture, but rather how they express themselves which is something that can change even within generations (most strongly during pregnancy and very early childhood but even afterwards things can change).

Given significant enough change (naturally not an extinction-level event) evolution can occur more rapidly and likely has in our past. Certainly artifacts of old times will remain, but I do believe our instincts today are measurably different than those of humans thousands of years ago.

Sure, some things and definitely interactions with the world change. But we are talking the entire mating mechanism being overhauled and the social and physical changes accompanying it every couple hundred years. yeah, i dont buy that one bit. As far as the "last couple centuries" the only thing needed to disprove that is readding some classic literature from that time and seeing for yourself. before written word it is of course much harder.

 

[Hagi]

Sure, some things and definitely interactions with the world change. But we are talking the entire mating mechanism being overhauled and the social and physical changes accompanying it every couple hundred years. yeah, i dont buy that one bit. As far as the "last couple centuries" the only thing needed to disprove that is readding some classic literature from that time and seeing for yourself. before written word it is of course much harder.

I wouldn't call variation in attraction to be an overhaul of a mating mechanism. It's the same mechanism, just with different parameters.

I don't think a predisposition towards certain features based on environmental factors during early childhood, pregnancy and priming from the previous generation is that hard to buy. I'd say it's vastly more believable than it being based on stone age instincts.

As for the last couple of centuries, that's an obvious change. A few centuries ago slightly chubby women were featured much more prominently in both art and literature compared to today where we see much more lean and skinny women. Nothing really wrong with either and both would be medically healthy but still a change. There's also been times where lean and skinny was favored but even then with differences, many Greek female statues are rather skinny but also feature smaller breasts whereas today's models generally are better endowed in that department.

All I'm saying is that I don't believe it's quite as simple as things being hard-wired. I think there's more factors at play than that.

 

[onard]

As for the last couple of centuries, that's an obvious change. A few centuries ago slightly chubby women were featured much more prominently in both art and literature compared to today where we see much more lean and skinny women. Nothing really wrong with either and both would be medically healthy but still a change. There's also been times where lean and skinny was favored but even then with differences, many Greek female statues are rather skinny but also feature smaller breasts whereas today's models generally are better endowed in that department.

Those are simply reflections of society at those times.

In the mid ages and renaissance, between famine and epidemics, growing chubby/fat was a luxury, a sign of health and good economical situation. There's even reports of men using fake bellies as fashion acessories. "Look, I'm chubby/fat, which means I'm not wasting away from a disease and I have enough money to afford to eat what I want. I'm clearly prime partner material". Whereas nowadays food and medicine are a lot cheaper and more widespread, so even poor people can "afford" to get chubby/fat.

Meanwhile ancient greeks were one of the most partiarchal societies ever. Women were seen as a curse of the gods, and barely had any rights. Young girls were thus not given meat or fish, as that was meant for the "superior" boys and men of the family. Because of this the poor greek girls wouldn't develop their bodies properly, and that was a sign of status "Look at this weak woman, she's be easy to keep under control" (blah blak Sparta girls were different blah blah they also spent a lot less time making statues or other forms of art).

 

[elvor0]

Yeah, no for profit company should ever behave so insufferably smug, insensitive, and unapologetic. Could you imagine the backlash something like this might cause if say, some enthusiast publications suddenly snapped and started insulting their customer base. If a bunch of them got together and simultaneously wrote several stories that all basically boiled down to "We don't need you as customers. We can find better customers."? I mean, that would be colossally stupid.

Dude, get out. Take it elsewhere. Take to a thread that's even a TINY bit related.

 

[VanQ]

Seems like a bunch of insecure people with no motivation or time to get the body that most deem attractive attempting to drag everyone else down to their level rather than shooting for the stars.

And that comes from somebody who most certainly isn't beach body ready.

 

[elvor0]

Yeah, no for profit company should ever behave so insufferably smug, insensitive, and unapologetic. Could you imagine the backlash something like this might cause if say, some enthusiast publications suddenly snapped and started insulting their customer base. If a bunch of them got together and simultaneously wrote several stories that all basically boiled down to "We don't need you as customers. We can find better customers."? I mean, that would be colossally stupid.

Dude, get out. Take it elsewhere. Take to a thread that's even a TINY bit related.

I don't know what you mean. I am agreeing with the original post. That being rude and disrespectful to your customers is a bad thing to do.

Yes. Yes you are. In the most contrived, unnecessary and baiting way possible.

 

[lacktheknack]

I'm surprised by the backlash to the ad, seeing how "beach body season" has been a thing that's existed for... forever, I think.

But whatever, I think they're assholes for how they responded, but of course, Streisand Effect has massively boosted their sales. Because of course it has.

 

[lacktheknack]

Yeah, no for profit company should ever behave so insufferably smug, insensitive, and unapologetic. Could you imagine the backlash something like this might cause if say, some enthusiast publications suddenly snapped and started insulting their customer base. If a bunch of them got together and simultaneously wrote several stories that all basically boiled down to "We don't need you as customers. We can find better customers."? I mean, that would be colossally stupid.

Dude, get out. Take it elsewhere. Take to a thread that's even a TINY bit related.

I don't know what you mean -

Yes you do. Your example had NOTHING to do directly with Protein World. You're fooling less than no-one. Keep that shit in the Game Industry Discussion cesspit.

 

[Erttheking]

Seems like a bunch of insecure people with no motivation or time to get the body that most deem attractive attempting to drag everyone else down to their level rather than shooting for the stars.

And that comes from somebody who most certainly isn't beach body ready.

Don't you think that's a bit of an oversimplification? Not everyone who complains about something is insecure. If they were, gamers would be the most thin skinned people I've ever met. And I say this as a gamer.

 

[Erttheking]

Double post, please ignore