October 14, 2006
Dove and the ‘campaign for real beauty’
‘Real beauty’
Real. Beauty.
It shouldn’t be defined like that, a cynical marketing tool to make me, 14 stone and pudgy and bad of hair and crap of clothes, make me think that it’s ok for me to look how I do just because the nice people who want me to buy shampoo say so.
No.
I’m the market that this is aimed at – fat and thirty, but one I was thin and thirteen. My anorexia had nothing to do with the media presentation of women – I didn’t even have the benefit of the internet, but that hegemony was too blatant even for 1992 and, I’d read enough Susie Orbach by the time I was 13 to know that there’s more to wanting to starve yourself that parodying Kate Moss. If there had been a Dove CAMREB when I was choosing my thinness, would it have saved me. Fuck no.
For a start, it’s there to make fat middle aged women feel less crap about being fat and middle aged. Blanket acceptancy – it’s you real beauty that counts. Secondly, who ever gave a fuck about beauty? If you’ve got an eating disorder, beauty is the last of concerns. Campain for real thin-ness. Campaign for real lightness. Now you’re talking.
Real beauty isn’t something that gets peddled in adverts, and the very idea offends me at a level so deep my soul is screaming. You can’t do this, you can’t package up something as amazing as beauty and muddle it with reality and then use it as a fucking promotional tool.
I’ll tell you what beauty is – to me. And only me, because god help me you, dear reader, have a better idea of your own beauty. The point I’m trying to make here is that it’s not something that can be culturally defined or sanctioned – whether you’re saying mingers are beautiul or supermodels are ugly. Beauty for anyone other than you or the people you care about is meaningless.
For me – beauty is stretching – feeling my body tense and then relax. It’s glancing to my right and seeing the world through the faint haze of auburn that my growing-out-red-dyed hair gives everything on that side, and seeing the shine and shimmer of hairs a couple of centimeters away from my face. It’s walking down a corridor and not caring how big your arse is. How big my arse is. It’s smiling. For anything at all.
And at no point do I need a bloody soap company to tell me what is beautiful.
