What Victoria's Secret and Meghan Trainor Are Trying to Tell You About Your Body

Guess what girls? Your body is disgusting. If you're bigger than a size 12 you're disgusting. If you're smaller than a size 12 you're disgusting. And just who's decided you're disgusting? Your fellow women, of course.

Guess what girls? Your body is disgusting. If you're bigger than a size 12 you're disgusting. If you're smaller than a size 12 you're disgusting. And just who's decided you're disgusting? Your fellow women, of course.

Unless you've been living in a cave on a deserted island with only a bloody Wilson basket ball for company, you've probably come across the delightful singer Meghan Trainor and the equally delightful Victoria's Secret 'Perfect Body' ad campaign.

VS's desperately misjudged undies ad declaring teeny tiny frames 'perfect' and Trainor's irritatingly catchy yet sickly enough to give you spots All About That Bass - which aims to fly the flag for the gal with the big bottom - couldn't be more different and more similar in their message.

On the surface All About That Bass is an ode to those with, as Meghan puts it, 'all the right junk in all the right places'. But you only have too look a little deeper (or should that be listen to a verse longer) before she's calling everyone else a 'skinny bitch' and pushing a murky form of self-acceptance based on boys liking 'a little more booty to hold at night'.

After all, feeling good about yourself and your body is wholly dependent on whether you're classed as attractive by someone else. And, according to Meghan, if you ain't got junk in the trunk you ain't got nothin'.

In a scarily similar vain, you'd be forgiven for thinking Victoria's Secret was trying to tell you something with their latest campaign?

Why? Oh, because they are trying to tell you something. They're trying to tell you that only their bras are perfectly formed and only their bras will give you the perfect form.

But when this message is emblazoned over the top of rib-sporting glamazons the 'perfect body' message has a more sinister note.

You want to be perfect? You need to look like this.

Intentionally or not, this blatant thinspiration is as dangerous as slapping Lambert & Butler back on billboards.

Women and girls are already force fed articles like 'how to eat like a Victoria Secret model', 'Victoria's Secret diet secrets revealed', and 'get the body of a Victoria Secret Angel'.

We're programmed to see these, sometimes painfully, willowy women as the ideal - but just in case you managed to miss the message VS have plastered it in capitals over the impossibly trim bodies of their spokesbodies.

What's a girl to do when she's faced with two contrasting yet equally damning messages about what her body should look like?

From the looks of things I'd say we've not choice but to desperately try to fit into one of the two seemingly acceptable size cults. To idolise one and shame the other. It doesn't really matter which because whatever you look like you'll always be considered disgusting by someone.

Close