Publications
Partners
It's probably best spelled out in Dove's Real Beauty campaign, with three videos, Onslaught about how children are bombarded with beauty messages, True Colours featuring little girls who already hate themselves and the reality of advertising in Dove Evolution
Axing their credibility
But let's not forget that Dove is owned by Unilever, who also owns Axe deodorant, which seems to be the primary offender in bringing us scantily clad and absurdly hot young women in ads like this – exactly the kind of media blitz Dove is purportedly campaigning against.
Fantasy girls
How about the Redbook scandal?
When a magazine aimed at older women, 40 plus (we won't even get into the issue of women over 50 being left out of the magazine demographic entirely), photoshops beautiful 39-year-old country music icon Faith Hill to within an inch of her life so she more closely resembles a 19-year-old Cosmo cover, that's a bad thing.
19 year olds don't manage to look like the heavily 'shopped Cosmo cover girls, let alone 40 year olds with perfectly natural smile lines and leftover baby weight and even the dreaded arm wobble – you know, all the stuff that makes women normal and human.
This isn't a slight touch up either. They liposuctioned away her back fat and her arms and most of her waist, made her neck longer, turned her hand into an arm and slimmed down her face which shows nary a crow's toenail let alone a whole foot.
On the flipside, we have the anti-anorexia ads, like Nolita's No. Anorexia campaign that followed in the wake of a Brazilian model's death from the disorder in 2006 and a fluster about the overly skinny girls who dominate the catwalks.
It's been fairly well established that the fashion industry does not cause anorexia (except perhaps in models who are the only ones literally expected to live up to the absurd standards).
It's a complicated disorder with all kinds of densely tangled psychological issues. For the model featured in the ad, 27-year-old Isabelle Caro, anorexia came out of a difficult childhood but says she "loves life and the richness of the universe" and is excited about the campaign as a way of forcing "young people to wake up to the dangers of the disease."
But is that really what it's doing? Sure, it's high on shock value and is being much talked about, but it's unlikely to change anything in the industry. And worse, it could end up featured as an inspiration photo on the pro-anorexia or "Ana" websites.
The pressure on guys
That's not to say men have it easy either. Since the advent of men's magazines featuring sculpted manly men on the cover rather than nearly nude girls, there's been increasing pressure on the guys too. Just ask David Beckham who was accused of padding his package in the Armani Emporio underwear campaign.
That old double standard
We know there's a double standard between men and women, that Philip Seymour Hoffman with his hanging gut and jiggly bits can fuck Marisa Tomei in the opening scene of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, but audiences reacted with disgust and outrage and loathing when Kathy Bates so bravely exposed her very real and very saggy breasts in About Schmidt.
So while Harrison Ford and Sly Stallone can reprise their roles as the heroic adventurers who made them, respectively Indy Jones and Rambo it's laughable to think that Michelle Pfeiffer will ever play Catwoman again and Sharon Stone bombed in Basic Instinct 2 even though she's still absurdly hot.
Of course, those characters were mainly based on their sex appeal while Indy and Rambo (barely) were more than just their chiselled abs. They had personalities. God forbid female characters should be more than just tits and ass.
But here's the upside
I've always been in reasonably good shape (sort of like Britney at her last MTV Awards appearance when everyone decried her, unfairly, as looking flabby). So while I've been outraged by the way women are portrayed in general and the unnecessary pressures it puts on us, it's never really affected my self esteem, or at least in any way that I'm aware of.
Until, that is, I started watching that Sex-and-the-City-for-boys fest that is Entourage populated by a parade of impossibly svelte skinny malinkies who kept getting skinnier (and certainly made my guy friends "svelter"). I've never known anyone that thin. It made me feel positively podgy.
But it also made me think about the way we relate with the media and how movies and magazines and TV shows and commercials help contextualise our lives.
You can see it in the way street thugs watch gangster movies for their cues about how to roll, how American soldiers have subverted the subversive themes of movies like Apocalypse Now to become pro-army anthems, to hype them up before battle, or the way our romantic expectations are shaped by fairytales and rom coms.
We've developed strong filmic vocabularies to understand our own lives, casting ourselves in the leading roles. And it affects the way we perceive ourselves positively as well as negatively.
For example, when I bought a pair of tight (and come to think of it, truly hideous) black PVC pants at the age of 21, wearing them made me feel like Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman.
Likewise, now, when I wear my 1940s-style polka dot dress I rock that look like Dorothy Parker or Gwen Stefani's Jean Harlow in The Aviator. And when I array myself artfully on the bed in lingerie for my lover, I feel like an Agent Provacateur catalogue model.
All it would take is a photograph to disabuse me of the notion, but that's the image I have in my head and, hey, you know what, it makes me feel good. It makes me feel hot and ravishing and sophisticated and glamorous or sluttish or debauched, whatever role I'm stepping into, as seen on TV.
Sure, it's delusional, but no more so than thinking I'm overweight just because of the girls in Entourage.
Got something to say? Weigh in below in the comments section.
