Remember last year’s “Beach Body” flap

Easily-angered feminists got so enraged over a London Tube ad featuring an attractive female clad in—horrors!—a bikini that they defaced the posters and threatened to bomb Protein World, the weight-loss-supplement company that the young woman was advertising. They complained that the ad’s slogan, “Are You Beach Body Ready?” amounted to “fat-shaming”—so the U.K. Advertising Standards Authority immediately ordered the ad pulled. Eventually, though, the authority decided that the posters weren’t offensive or irresponsible after all.

Never fear—the feminists have won in the long run. They turn out to have an ally in London’s new Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, who has decreed that henceforth there shall be no bikini-wearing ladies in ads anywhere in the city’s public-transport system. According to the Evening Standard:

Mr Khan said: “As the father of two teenage girls, I am extremely concerned about this kind of advertising which can demean people, particularly women, and make them ashamed of their bodies. It is high time it came to an end.

“Nobody should feel pressurised, while they travel on the Tube or bus, into unrealistic expectations surrounding their bodies and I want to send a clear message to the advertising industry about this.”

What was interesting about Khan’s ukase was the fact that there had been no prior input from the general public in London about whether they objected to feeling “pressurized” by looking at photos of models wearing bikinis while riding the Tube. A few well-placed complaints from feminists seem to have sufficed. As the Daily Caller notes:

There was a petition with over 70,000 on Change.org opposing an advertisement with women in a bikini that asked “are you beach body ready?” The petition said, “Protein World is directly targeting individuals, aiming to make them feel physically inferior to the unrealistic* body image of the bronzed model, in order to sell their product.”

The Caller also notes:

Recently, advertisements featuring bikini-clad models in the British city of Birmingham were spray painted over. Birmingham has a high Muslim population.

So, Khan is essentially doing a political-correctness twofer: appeasing radical feminists and radical Muslims at the same time.