An Open Letter to the Staff of Southaven Middle School, re: Your Excellent Plan to Provide Female Students With Free Shapewear
— CNN, January 2022
To the staff of Southaven Middle School,
Slims® Shapewear would love to sponsor this generous giveaway for your middle school girls. We will have to re-tool all of our factories since we don’t currently make shapewear for people who weigh 85 pounds and stand 4 and a half feet tall, otherwise known as ‘children.’ But kids’ shapewear is a market we’ve been dying to expand into, no pun intended! After making $150B by capitalizing on women’s greatest insecurities, the insecurities of tween girls should be a slam dunk for us. I mean, this is truly a gift for us! Our marketing department has been buzzing nonstop since your letter went out — we’re toying with the idea of co-branding with Mattel, Disney, and even Build-a-Bear. One of our teams even floated the idea of SpongeBob shapewear out there, how darling would that be??? Can you imagine that crazy SpongeBob in a pair of compression bike shorts! He needs ‘em!!!
We would be thrilled to send Southaven Middle School 400 units of shapewear immediately. We’ll need to know if your school currently requires students to wear uniforms? Just guessing from your general M.O. of weight policing that you’re probably also policing their clothing. So just let us know things like required skirt length, average shirt size, how many fatties you have, etc. etc.
We’re so looking forward to this partnership. You’ve really given us the shot in the arm we’ve needed recently, since so many of our customers have been working from home the past two years, and haven’t had to worry about harnessing their fat stomachs and oversized thighs so that their disgusting bodies can be tolerated in the workplace. This is a dream come true for us. It has even started us thinking — maybe this is just the beginning. Maybe we’re thinking too small here, although as you know ‘small’ is baked into our corporate culture! But what if we are thinking too small in this case? Is it the right time for slenderizing diapers? So many fat babies out there. This could be an entirely new revenue stream for us.
And as a token of our appreciation for this exciting opportunity, we would be happy to send complimentary shapewear for the faculty and staff. Just send us a quick note to let us know how many of you are still in the appropriate age group for being objectified, and how many have given up so we’ll have an idea of how much merchandise to send. And of course you can leave the male staff out of the tally, they’re all 100 percent perfect just as they are. But we don’t have to tell you that, do we?
We’d just like to close by saying what a noble cause you’re championing here. Sometimes in this day of common core, overscheduled extracurriculars, and stressful standardized testing, body shaming gets lost in the mix. What happened to good old-fashioned bullying? If we don’t instill these ideas at a young age, while these girls are still so impressionable, I ask you — who will? Can we afford to leave this important cause to their mothers? Their partners? This new age of wokeness and body positivity is threatening to be the death knell of the foundation garment industry. Let’s not let that happen. Look what happened to foot binding! You’ve never heard of it? My point exactly. Let’s work together to bind not only their waists, but hopefully their minds too. I mean, imagine a world where a young girl doesn’t give a second thought to the size of her jeans, but instead is focused on expanding her intellectual horizons. This has to stop. We’ll make it stop. Together, with waist-cinching shapewear so tight their organs will be rearranged. It’s the only way.
Stay slim!
Stephanie Miller,
EVP, New Product Development and Fat Shaming, The Americas
Slims Shapewear
