Over the weekend, there was a protest about Protein World’s ‘Are You Beach Body Ready?’ poster in London’s Hyde Park, and the anti-Protein World movement’s got some celebrity supporters in the form of Sandra and Sandy from Gogglebox!
Vice News reported on the protest, which is part of the #EachBodysReady movement, and this happened:
After about 20 minutes of loitering about in swimming garments, Sandy and Sandra from the Channel 4 show Gogglebox turned up, parked a deck chair up in the middle of the crowd and started shouting: ‘Beach body! Beach body!’
Sandra then told the demonstrators: ‘I'm curvy, babes. I can’t be wearing a bikini, though. I’m fat, right, but I’m not fat! Egg, bacon, sausage and beans, babes. A fry up is for the body movement.’
Then she gave out some free jewellery from her “Rings and Tings” range.
Which we entirely respect. As much as there were people of all assorted body shapes and sizes, with ‘this body’s ready’ and ‘fuck off’ scrawled on themselves in pen, it was pretty cold on Friday, and getting your clothes off shouldn’t be the only effective means of protest.
Their CEO, Arjun Seth has called feminists ‘terrorists’ and has been very excited about the publicity his company’s been given, tweeting stuff like this:
And this:
However, as the organiser of the anti-Protein World protest, Fiona put it: ‘This is meant to be a party to celebrate all the different body images that there are and make women feel amazing about themselves.’
‘The advert was the straw that broke the feminist back, and it just so happened to be for Protein World. After their response on Twitter, I think that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer company.’
She continued: ‘Plus, we’ve had women tweet us saying that we’ve made them want to buy a bikini for the first time in 10 years, and to me that’s not a small thing.’
Just like Sandra and Sandy, we’re still pretty angry about the adverts – hopefully, this extreme example of sexist advertising will help people to take a long hard look at the fucked up ways women are taught to feel shit about themselves by the media, and then encourage the powers that be to do something about it.
Like this? You might also be interested in:
#EachBodysReady Looks To Destroy ‘Beach Body’ Expectations Of Sexist Adverts
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.