There is never a bad time or place to share this video.
Evolution of Beauty- Dove Campaign for Real Beauty
The beautiful, healthy, real woman in the clip sits down and is systematically transformed into what looks like an alien for about .5 seconds... until your perspective adjusts and you realize that the final product is what we would call "pretty" in any other situation.
Every time I watch this, the part where they photoshop her send shivers down my spine. They do crazy things we'd never think of like shrink and elongate her neck and enlarge her eyes and lower her shoulders-- like she's looking in a fun house mirror. She's warped and distorted in order to fit our own similarly described concept of beauty.
Images like this one are what girls and women base their own SELF WORTH on. Too bad it's pretend.
The bar is set at some imaginary, computer generated goal we will never achieve.
We sure as hell try, though.
It's a dose of optimism when you look at the fact that the video brings this fallacy to people's attention. I have a special kind of gratitude for the people at Dove who've put together the Real Beauty Campaign. It certainly does put a little wind in my sails to think of the way this video exploded onto the internet. I'm fairly positive you've seen it by now, and if you haven't, prepare to never look at a magazine cover the same way again.
So thank you to the people at Dove for reminding us all of reality.
-E
Great start to your Blog! Interesting story about the nurse /doctor un- joke. It makes me sad to hear about such attitudes from such young minds. I thought these outdated and demeaning lines of thought were on the way out when I was in high school back in the 70s. I am proud of you Emma . Stay strong , be the
ReplyDelete"candle in the dark"
Emma, your mom brought this blog to my attention back at the beginning of the month and I just now followed up. Way to kick ass and draw a feminist eye to (disappointingly) everyday attitudes and commonplaces that we otherwise overlook.
ReplyDeleteI had never seen this Dove commercial, and I was shocked how easily my brain switched the distorted face from alien to "normal". That freaky perspective on what a beautiful woman should look like reminded me of something recently read about: Isabelle Caro.
Now deceased, Caro was a model with a severe eating disorder. She posed fully naked and horribly malnourished for an anti-anorexia campaign which coincided with the Milan fashion week. She was ill from her not-unusual anorexia and hoping draw attention to the illness and help others by getting limitations in place for how skinny the models could be. People asked for the billboards to be removed because the (true un-photoshopped) images were so disturbing.
Ultimately the campaign didn't succeed in changing anything about the modeling culture. Caro has died from anorexia-related health problems. Her freakishly anorexic colleagues continue starve themselves on cornflakes, walk the runway, get picked up for national ad campaigns, and have their images plastered all over to distort the perceptions of women (and men!) everywhere. And girls everywhere still fantasize and fetishize the "Ana" lifestyle looking to those photos for "thinspiration". On it goes.
I don't understand. What is wrong with us?? Why the body-obsessions? Why do we do these things to our bodies? Can you imagine grizzly bears sitting around navel-gazing, spending their days obsessed with the curve of their bellies and not the cut of their claws?