It's Fashion Week in New York, and Pepsi is debuting a new design of its own: a skinny can. Sounds harmless enough, until you read the press release accompanying the slender product. "In celebration of beautiful, confident women, Diet Pepsi presents the taller, sassier new Skinny Can…" Ouch. "Got that, fat chicks?," writes Jim Edwards for BNET. "Pepsi is celebrating tall and skinny soda/women because that’s what’s confident and stylish!"
The skinny can itself is a great idea, writes Edwards: It holds the same 12 ounces, but no longer looks just like Diet Coke. In fact, it's more like Red Bull and other brands in the oh-so-hot energy drink category. Plus, "you can probably fit more of them in the door of your fridge." But Edwards notes that the redesign was unveiled months ago, and won't hit stores til March, and chides Pepsi for unnecessarily "tying the can to an event with a history of favoring women whose body types are unusual at best and so unhealthy as to be fatal at worst." Dumb move, he writes. "Makes the old can look like your fat friend." (Click for more sexist-or-not? opinions.)