We like lighter laptops, HP, but do you need to sell it with skinny bodies?

Go get someone less lazy and more creative to design your ads.
We like lighter laptops, HP, but do you need to sell it with skinny bodies?
We like lighter laptops, HP, but do you need to sell it with skinny bodies?
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We’re all for thin. I mean, who wouldn’t want a laptop that’s thin and light? The laptop that this story has been filed on is much thicker that the one in HP’s front page advertisement in papers on Monday.

But, seriously? What does your “enviably thin” laptop have anything to do with a woman in a dress that shows her very flat stomach, and that every so slight arched back, making her stomach look even flatter.

Oh wait, we forgot!

It’s a toned-down version of the logic of LG’s Bikini phone, and Gizmodo’s comment of it:

“What a brilliant idea by someone at LG to name their KF600-a phone we've covered before-the Bikini. What better way can you think of, besides more money, to convince your models to pose in Bikinis? None. None better. Just when we thought Samsung had the upper hand on shoehorning Korean ladies into product photos, LG goes and takes it to another level. Will we see a subsequent "Samsung Topless" retaliation? Can we, please?”

There’s a lot more where that came from. A Google search will come up with rather predictable images. Women sleeping on bikes, sitting on a helmet with her legs spread and wearing leather bikini bottoms and a skimpy top.

To be fair, the HP ad’s imagery isn’t quite as bad as some of the other adverts. But the associations created by its tagline ‘Impossibly thin, enviably engineered’ have added to the disquiet many of us feel.

With its tagline, this image tries to equate women with thinness as a state of being that everyone must envy and yet, simultaneously aspire to. And of course sell the laptops to a crowd that will remember the imagery.

But the second line of the slogan got one thing right. The thinness is engineered, even on human beings. Very few women are “naturally” so thin. And if they are, good for them.  But good for us too, those of us who do not fit that body type or disagree with you when you project that body type as desirable. 

And we’re telling you: Go get someone less lazy and more creative to design your ads.

It took us a while to recognize that such ads did much damage to women. But now that we know, we aren’t going to let ads like this go scot free.

I would love a lighter laptop. Who wouldn’t? But please, come up with something other than a lame, stale, sexist idea of a thin model to convince me. 

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