Open Letter to the CEO of Carl's Jr,

Dear Andrew Pudzer,

I was watching the Olympics the other day and feeling really good about Katie Ledecky. Katie Ledecky swims like a dolphin. She slices through the water so skillfully and so gracefully. And apart from her prowess as a swimmer, which is awe-inspiring even to a non-athletic girl like me, I felt happy about the fact that she had such control over her own body. There she was, zipping back and forth that pool in Rio, and her body was completely her own, and she was being celebrated for how wonderfully she wielded it.

Throughout history, a tradition of viewing female bodies as sexual objects has corrupted half the population’s sense of self, and in the digital age, the images we see 24/7 only add to this damage. So you can imagine that as a young woman, I was feeling grateful in that moment that the Olympics provided proof- to a huge worldwide audience- that our bodies are so much more than vessels built to fulfill male sexual desires.

And then a Carl’s Jr. ad came on.

It advertised the new Bacon 3-Way Burger, and featured three white women in little bikinis eating the burgers luxuriously. The camera zoomed in on various parts of their bodies. Once each part has been given the necessary screen time, the girls are shown feeding each other in a sexually suggestive manner. “Yeah yeah, I know what you’re thinking. But come on, it’s called a Bacon 3-Way Burger,” one of them says, as the horror finally winds down and the video is about to end. “What’d you expect?”

Let’s start with what immediately pissed me off about this video. I was forced to watch it with my entire family sitting on the couch with me, and that included my 11-year-old sister. My sister is one of the tiniest girls I know. She’s a dancer and a gymnast and has a naturally small appetite, making her so skinny that her ribs show. And yet my sister sincerely believes she could lose weight. She idolizes small waists, criticizes her own. I do my best to instill self-love in her, and I am so glad I can be there to do that. It’s one of the only positive influences in a world that bombards her with visuals of a certain body type and reinforces in her over and over that she should aspire to it.

Your ad, needless to say, does the perfect job of fitting this mold. Each woman has the same figure, and the camera cuts to different body parts to emphasize this. It focuses on the hips, and then the breasts, then stomach, then lips, and so on. This serves to objectify the women in a special way: it turns a whole people into a list of their bodily features.

The beauty industry and others who profit off of female insecurity are well aware of this strategy. I grew up dealing with its effects. In middle school, I’d make lists of all the things that were wrong with my appearance so that I could go through them one by one and try to “fix” myself. That process taught me to hate myself. It shattered my self- esteem even in different aspects of my life because it drilled into me that the way I looked was the most important thing, and the way I looked was never going to be good enough.

With your ad, you’ve found an equally dehumanizing second way to utilize the same strategy. You’ve made the women into objects, selling sex as a way to sell food. And it may not seem like a big deal, because it’s just one ad campaign- what are a few offended viewers in the face of rising sales? But you are contributing to something much bigger, feeding a culture which encourages blatant disrespect of women through the objectification of their bodies.

My best friend got catcalled when she tried to go on a run recently. Some guy leaned out of a car window to yell something at her. “Do they think that’s going to make me want to go out with them?” she asked me in frustration. The thing is, they don’t think about what she’s going to think, because they’ve been conditioned to believe that it isn’t relevant. To them, she is one-dimensional, the million thoughts that could be in her mind rendered superfluous by the mere existence of her body.

When you produce commercials like the Bacon 3-Way one, you are sprinkling the seeds from which this line of thinking sprouts. And once they take root, they bring forth into the world atrocities such as sexual harassment and rape. When you play those commercials over and over again on every possible platform, you provide nourishment to ideas which put women in real danger.

“It’s called a Bacon 3-Way Burger. What did you expect?” the woman in your ad asked me. I expected that in the United States, in 2016, no self-respecting company would sink to such foul, grimy depths and besmirch is own name in a desperate attempt to be talked about. The demographic of “hungry, young guys” you claim you’re trying to attract would be way better off eating somewhere like In n Out, where the burgers make a name for themselves through their own pure goodness rather than via the bare, oiled bodies of supermodels.

“I think it’s very American,” you say of women eating burgers in bikinis. Well, I think being American is much better represented through the determination and sportsmanship of Katie Ledecky. It is represented in my sister, an immigrant from India who loves learning about US History through the musical Hamilton. It is represented in my best friend, who dedicates her time to volunteering and social activism so that our country can be welcoming and safe for people of all backgrounds.

In your ads, I see a version of America that we should be ashamed of. I see an America that didn’t grant women the right to vote until less than a hundred years ago. I see an America that didn’t completely outlaw marital rape until 1993. I see an America which has and continues to treat women as lesser beings, whether it knows it or not.

Integrity and respect will always be worth more than views on YouTube, and I hope you can realize that someday.

Yours in wrathful disgruntlement, Aalia Thomas