Sunday, 11 September, 2005, //
snippet of the Campaign for Real Beauty webisteThe people at Dove have their hearts in the right place. They really do. And what they're doing is getting a rather positive response, in a few New York Times articles as well as Dove's own Campaign for Real Beauty promotional website.
So some women feel good when they look at the ads and that—whether or not these women are the majority notwithstanding—alone makes me happy that it's being done. It's a step in the right direction for sure.
But am I the only person around here who feels a little frustrated every time I look at the tag line of this campaign? It's pretty sick that these women can't be put before the eyes of the public without what basically amounts to an asterisk next to their asses and a footnote reading, "Yeah we know they aren't skinny. Aren't we cool for putting them in an ad anyway?" Does every billboard with these women really need an announcement that they aren't as thin as the swizzle sticks on the billboard next door? I think most of us can pretty much see that for ourselves. Does Dove's website really need to insist with methinks-Dove-doth-protest-too-much levels of repetition that it finds these women are beautiful in their own unique ways? C'mon. These are some pretty girls. They've got big, bright smiles, clear skin, and shiny hair. None of them have huge, flabby stomachs or cottage-cheese thighs. They'd be looking a lot prettier without all this insistence that they're going to "celebrate their curves."
Wouldn't Dove's message be coming across a little clearer if it slapped these pictures on its billboards without the "check out these curvy women—but they're still pretty, we swear!" commentary? U.S. women all know what "curvy" really means in the mouths of advertisers and the mainstream media. It means you're not up to their standards.
In this sense, rap—which gets unending flack for objectifying women—is quite a few steps ahead of Dove's game. You know that Kanye West "Gold Digger" video I mentioned one post down? Many of the women wriggling in front of "Fantasy Magazine" and "Oooh LaLa" aren't supermodel-thin either—and Kanye doesn't change the lyrics to "now I ain't sayin' she a supermodel/but it ain't like she so fat she's got a waddle" when the "curvier" women are front and center. In fact there's nothing at all to differentiate them from the thin girls in the video aside from the viewer's own preference.
Maybe advertisers and the mainstream media can take a hint. I'll be a lot happier when I see normal-sized women in ads that don't have the words "curvy," "real," or "plus-size" anywhere in sight. Until then, rap videos and the boastful Dove ads are going to have to do.
