Dove Shmuv

A number of things irritate me about the New Dove firming cream ads. And since it appears to be my mission in life (or at least the mission of this blog) to inspire controversy, I thought I’d mention them.According to Dove's own website , the company has embarked on "a global integrated-marketing campaign that undermines the basic proposition of decades of beauty-care advertising by telling women – and young girls – they're beautiful just the way they are."As evidence of this utopian vision, they offer billboards of plus sized women in their underwear. Very nice. Very nice indeed. One problem though. If these plus sized women are so beautiful, why do they need firming cream? The ad is not saying, "Hey world, large gals are beautiful!" It's saying, "Hey large gals, you'd better do something about that nasty cellulite, pronto!" All of which is especially nice given that there's little evidence any of these products really work. This ad works the way most ads work--by identifying a problem and offering a solution. To wrap it up in some pseudofeminist malarkie is cynical to say the least.Just don't tell Dove's fan's that. If you go to their website, you can add your very own testimonial describing the ways in which Dove's new ad boosts your self-esteem. A sample:"Keep up the good work on making us feel beautiful."--Jenny ShawDodgeville, WIAn article in Slate on the same subject elicited a barrage of similar sentiments. The fact that so many women seem to find comfort in this manipulative ad is quite telling. Obviously, there is a large reserve of resentment for skinny girls--especially fashion models.Why is that exactly? Why are women so often intimidated and resentful toward fashion models rather than inspired by the images of aspirational beauty they help to create? Why does Shaquille O'Neal with his statistically improbable height and uncanny basketball talent inspire where Kate Moss afflicts us with low self esteem?I should point out that when I say “we” and “us” I am referring primarily to Americans. Europeans (particularly the French and Italians) don’t seem to have this problem. This might have to do with the fact that they are quite a bit skinnier than us and therefore closer to the “ideal” weight, but I think there is more to the story.For one thing, Europeans don’t have the same relationship to fashion that Americans do. They see fashion as aspirational and fashion photography as an art form. Michelangelo didn’t carve the statue of David with back hair and love handles even though regular Italian guys probably had both. And we’re not intimidated by the statue of David because we view it properly--as an expression of an ideal of human strength, youth, and beauty. But when it comes to fashion images, we Americans get overly literal--viewing them as concrete guideposts for our own appearance. That is not, in fact, what the fashion industry intends. Being married to a fashion photographer, I have an insider’s take on all of this. A fashion image is like Michelangelo’s David. It’s aspirational, ideal, a platonic form of a particular style of dressing. Fashion photographers cast young, tall, slim women with symmetrical features and good skin because they are more like blank slates than the rest of us with our smile lines and interesting shapes. Bring in the make up, hair, clothes, lighting, scenery, etc. and you can create with these blank slates a fantastic world quite removed from the real one. That’s fashion. That’s fashion photography. And that’s the role “skinny” models play in it.But guess what. It's a lot easier to make a buck off of women who hate something about themselves and are willing to spend money to fix it. So companies like Dove have a stake in supporting the literal approach to fashion imagery. They want you to feel inadequate when you look at the pages of Vogue so they can sell you something that will fix you. Oh, and while they're taking your money, they'll feed you a load of crap about self-esteem.Why do we fall for it? Why is our self-esteem (especially women's self-esteem) so tied up in beauty? It's a rotten deal. Beauty is scarce. That is its nature. That is its power. We can’t all have equal amounts of it any more than we can have equal amounts of basketball talent. But Shaq doesn't destroy our self-esteem. Why is it only beauty that crushes us? Are we that shallow?Of course not. But we do live in a society where women are defined first and foremost by their attractiveness to men. Our other talents and abilities take a cultural back seat. The Dove ads and their fervent supporters are not part of the solution, they are part of the problem. They reinforce the primacy of female beauty by politicizing envy of skinny girls in a naive pseudofeminism.Of course large gals are beautiful. Skinny girls, tall girls, short girls, all girls are beautiful--not equally to all and not all the time. So what? If you want to make things better for women, don't celebrate "new" standards of beauty that reflect our expanding waistlines. Resist the very notion of standards. Women were not, in fact, put on this earth to be visually pleasing to men. Stop pretending they were.