Vintage Sexism: "Slender"
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"That's right ladies, because your husband will only have sex with you if you're thin."
That'so sad. My SO is the one person I feel most comfortable around, I can't imagine feeling pressured to be skinny by him too.
Finally, a way to get skinny while sitting at home waiting for my husband to return from work so we can get it on.
And today, 225 calories would be considered too much. After all, that's more calories than in a 12 oz can of regular cola...
I'd like to get that skinny sitting at home drinking soda. :)
"Good work girls," purrs the patronising narrator....
Ah yes, good work indeed on restricting yourself to a joyless regimen of foul-tasting, expensive, nutritionally empty diet drinks which would probably cause your teeth to drop out from scurvy if anybody ever managed to stick to it long enough, and all so that you can reassure yourself that your husband's shallow sexual interest in you won't be derailed by his younger, perkier secretary making eyes at him over her low-calorie diet meal enjoyment replacement drink.
Remember girls; demurely meeting your husband's sexual needs in an efficient and ladylike manner regardless of the personal cost to you, will allow you to continue spending disposable income on the important things in life - like Carnation brand low-calorie diet shakes!
er... Am I the only one who took more issue with the fact that this vintage ad was advocating DRINKING 225 calories, or roughly half the amount of calories one should have for an entire meal, in a single glass?
Maybe my veganism is seeping into everything food related, but I'd never drink anything with that many calories unless it's a special occasion... Water is all I need!
Am I alone in that?
I have a feeling the commercial was advocating drinking this to replace meals, instead of as a drink in addition to meals.
And yes, water is all I drink. I hope, however, that you're not preoccupied with counting calories (it sounded a little that way, but as all I have to go on is your comment, I have no way of actually knowing). Eat things because they're healthy, don't avoid things because they have high caloric content. Focus (and eat) on what you should eat, don't obsess over what you shouldn't eat.
You're not alone. I'm vegan too (plus a health nut/water lover), and while I definitely don't advocate that everyone should be vegan or even necessarily vegetarian, I DO advocate that people should eat FOOD. NORMAL FOOD! Not freakin' pseudo milkshakes as a meal replacement. That's just nasty and unsustainable. Also, counting calories sounds like it would just drive someone insane.
Basically what I would love is if everyone just let go of the numbers. Numbers involving weight, size, energy units used to measure nutritional value, just forget it. It's all enough to drive us insane (and I think it already has). Eat the foods that you know your body responds well to at regular intervals and in appropriate amounts.
If people want to think about numbers, take math and science classes. Now there you'll find something interesting to use them for.
YEAH!
This past year, my mom sent me the most delicious cake for my birthday from the Cheesecake Factory - I invited all my friends over to eat it because it was enormous, and we were joking around looking at the nutrition facts...I mostly just laughed when I noticed it was almost 1,000 calories a slice - but one of my friends literally dropped her fork and looked ill. Made me sad. It was a very tasty cake.
I'd hate to admit it on a Feminist board but I'd probably be that friend who runs to the bathroom after finding out that the cheesecake that I've been eating is 1000 cal. a slice. That's like a day's worth of calories right there.
At least I'm honest.
Whoa, since when is 1000 calories an entire days worth? 2000 is the general DV.
I DO count calories, but that is because I'm supposed to be getting closer to 3000, intead of the DV of 2000, since I'm on a weight gain diet. Meh.
That's very nice that you have a body that allows you to do that, but please educate yourself before doling out the advice. Some people do need to worry about the numbers of their food in order to stay healthy.
I would love to have the luxury of limiting my number thinking to science and math classes, but it is more important to me to stay off insulin. In real life I've been lectured about being "skinny already" when I take out my notebook and chart my food intake after a meal, and yours is not the first comment deriding people who obsess about the numbers of their food.
No one should have to explain their medical condition to strangers. People should be mature enough to mind their own business. If not paying attention to the numbers of your food works for you, wonderful. Not everyone is exactly like you, so stop preaching as if they were.
You're right, what I said was way too generalized and preachy. I'm sorry for speaking (err...typing) so reactively.
I said it because the first thing that comes to my mind on this issue are the weight problems that the women in my own family deal with, as well as the bullshit that they have had to sift through to find their own comfortable diet. For them, counting calories DID drive them crazy, and they're better off with what I talked about. However, I know everyone is different; these are just the women in my family whose bodies work similarly to my own, and I don't know what it's like to have to worry about something like insulin levels.
Furthermore, my experience with nutrition and numbers among my friends and roomates has only had to do with obsessions with weight that I know are not related to any serious medical problems. Seeing 100 calorie packs lying around the house every day just drives me nuts. So this just adds to my assumptions.
It was a knee-jerk reaction because of my own personal experience. I didn't mean to sound like I thought I knew what's best for everyone.
Also, the way that Carnation are so careful to market their product *exclusively* towards married women cracks me up, because we all know that unmarried people have no business being interested in sex.
In some ways it reminds me of modern adverts for condoms, Viagra and period *cough* birth *cough* control pills, and I suppose it could be argued that they are sort of positioning it as a "sex aid".
"Carnation is a respectable family company, who make products for respectable families - how dare you imply that shameless single hussies might avail themselves of our product in order to snare themselves a man!"
Uh - to everybody saying that 225 calories in a single drink is excessive, I think the idea is that the diet drink replaces meals.
225 x 3 daily meals = 675 calories per day.
Excessive? It's nowhere near enough to be healthy for a toddler or small child, much less a full-grown woman.
Wait, I remember that stuff. I must be old! The sad thing is that I went on a diet with that--or with the similar Alba 77--when I was in the 5th grade (1978).
The funny thing is that it was pretty much exactly the same stuff as Carnation Instant Breakfast.
I'm old enough to remember it too, it was pretty tasty as I recall. Ovaltine and Tiger's Milk were yummier.
yuck, yuck yuck!
On the plus side, this did make me think about milkshakes, which are delicious and wonderful. Like a nice vanilla or cookies & cream, good thick ice cream with a little milk... Mmmmm, milkshakes....
Trust me. I don't count calories. After doing a calorie experiment in bio, I kind of laugh at people who count them. wtf do calories mean? Fat content is more important.
But, my mom says it's because I've limited what I eat so much that there's absolutely no reason to. And she is my mother, so she must be semi-correct, right?
And, yeah, the whole 'drinking it as a replacement' thing didn't occur to me the second I watched it, but looking back on it, that doesn't irk me because of calorie-counting, it irks me because drinking is not the same as eating.
Then it makes me think of all my super health conscious friends who go to ridiculous extremes for no reason. Like eating half a piece of chicken and a tiny baked potato for dinner (because a bunch of carbs is, as we all know, so healthy when you're going to sit around watching movies).
And then they watch me eat a cupcake and they stare longingly, even though I offered them one.
I always want to say: Quit eye-fucking my food!
But that'd be mean.
I've got a question. I can't find a forum, so I'm asking it here. I'm really desperate to know this, please help!!
What is the most significant difference between life and death?
In purely biological terms the difference can be summarised as:
Movement
Respiration
Sensitivity
Growth
Reproduction
Excretion
Nutrition
otherwise known as the acronym MRS GREN.
Although we at Feministing are happy to debate and inform about most issues, we *do* draw the line at doing your homework for you. ;-)
All of those functions can be performed by a robot with the appropriate technology can't they? So, can that robot be called alive?
I'm sorry if this question sounds stupid, but I've been thinking about it for days, and can't find an answer to it.
"Manly" backwards? Really?
Please tell me from what wonderful technologically advanced future you come from where robots are able to grow, respire and reproduce? ;-)
Phillip K Dick's classic sci-fi novel "Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep?" might interest you and answer some of your questions. It's an exploration of what humanity is in a futuristic world capable of producing MRS GREN style androids.
Or alternatively, just watch the film adaptation "Blade Runner".
Respiration is nothing but a breaking down of matter to produce energy. Take some wood and burn it - that's respiration. Reproduction is a rearrangement of matter within a framework or "blueprint. That's also done - "artificially" and naturally.
And everything in nature grows - rocks for eg. It's not very hard to conceive of a future where all these things are artificially made possible. In fact, present discoveries at the quantum level would suggest that they would be possible within 30 to 40 years.
Like I said, I gave this a LOT of thought.
In fact, all these things are done artificially, albeit separately, all around us. It's just a question of combining them all into a single unit - a robot, as Nature has done with life.
I'm sort of befuddled by your presence here. At first I thought it was some kind of weird trolly joke that I just wasn't getting... If you really are actually interested in this kind of stuff, it's not like there aren't people out there doing research on just this sort of thing in a wide variety of fields (philosophy, computer science, neuroscience, biology, etc)...?
P.S. For an interesting counterpoint to the sort of optimism about AI that permeates a lot of sci-fi, there's always this. Of course, your original question was a lot more broad than questions about intelligence and consciousness, but I think they're probably in the same general spectrum of questions...
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAA.....AHH..AHH..AAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
HAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAAAAHAHAHAA!! AAAAAAAAH!! GAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAA!!
AAHH...
AAHHH...
aah..
ah..
Heh heh. That was hilarious.
You're right, what I said was way too generalized and preachy. I'm sorry for speaking (err...typing) so reactively.
I said it because the first thing that comes to my mind on this issue are the weight problems that the women in my own family deal with, as well as the bullshit that they have had to sift through to find their own comfortable diet. For them, counting calories DID drive them crazy, and they're better off with what I talked about. However, I know everyone is different; these are just the women in my family whose bodies work similarly to my own, and I don't know what it's like to have to worry about something like insulin levels.
Furthermore, my experience with nutrition and numbers among my friends and roomates has only had to do with obsessions with weight that I know are not related to any serious medical problems. Seeing 100 calorie packs lying around the house every day just drives me nuts. So this just adds to my assumptions.
It was a knee-jerk reaction because of my own personal experience. I didn't mean to sound like I thought I knew what's best for everyone.