After I saw the first Dove ad in their on-going “Campaign for Real Beauty,” I kept my response to myself because I was fairly certain that I would be the only person in the whole, wide world (as we used to say when we were kids) who would find it ... well: Repulsive.
The Dove ad features six ordinary women with different body types, none of whom look particularly anorexic. They have been lined up in white bras and panties and posed to look in-your face confident, cocky, and sexy. What they resemble, instead, is a bunch of bank clerks or dental assistants in a locker room after a sweaty game of ping pong, who are too old to be thrusting their underwear clad-hips towards the pervert photographer who has somehow talked them into posing half naked for the picture.
Thank heavens he didn’t catch them in the shower.
The caption under the photo, which has been made into giant billboards and plastered all over the known universe, is “Real Women Have Curves.” The concept is this: You, your grandmother, the 200 pound captain of the Women’s Mud Wrestling Team – none of us have to judge ourselves against conventional standards of beauty (size zero models with thighs perfect for a game of pick-up sticks). Why? Because Dove has freed us to glory in our roundness, our tattoos (yes. One of the panty-clad dental assistants has a tattoo on her thigh), our chubby ankles, our droopy hair, and our (bravo, whoopee, let’s hear it from the audience) individuality.
I hope that Dove gave those poor dumb clucks a lot of money because, instead of individuality, what the ad evokes is a desire to throw each of them a towel and urge her to “Cover up.”
Never, never, never had I suspected that I was one of many who found this advertising campaign objectionable. But last week, during one of our marathon telephone calls, my sister, Linda, said, “You should write a column about those revolting Dove ads.” It was she who told me to go on-line and check out the various “I hate the Dove ads” websites and links.
Dubious that such things could exist, I obeyed. Good grief. There they were! Spoofs galore. Some border on being deranged. Some are really clever. Most are very, very funny.
First I have to tell you about A Dove Film Evolution. This is a live action commercial in which, over a period of sixty seconds, an ordinarily pretty woman who looks like your cousin Martha before she has brushed her teeth is transformed via make-up and trick photography (a Photoshop-like tool widens her eyes, narrows her jaw, slims her neck, and so on) into a gorgeously boring every-hair-in-place fashion model. At the end of the commercial, these words flash across the screen: “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted.” The purpose of the ad, I suppose, is to counsel us to take off our makeup, flaunt our blemishes, and, like Martha, go out in public before we have been air brushed or brushed our teeth.
