Norwegians ban ‘body beautiful’ adverts from streets
Near-naked models in bus-shelter posters make young unhappy about themselves, city decides
SCANTILY clad women and muscular, boxer-wearing men will be banned from adverts on bus stops, city bikes and public lavatories in Norway’s thirdbiggest city in a bid to combat negative body image issues. Trondheim’s LeftCentre municipality voted to ban all advertising on council-owned sites that “conveys a false image of the model/ models’ appearance and contributes to a negative body image”.
Ottar Michelsen, a councillor from the Socialist Left party, which proposed the ban, said the move followed “a huge debate” in the city over how to decrease young people’s anxiety over their looks. “If we are serious about discussing what kind of pressure we put on youths on what they feel they should look like, we also have to [bear] in mind what kind of advertising we have,” he said.
“We have to be conscious about what kind of models are used and whether they are heavily manipulated, showing completely unrealistic bodies.”
The new policy, which was voted through on Tuesday, will be included in the contract of whichever company wins a tender to manage the sites from 2018 to 2030.
The guidelines also require any adverts featuring manipulated images to be accompanied with text warning the they do not depict real models. “At a minimum, advertisements in which body shapes have been retouched should be marked as such,” it reads.
Yngve Brox, a councillor with the opposition Conservative party, said the measure was “typical Norwegian” overregulation.
“I’m not in favour of what we here in Norway call body pressure, but I don’t think that everything can be fixed through laws and regulations,” he said. “Regulating as a politician how advertisements can look, that’s hopeless.”
He complained that the new rules also ruled out “advertising that is offensive or discriminatory against groups or individuals”. “Well, I find advertising for the Labour Party offensive. Does that mean it should not be allowed?”
Trondheim is not the first place to have sought to improve citizens’ body image through legislation.
France last year brought in a law banning super-skinny models from its catwalks, with the socialist MP Olivier Veran arguing that they “glorify anorexia”. The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority last month banned the Gucci fashion house from using an advertisement featuring an “unhealthily thin” model. Oslo has a similar ban on advertising that might offend certain groups, but has no specific guidelines on body image.
Body pressure, or kroppspress, has been a near obsession for the Norwegian media of late, with more than 800 articles written about the issue in the first four months of this year alone, according to local media-monitoring agency Retrievers.