Is This Really the Battle to Choose?

There is a popular, trendy clothing company who has in their catalog, a simple, grey, v-necked t-shirt with the slogan “Eat Less” emblazoned across the front. Outrage over this t-shirt, modeled by a painfully thin young girl, as are all the fashions this company promotes, has been flashing around the Internet world this week.

Ever the devil’s advocate, I commented in response to yet another angry Tweet that perhaps this t-shirt was a commentary on our country’s growing problems with obesity, as opposed to a salute to anorexia. A firestorm in my tiny corner of the Twitterverse ensued and included a retort by one woman who seemed to suggest that all of our problems with obesity are caused by dieting. I thought it had more to do with large amounts of fat-laden food, easily and cheaply accessible to a time pressed population who no longer has to move much in order to get through the day. But I digress.

I admit that showing this particular t-shirt on such a thin girl is disturbing but I can just imagine the outrage that would have spilled over had the shirt been worn by a large woman. Is “eat less” such a bad slogan for us? Perhaps “eat healthy” would have been better but not nearly so pithy, which is certainly the watchword for t-shirt slogans.

I read a few blog posts written in opposition to this shirt and the comments that followed. The gist of the argument seems to be that young girls shop in this particular store and don’t need that kind of help in their struggle with negative body image. I certainly understand and agree with that concern. Having said that, do we really need to be vigilantly censoring every t-shirt slogan that hits the market? What about “live fast, die young” or “sex, drugs and rock and roll”? Not messages that we really want our young people to embrace either but those slogans have been around for forty years or more and are still being churned out today. They don’t seem to have pushed us over the edge, why should this one?

Do we really need or even want to be up in arms over every possibly objectionable slogan that somebody thinks up to sell a product? Who gets to decide what’s objectionable anyway? “Eat Less” may be horrifying to a recovering anorexic while a struggling dieter might be pasting the same slogan on the bathroom mirror.

Is this little firestorm the modern day equivalent of griping to your friends about something that made you mad? Instead of at the kitchen table it’s now aired on Twitter, Facebook and blogs like mine and reaches hundreds of thousands of people. Angry posts are calling for boycotts of this particular store, while no doubt driving readers to click on over there to see for themselves, for which the store is probably thankful.

Is organized protest really necessary here? Do we really need to be whipped into a frenzy over this? Can we not, in our capitalistic society, simply individually choose to refuse to buy that to which we object? Do we really think that this company has a great commitment to this t-shirt slogan? If it doesn’t sell, won’t they just stop offering it?

Is our girls’ psyche so fragile that the very sight of “Eat Less” on a t-shirt will cause them to become anorexic? If that’s all it takes then we have bigger issues to deal with than t-shirt slogans. Let’s organize around some of them instead.

What do you think? Do we raise the hue or merely our eyebrows? I'm going with the latter.

Update: Sometime yesterday evening the company who was selling this shirt pulled it from their website, presumably in response to all the controversy. Although on its face this may seem like a win, I'm concerned. There are a lot of people out there who don't like the same things I like or agree with my beliefs and I hate to think they might have the power to choose for me what I get to buy/read/see/enjoy/do. Does this worry you too?

For a counterpoint article on the shirt controversy try this one by Revolution for Real Women.