"Women are sexy, thin, mostly naked playthings for you to dress up and play with at will."

And dressed in expensive garbage, at that. A bauble is, by definition, a trivial, showy piece of junk with no real value. It's a trivializing, demeaning term for their own product, and a nonsensical one, considering their "baubles" are going for thousands of dollars. Either the advertisers are lacking a grasp of basic vocabulary, or they're openly acknowledging that women would be happy with bubble gum rings, as long as they were shiny and cost a few month's salary.

I became remarkably sad after reading this post. It's really unfortunate.

Also, I guess women don't read Times Online, not even human interest storied about other women. The ads are all male targeted.

This is the same observation I make whenever a women's magazine does a piece about size acceptance...and two pages later features some model airbrushed within an inch of her life selling you shaving cream. What the? Seriously?

Make no mistake that these companies have total control over the advertisements that are placed within their pages and on their websites. The mixed-message of "big is beautiful" but "thin people sell more stuff!" is so aggravating that you have to wonder if these people even GET it.

I'm sure they do, which is the sick part. But as long as the media comes out with its once-or-twice a year, thin-brandishing article the executives feel like they've done a social service to all the self-hating fatties who were, undoubtedly, sticking their fingers down their throat mere moments before a magazine told them, "It's ok to be you!"

But once all the warm fuzzies have dissipated, keep on reading so you can learn how to "Lose a dress size in a week." Cause self-esteem is nice and all, but these people have magazines to sell.

It looks like this is more an example of recklessly daft copy editing to me. Gwen remarks that the advertisements undermine the content of the article, but by the same token the article's content also undermines the ads. That's considered quite embarrassing to both parties. And it's not like those ads-disguised-as-content needed any help looking sleazy.

I've been following some online communities who have been posting tributes to Daul that include a lot of Daul's interviews, blog entries, etc. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, and I very may well be, but I don't recall Daul ever saying anything about the pressure to be thin, or feeling such pressure herself.

If Daul was under pressure for the other things that a model may be under pressure for (and there are surely plenty, such as being away from family and friends, meeting unreasonable deadlines, compromising personal values to book a job, etc), then there are no mixed messages and there is no irony in that screencap of the Times Online.

It seems to me that Daul had severe depression, and I think acknowledgement of that and taking the opportunity to increase awareness of depression is being side-lined here in favour of making another criticism of the size of models.

This is ridiculous. You cannot use Daul's suicide as a means to a political platform. We, the world, have no idea why she committed suicide, but it was CLEAR from her video blogs and coverage that she took the time to eat, and cared about her health. Yes women are expected to be thin--and some women really are thin and should not be punished for being who they are. It is horrifying to manipulate her suicide to further some cliche notion or ab absolutist political campaign.