Editorial: Dear KFC, leave our fat alone

Female fat is attractive. Don’t let straw-like women parading on magazine covers deceive you… Female fat is attractive. Don’t let straw-like women parading on magazine covers deceive you — the way a man can fall helplessly captivated by the swinging hips of a voluptuous woman strolling by is no joke — it’s fat.

It’s by artfully displaying their perfectly proportioned fat deposits that for millenia women have attracted, and exerted power over, the opposite sex. In his book “Sex, Time and Power,” esteemed anthropologist and author Leonard Shlain said it best: “Instead of gorgeous colors, fantastic markings, sleek hides, sumptuous fur, bright feathers or polychromatic scales, Mother Nature decided to use fat” to “drive a man wild with intoxicated desire.”

This power relationship between males and females of our species is uniquely human, and to take advantage of the attractive nature of college women’s fat for profit is not only intrusive, it’s wrong. So KFC Corporation, throw away your new marketing campaign before it causes too much damage.

According to USA Today, the fast-food chain has devised an unprecedented way to market its high-calorie, sodium-laced Double Down sandwich that replaces bready buns with two fried chicken patties. Instead of sticking to the traditional TV ads and billboards, the company is paying college women $500 to hand out coupons while wearing tight-fitting pants. And — you guessed it — large letters reading “Double Down” are plastered on the pants’ behinds.

Understanding the primal power inherent in the female buttocks, KFC’s Chief Marketing and Food Innovation Officer John Cywinski calls his marketing campaign “an effort to reach … our key target of young men,” according to the Huffington Post.

It’s one thing to manipulate natural, everyday human desire to sell a product, it’s another to employ women as advertising commodities and call it “marketing.” It’s not like KFC is handing out logo-emblazoned baseball caps. They’re paying students to use their bodies as human attention-grabbers.

And even if there were a way to make objectifying women acceptable  — and no such way exists — KFC can’t even earn points for creativity. American writers have employed, and fully exhausted, the women-as-meat motif.

Most of us have seen the “Seinfeld” episode in which George Costanza equates sexual desire — and, by implication, women — to food. And we also remember “A Streetcar Named Desire,” in which the overconfident buck Stanley opens the play, both literally and thematically, by thrusting a package of meat at his wife Stella. But just because such values entertain us on stage and the TV screen doesn’t mean we should accept a society that condones George and Stanley, let alone one that advances their distorted ideals.

For now, KFC is only using young women at Spalding University in Louisville, Ky., but the company plans to expand the campaign to at least three more campuses. If it comes to Pitt, or even if it doesn’t, we’ve gained yet another reason to reduce our intake of fast food.

Let’s not sell our own bodies’ fat just so a corporation can sell more of its form of lipid. Our bodies are just too precious.