In the Blog
beinggirl.ca advocates disordered eating: bringing the fight to canada
Lately I’ve been getting links from co-conspirators around the blogosphere on both the fantastic and quite awful activities on the Feminist Front. And things move fast - last week I received a tip from Parents for Ethical Marketing that Procter & Gamble website BeingGirl.us had up an article that encouraged disordered eating in teen girls.
But before I could type “WHAT THE HEY YOU JERKS” into a subject line for a blog post, thanks to the efforts on the part of countless bloggers, writers and phone callers who inundated P & G, the article was removed from the US site.
So why am I blogging about this? Well, the article is still up on BeingGirl.ca, right here. Sigh.
You will note the article includes excellent suggestions like: force yourself to wait 30 minutes before you eat; write down everything you eat; and put up post-it notes around your room and locker to remind yourself not to eat, you fatty. Ok, the “you fatty” part was my own, but I can’t help but feel I was just making the implicit, explicit.
In case this doesn’t sound that bad to you, remember this information appeared unsolicited on a website targeted to girls just starting to have their periods. As in girls who are 12.
Let’s take a moment to celebrate the power of grassroots calls to action. Hooray! Clap clap! And now let’s start some grassroots action of our own: get in touch with Beinggirl.ca and ask them to get their nonsense off the Canadian site as well. Some places to start:
Procter & Gamble Canada Contact Us Form
Responsible Shopper Profile With P&G Head Office in US Contact Info
Also check out the original call to action that started this all at the F-Word blog: it has numbers you can use to call the US office.
[And if you want to complain about some other things on this sprawling, multinational and honestly terrifying site, can I recommend that you also check out the page which reduces ALL of Africa to ten facts, mostly about giraffes and cheetahs. Also look for marketing that trains children on how to emotionally manipulate their moms into buying them deodorant.]
