I’d just like to meditate for a moment on the way the majority of the spam I get here is for weight loss products.
It comes in the form of comments, “Hey, you should try this herbal weight loss thing.” As though it were from a concern troll. But there are five identical comments, from different names.
Spam is keyword based. We say the word fat here a lot, so the weight loss spammers view you, my readers, as a vast and ripe field of customers just waiting to be plucked. Oh, if only I would let their messages through!
The idea of fat acceptance is so uncommon that mentioning the word fat comes with a presupposition that it is being mentioned in the context of a desire for weight loss.
This is how ingrained the anti-fat stance is.
And, you know, this isn’t exactly a surprise. But it’s good to remember this stuff, as we make our way through the world. Not to make victims of ourselves but to just be prepared and now what we are going up against when we decide to discard the predominant way of thinking about our bodies. We don’t operate in a vacuum, after all.
We’re also, it would seem from the spam I receive, just obsessed in general with sex and drugs. As if we didn’t know that already, eh?
5 Comments
I’d be interested to you make an entry just for spammers to comment on, and approve all of them (if it’s possible to approve for one entry but not for the rest of the blog.)
…and it’s interesting to note how that presumption changes by class/subculture: I live in a predominantly poor black neighborhood, and I often see signs nailed to telephone poles that say,
GAIN OR LOSE
SERIOUS WEIGHT
215-XXX-XXXX
Hmm… can I lose serious weight and gain fun weight? Or perhaps gain frivolous weight?
Incidentally, while you’re absolutely right that presumptions change by class (even spam and Google ads are only directed towards people with computers), you might be seeing those signs for another reason: they’re Herbalife ads, or something similar. In an area where people are often unemployed and economically depressed, you’re going to find more pyramid schemes. I bet if you studied lottery ticket purchases and Herbalife ads, you’d find that they were covariant, and were negatively correlated with average income.
Just to make this crystal clear, I don’t mean that people in low-income areas are gullible! Herbalife and the lottery are both examples of schemes that prey on the poor by offering easy money in a context where money is very difficult to come by.
for every type of “group” (i use that word for lack of a better) out there, be it fat people, short people, tall, blonde, tattooed, women with long nails, women with short nails, women who have short nails but want long nails, people with scars, people who intentionally scar themselves (i’m just thinking off the top of my head, i could go on all day with examples)….. so for every type of group out there, there’s a marketing group set up somewhere, online, or in an actual office that will try to sell that group of people something. It could be an actual product – like herbalife (though i must admit i’m not even really sure what that shit is), or it could just be a mind set, or “lifestyle”. And, it’s hard NOT to succumb to this crap, even subconsciously.
I recently read an author who referred to this whole advertising/ marketing/forcefeeding of ideals and mores thing as our real-life “matrix”. And it truly kind of is. It’s this….force… this constant onslaught of information/advertising/lifestyle-peddling that comes at us from every direction, every day, in our lives. As TR mentioned, it comes through in the form of spam everyday into the comments, or as Fillyjonk notes, as links that show up in your gmail. Or on tv, or on the back of a stranger’s newspaper or magazine while you’re riding the train, billboards, etc etc etc. ARRRRRGGGGHHHH
(a bit off topic, maybe, sorry). I think unless people make a conscious effort to check out of the matrix, they get sucked in whether they know it or not.
The fact that MOST middle class white women suffer from disordered eating (as discussed over at Kate’s) is evidence of this matrix at work. I’m serious…. even though i now sound like a conspiracy theorist sci fi fantasy nut.
They come after me with a lot of penis enlargement products.
And I’m like, hey, buddy, my penis is large enough as it is!