D. H. Lawrence wrote a series of poems sneering at modern sunbathers in all their beach body readiness. Yes they looked fit and healthy (healthy, healthy, healthy). And yes, they even looked good enough to eat. But somehow their flesh lacked meaning and vitality; their great inert thighs leading nowhere.
So, far from feeling bad about his own emaciated and disease-ravaged physique when confronted with those bodies deemed biologically admirable, Lawrence defiantly affirmed his own contrasting quickness.
I thought of this last year when there was a great hoo-ha over a poster for Protein World's weight-loss collection featuring a perfectly formed bikini-clad model (Renee Somerfield). The Advertising Standards Authority received almost 400 complaints from those who found the campaign objectifying and socially irresponsible. There was also a protest in Hyde Park and an online petition that attracted more than 70,000 signatures.
Eventually, the fuss died down and everyone either forgot about the case, or found something else to get het up over. But now this issue of body shaming is back in the headlines thanks to the new London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, who has said he will ban all ads on the Tube and bus network that might offend commuters or make them feel pressured to conform to an ideal body type.
Speaking as a father of two teenage daughters, Khan warned that images such as the above demeaned women and caused confidence issues among young people. It is high time, he said, that such advertising came to an end.
Obviously, this is an astonishing and, to my mind, rather worrying development. For it means that the Mayor is making policy on the basis of a Helen Lovejoy approach to decision making; one that effectively turns all Londoners into Sadiq's little girls in need of daddy's protection and wise authority.
Ultimately, I'm no more beach body ready than Lawrence. But nor am I ready for Khan's progressive paternalism which offers a soft form of sharia and censorship in the name of feminism and thinking of the children.
