London’s new mayor, Sadiq Khan, has already made good on his campaign promise to ban body-shaming advertisements from the city’s transportation system. The decision, which was announced Monday, was in response to Protein World’s 2015 ad campaign featuring a thin model wearing a yellow bikini with the words, “Are you beach body ready?”.
According to QZ, the poster received a great deal of backlash, with many people calling the image “offensive, irresponsible, and harmful because it promotes an unhealthy body image”. There were even protests and petitions calling for an overhaul of Transport for London’s policies that allowed these kinds of ads to be displayed on tubes and buses. To make matters worse, the weight loss company Protein World sent out tweets insisting the backlash was actually helping their business. Wow.