Fat Girls as Useful Life Accessories » Sociological Images
The ad uses the same strategy as a previously covered Bacardi campaign in which they encouraged women to “get an ugly girlfriend.” Both suggest that being fat (or ugly, and they’re often conflated) is undesirable. They also both treat fat people like they’re aren’t deserving of respect and dignity; that is, it’s okay to use them. In this case, the skinny girl is literally hoisting the fat girl into the air, so aggressively that her shoe is falling off. The fat girl is like a thing that the skinny girl owns and can pick up and toss about.
Notice also that it’s taken-for-granted as simply true that, if a “boy” were to see these two girls together, he would look at the skinny girl and ignore the fat one. This is a pathologization of sexual attraction to fat women, the same pathologization that leads us to call it “fat fetishism” or come up with terms like “chubby chasers” to try to explain “weird” sexual proclivities. It assumes that it’d be unnatural to find the fat woman sexier than the skinny one.
Notice also the stylization of the drawings. Both the fat and the skinny girl are drawn with wildly exaggerated proportions. This makes fat and skinny people seem like members of different species, entirely alien to one another. Skinny people are sticks; fat people are essentially circles. In reality, fat and skinny people look more alike than this. They both have human bodies with all the same parts. Some people just have more fat than others and fat is distributed differently in everyone. Fat is human, fat is natural, fat is okay. But a fear of fat is stoked when we see images like this that threaten us. This image says, “if you are/get fat, you will be a downright FREAK; you will be a circle when you should be a stick. And skinny girls will wave you around to draw attention to themselves.”