Dove Love

We all remember Dove's breakthrough commercial, "evolution," which demonstrated the media's miraculous special effects and how an average-looking (OK, above-average) Jane can be transformed into a stunning glamazon with the help of a little Photoshopping. You know -- make her eyes as big as saucers, elongate her neck to giraffe-like proportions, pump up her hair, lips, EVERYTHING! Make it all bigger, better, prettier. This is how so many women become hooked on attaining a goal that is not only unrealistic and unnecessary, but flat-out unachievable.

The company is at it again, with a new hard-hitting video called "Onslaught," part of their Campaign for Real Beauty. As I watched the film this morning, a wash of emotions came over me: sadness, anger, disgust...and hope.

It's a minute-plus montage of pictures showing women as objects, women dancing seductively in videos, women on scales, women having their faces slashed and breasts cut open by surgeons. It is our lives as females in fast-forward: everywhere we look, billboards and bus-stop ads tout mages of "the perfect figure." Commercials promise up their products can erase our "flaws" -- wrinkles, freckles, age spots, muffin tops, cellulite. Products pledge to make us lighter, darker, thinner, bustier, smoother, plumper (in the right spots) and flatter in others.

I watched this video and I thought, "This is my life. This is the life of so many women I know." Constantly bombarded with images of women being objectified, degraded and put down. Like this new, potentially NSFW German ad -- it's for a career fair at a technical school. Or rapper Nelly's music video, Tip Drill, in which he swipes a credit card though a woman's ass as if she were a product to be charged. Or this lovely Dolce & Gabbana ad.

Some people have expressed concern that Dove's ad is hypocritical, because the company is owned by Unilever (makers of Axe body spray, for example). True, those ads depict women as mindless twits, attracted by a spray of high-school cologne and ready for the taking. But (a) I think Axe is being playfully hyperbolic, poking fun at themselves and other beauty campaigns like them who take themselves too seriously and (b) why blame Dove for another company's adverts? Dove is stepping up doing something to help revolutionize the way women and men look at the media, to change the impact these ideals have on the little girls of America. Their work gives me hope that change can happen, viral film by viral film.

Please watch this video -- watch it over and over again, alone and with your children. Send it to friends, to mothers. Watch it until you can say out loud with a slight sense of relief and a healthy dose of anger, "No wonder our society is so messed up." Because it is, we are, and it needs to stop before more innocent young girls like the strawberry-blonde in "Onslaught" sacrifice themselves to the altar of the scale and the toilet, with images of "perfection" dancing in their brilliant minds.

The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is at www.campaignforrealbeauty.com

Comments

[NABNYC]

If we look at the issue of violence against women, for example, and we focus on trying to teach women to leave violent men, a good idea, aren't we really defining the problem as being a women's problem? When in fact it is a man's problem. If society had a massive campaign to end violence against women, we wouldn't have to teach women that being hit in the face is a clue that it's time to leave.

A lot of this body image stuff is the same thing. Women are told by society that they are ultimately evaluated based upon finding a high-earning man to support them. That's the winning ticket. And therefore, they must find out what men want. And we learn that men want very thin women with large breasts and young-looking faces. So plastic surgery becomes common and women have plastic injected into their bodies to try to look like men tell them they should look.

Men control the economy, the politics, the wars, and most everything in the country. Shouldn't we start evaluating this as being a man's problem, not a woman's problem. If women have little control in the world, or in their lives, and have little chance of earning a decent living on their own, then why would we expect them to do anything except slice, dice, vomit, dress, act as they are instructed.

Why do men value women so little that they expect all women to have their breasts cut open and have bags of liquid plastic inserted inside them? Why do men expect women to starve themselves to make themselves physically helpless. Why do men want women who have bodies shaped like little boys, except for the breast implants?

Why is the traditional female shape - curvacious, glorifying the unique child-bearing capacity of women - despised by men in this country?

Maybe we need to define this sickness that we see in so many American women - starving, shop-a-holics, plastic-surgery freaks - as being more the result of a man's problem than just silliness by women.

[Trilby]

I am often disgusted, as I walk the city streets on my way to work, at the "news" vendors with racks of magazines like "Stuff" "Maxim" and all that other salacious crap. I think, young girls see that. What must they think? Is that our destiny, to be toys/recepticles for men to use? It makes me quite sick and disgusted with the men who buy these stroke-mags.

[Balzac]

That was very powerful.

[TwoKnives]

I think we can "blame" other companies owned by the same parent corporation -- Unilever -- for their ads. It shows that the Dove campaign is just another marketing ploy to sell more soap. This is obviously an attempt at impressing young minds with a brand identity and hope that it will stick until the girls are old enough to buy their own Dove products.
I'm not saying that the video isn't moving and relevant. It is. My problem with it is that the final message puts the onus on parents to "save" their daughters from the onslaught of advertising. That's a big task when you consider the billions of dollars spent by marketers. What about corporate responsibility? When are these companies (Unilever) going to step up to the plate and say "enough -- this isn't good for anyone?"

[LisaP]

My take on that little film is that the strawberry blonde beauty is the one we strive to be (and can never measure up to). The group of regular girls at the end represent the rest of us, and the beautiful little girl is the beauty ideal the industry uses against us.

[kellygrrrl]

WOW!
there are so many things I could say
but I'll just leave it to the words of my husband
when I showed him the piece.
HE said,

"the truth hurts.
but someone had to say it."

[jeskiley]

Viral film by viral film, that's good. I'm 33, and I long for the days of simpler images on TV. I don't think twice about what's flashed before my children's eyes (unless it's reality TV sluts) because I feel like it's well beyond my control. Let them become numb like I have.

If it's product by product, or station by station, I will be renewed and hopeful as well, if what is shown on television follows simple principles of taste. Send out the surveys asking what America wants to be watching on TV, let's have a rennaissance, let the majority rule. I have faith.