Fat Girls and Underwear--Has the World Gone Crazy?
Seth Stevenson in Slate writes about Dove's new ad campaign. (See http://www.slate.com/id/2123659/). This PC campaign for whatever beauty product features shockingly fat, yet real! women, ranging in size from the merely zaftig size 4 to the morbidly obese size . . . 12. In their underwear! In un-retouched photos! Revofuckinlutionary.
This sort of ad bothers me, and Seth merely scratches the surface as to why. First of all, it's because Dove really is seen as revolutionary for featuring non-models with "real" bodies in their ads for products that non-models with "real" bodies buy. Wow. Women write to all kinds of beauty magazines clamoring for these types of images, and women are writing to Dove to express their post-feminist pleasure, and, yet, they continue to buy fashion magazines packed with "unreal" women that make "real" women feel bad about themselves.
Secondly, it's the term "real women." Models, no matter how chiseled, are real women with real women's bodies. They are not manufactured by the Japanese or anyone! They were born to actual, living women and enjoy all of the voluntary and involuntary privileges that come with a functioning brain. The fact that they are famous, lauded and paid outrageous sums of money for putting up with the dehydrating effects of air travel and having to endure goosebumps on cold beaches in their bikinis is a product of the fashion economy--an economy almost solely supported by women who insist on blowing their 80 cents for every dollar a man makes on $5 Cosmopolitans and $45 bras. If you don't want to see 18-year olds with no body fat and gravity-defying breasts posing in $3,000 frocks, don't buy the magazines, and don't buy the frock. My analysis of what would happen in the marketplace is thus: Mean model go bye-bye!
Along that note, it irks me when women express hatred for other women based on how they look. It's bullshit, and we need to stop doing that. If we base all or most of our self-esteem on our relative attractiveness to a tiny subset (yet still real) of possible female shapes, we've lost our collective minds. Is this really all we've got going? My notion of the perfect weight and size is based 90% on myself--MY perfect weight, MY version of good health--and 10% on what various health professionals say is healthy. (OK, maybe 2% is based on clothes-buying ease.) Getting to this mental state was ridiculously tough, by the way, and chewed up a lot of gray matter that would have been better used to learn French or distribute the world's resources more equitably. I am 5'8" tall. At my thinnest and healthiest (in college and immediately thereafter), I weighed 135 pounds, wore a size 10, and could run 5 miles over hilly terrain fairly easily and hike all damn day. Note that this healthy and attractive size would have made me one of the heftier models in Dove's campaign. By comparison, Cindy Crawford is 5'10" (six inches taller than the average American gal) and, at the height of her modeling career, a size 6, maybe 120-125 pounds. She, too, would be eligible for Dove's "revolutionary" campaign.
Which leads me into the third beef (ha!) I have with Dove's campaign: they cut women off after they reach a size 12. This effectively eliminates the modeling chances of the average American woman, who is a size 14. She and the rest of her pod, or roughly half the American female population, are much too fat for Dove--an example of unreal women on the other side of the scale. And, of course, they start the "real woman" campaign at size 4. FOUR?! This is 5 sizes below the average, and a mere 1 or 2 sizes larger than everyone's favorite fatass, Sarah Jessica Parker. She is a well-reported size 0, which is the starting point for women's clothes.
The dimpled bottom line is thus: Dove is not a beautiful bird, but a parasite. They are still feeding off of women's insecurities, but have found a not-so-sly-really way of feeding off of the insecurities of a different market of women--the "you go girl!", faux but-I'm-not-a-feminist, enlightened and empowered yet still reading the same old soul-crushing, money-sucking fashion magazine crowd--and getting them to shell out the ducets for their hideously overpriced ass-firming cream. At the same time, they've managed to make women who were at least used to feeling like shit in the presence of actual models feel even worse for not even making the cut of Dove's (huge corporation) version of the Real Woman. When you let someone else, and especially a huckster trying to sell you something, set the standard of what you should be, and get away with the radical, insulting, and misogynistic judgement of whether or not you are a "real woman", do you deserve to be miserable and miss out on great parties because your thighs are too big?
Women are more than their looks. (Apparently, this isn't obvious enough.) Imagine what would happen if women, in their collective, unified glory, told the fashion and beauty industry to fuck off. Let the revolution begin.
This sort of ad bothers me, and Seth merely scratches the surface as to why. First of all, it's because Dove really is seen as revolutionary for featuring non-models with "real" bodies in their ads for products that non-models with "real" bodies buy. Wow. Women write to all kinds of beauty magazines clamoring for these types of images, and women are writing to Dove to express their post-feminist pleasure, and, yet, they continue to buy fashion magazines packed with "unreal" women that make "real" women feel bad about themselves.
Secondly, it's the term "real women." Models, no matter how chiseled, are real women with real women's bodies. They are not manufactured by the Japanese or anyone! They were born to actual, living women and enjoy all of the voluntary and involuntary privileges that come with a functioning brain. The fact that they are famous, lauded and paid outrageous sums of money for putting up with the dehydrating effects of air travel and having to endure goosebumps on cold beaches in their bikinis is a product of the fashion economy--an economy almost solely supported by women who insist on blowing their 80 cents for every dollar a man makes on $5 Cosmopolitans and $45 bras. If you don't want to see 18-year olds with no body fat and gravity-defying breasts posing in $3,000 frocks, don't buy the magazines, and don't buy the frock. My analysis of what would happen in the marketplace is thus: Mean model go bye-bye!
Along that note, it irks me when women express hatred for other women based on how they look. It's bullshit, and we need to stop doing that. If we base all or most of our self-esteem on our relative attractiveness to a tiny subset (yet still real) of possible female shapes, we've lost our collective minds. Is this really all we've got going? My notion of the perfect weight and size is based 90% on myself--MY perfect weight, MY version of good health--and 10% on what various health professionals say is healthy. (OK, maybe 2% is based on clothes-buying ease.) Getting to this mental state was ridiculously tough, by the way, and chewed up a lot of gray matter that would have been better used to learn French or distribute the world's resources more equitably. I am 5'8" tall. At my thinnest and healthiest (in college and immediately thereafter), I weighed 135 pounds, wore a size 10, and could run 5 miles over hilly terrain fairly easily and hike all damn day. Note that this healthy and attractive size would have made me one of the heftier models in Dove's campaign. By comparison, Cindy Crawford is 5'10" (six inches taller than the average American gal) and, at the height of her modeling career, a size 6, maybe 120-125 pounds. She, too, would be eligible for Dove's "revolutionary" campaign.
Which leads me into the third beef (ha!) I have with Dove's campaign: they cut women off after they reach a size 12. This effectively eliminates the modeling chances of the average American woman, who is a size 14. She and the rest of her pod, or roughly half the American female population, are much too fat for Dove--an example of unreal women on the other side of the scale. And, of course, they start the "real woman" campaign at size 4. FOUR?! This is 5 sizes below the average, and a mere 1 or 2 sizes larger than everyone's favorite fatass, Sarah Jessica Parker. She is a well-reported size 0, which is the starting point for women's clothes.
The dimpled bottom line is thus: Dove is not a beautiful bird, but a parasite. They are still feeding off of women's insecurities, but have found a not-so-sly-really way of feeding off of the insecurities of a different market of women--the "you go girl!", faux but-I'm-not-a-feminist, enlightened and empowered yet still reading the same old soul-crushing, money-sucking fashion magazine crowd--and getting them to shell out the ducets for their hideously overpriced ass-firming cream. At the same time, they've managed to make women who were at least used to feeling like shit in the presence of actual models feel even worse for not even making the cut of Dove's (huge corporation) version of the Real Woman. When you let someone else, and especially a huckster trying to sell you something, set the standard of what you should be, and get away with the radical, insulting, and misogynistic judgement of whether or not you are a "real woman", do you deserve to be miserable and miss out on great parties because your thighs are too big?
Women are more than their looks. (Apparently, this isn't obvious enough.) Imagine what would happen if women, in their collective, unified glory, told the fashion and beauty industry to fuck off. Let the revolution begin.
posted by lulu | 10:44 AM
5 Comments:
I heard about these dasterdly ads a few weeks ago, thanks to some angry diatribels from one of the Damn Hell Ass Kings.
To see the anger, paste these links: 1. http://poundy.com/body/smell_the_dove.php
2. http://poundy.com/chicago/today_in_the_chicago.php
Thanks for the links, Burb. Here's a comment from a gal responding to the ad that perfectly illustrates my point that women need to stop bashing other women:
"It's more realistic because it's real women using these products -- it's not anorexic robots using them. It would get me to buy [the product]. It's definitely a positive thing."
"Anorexic robots"? So, not content with letting men dehumanize us, we dehumanize each other? Hard to get bent out of shape when an anorexic (it's all her fault!) robot gets raped or beaten up.
I read this article earlier, and one thing the author said really pissed me off. Go to the article and look at the picture toward the end, the one where the woman has her back to the camera and is looking over her shoulder. According to the author, this is "Stacey," and she is "showing off her ample bottom." I'm sorry, but this person does not have an "ample bottom." In fact, she has a teeny, tiny, very cute bottom. If this bottom is really considered "ample," then my own body, which I've finally learned to be very happy with over the last 10 years or so, is grossly, disgustingly, morbidly obese--it's amazing I don't blind people with revulsion just walking down the street.
Seriously, fuck all of these idiots. And by the way--there is maybe no bigger scam going today than "firming lotion." Any lotion can be "firming" if you use it every day. Yes, that $2.99 bottle of regular old Jergen's does the SAME THING as a special $30 bottle of "firming lotion." There's just only so much a lotion can do, though, people. Get over it.
Thanks for the post, lulu. So true.
I agree with you Flipper (not that you are disgusting--far from it), but that this Stacey is anything but unpleasing.
Anyway . . . I found another link today that (to my mind) is somewhat related to this whole notion of being comfortable with yourself. And, yes, strip aerobics seems like it was created by guys, for guys, but the writer comes across as empowered.
Read her views: http://dancingbrave.typepad.com/db/2005/08/my_birthday_pre.html
I guess I'll have to weigh-in (hahaha) on this issue, since it matters to me in odd ways. I am so tired of people (most often women, but sometimes men) acting as if weight were the issue. Or, on the equally insane side of the gender barrier, the eternal question: Does size matter? In this crazy, narcisistic, body-hating culture, big men and little women are okay, but big women and little men are not okay. That is, if they live and die by magazine covers and other pop-cult advertising conspiracies to steal our dollars and our souls. With apologies to Immanuel Kant (who took a long walk every day at precisely 5:00 pm), I propose a hypthetical imperative: If you want to liberate yourself from this mind-body prison we call Amerikan commerce, you must forget the above okay/not okay standard, or replace it with another standard. To quote Maria Muldaur, "It ain't the meat, it's the motion." Whatever the size of your ample butt, pick it up off its favorite chair and move it in as many different ways as you can think of as often as possible. It will be both a beautiful and a happy butt.
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