You Can't Please Everybody...or Every Body Can't Please You

This is a belated repsonse to a topic that had been whirling around the media for the past few weeks. I had dismissed it before with a snort followed up with a "who cares", but I've been having a particularly "girly" week. In other words, I'm having body-image issues. So I got to thinking about what is attractive and if it can be defined, or if beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. It got me thinking about those Dove divas.
For anyone who hasn't heard, there have been some "unconventional" ads for Dove's skin-firming lotion, in which so-called normal women were used as models. Normal being not the size 2 models that currently rule print ads, but the kind of gals we all see walking down the street. The kind of gals most of us are.

These ads, like any form of media that challenges what is normally forced down the public's collective throat, were met with praise at the beginning. The initial response was positive, mostly from women who were tired of seeing rail-thin models depicted as the standard of beauty. Women who were tired of seeing obviously twenty-something women advertising anti-wrinkle cream, or genetically blessed bikini models hocking ab-crunchers and butt-shapers. We're all smart enough to know that if we use Pantene, we won't automatically look like Beyonce. We also know that most celebs have enough money to hire personal trainers and nutritionists to keep them looking gorgeous, so the 30 minutes we spend at Curves 3 or 4 times a week isn't going to be getting us a cameo on Desperate Housewives anytime soon. So it was great to finally see a company willing to embrace real women with real curves for an ad campaign. After all, their target audience is real women, so why not?

But soon enough, the rumblings started. Up first was the issue of exploitation. Some folks felt like it was unfair to use heavier women in a skin-firming ad campaign. The argument was that if Dove was really trying to promote self-acceptance, they shouldn't be telling the very women in their ads that they need to use their product. To me, this is not a very logical argument. The ads weren't for any kind of weight loss product or diet pill. Basically all the skin-firmer does is tighten up the skin and reduce the appearance of cellulite. Even skinny women can have cellulite. If a woman is a little chunky, she might love her curves but I guarantee you that she doesn't love her cellulite. No woman wants that. A voluptuous body is very sexy to many men and women, but the cottage cheese just ain't happening. It's not something that anyone finds attractive. It's not unbearable, and most of us and our significant others can live with it, but given the choice we would banish it forever.

Another problem that all the complainers out there conjured up was that the ad campaign was condoning being overweight, rather than promoting a healthy lifestyle. This is an overreaction, most likely from the I-run-5-miles-a-day-every-day-and-my never-had-a-cookie-vegetarian-bony-ass-talks-about-wheat-grass
smoothies-for-hours-on-end-to-anyone-who-will-listen contingent. The ad is simply promoting a beauty product. Dove's ultimate goal is to help women look and feel better about themselves while making boatloads of cash. Pretty simple. There was no huge tagline that read "Be Fat Like Us and You'll Live Forever!" Everyone knows the risks involved with being overweight. None of these models were morbidly obese. The thing is, people can be heavy for a variety of reasons. Yeah, sometimes weight gain comes from pure laziness and love of food. Sometimes it's genetic. And maybe there are women out there, like myself, who know that they should lose some pounds but they're either unmotivated or just trying and running into problems along the way. So, what should we say to these women in the meantime? "Feel bad about yourself until you look like Gisele?" No. There is nothing wrong with promoting having a healthy body image. And it's really hard to care about how you look, or even how you feel, when your confidence is in the toilet. Love the body you're in now, and you'll be more apt to take care of that body in the future. Or as one of Dove's competitors simply says, "love the skin you're in."

Of course, the most usual reaction came in the form of insults and mockery. People just flat-out said that they didn't want to see billboards with fat chicks on them. Apparently, it's disgusting. I think that some morons out there just make too big a deal out of body size. I wouldn't get turned on by a billboard of a hairy fat guy in a Speedo, but I wouldn't lose my lunch over it either. I certainly wouldn't write a nasty letter to my local paper or the company who was advertising, moaning that it should be taken down.

What's funny is, in such a PC world as we're living now, it's still perfectly acceptable to make fun of fat people. And not even just "fat" people, but those who are just carrying a few extra pounds around. Hell, I remember in college that if you weren't a petite girl with a perfectly flat stomach to show off your standard-issue butterfly (or dolphin) bellybutton piercing, you were virtually un-datable by most guys' standards. Then again, I've seen plenty of heavy women in great relationships with thinner men and vice versa. So obviously, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. Why then, do we continue to look to the media as a gauge for what is attractive and what's not?

Making it all even more ridiculous, now all we read about in the tabloids is how girls like Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie are too thin. It's hilarious the way the media blames things like this on the media, and then they just continue to perpetuate the problem. Lindsay Lohan is so skinny, she needs professional help! Those Dove models are too fat, we get sick just looking at them! The Victoria's Secret models' perfect bodies are an unattainable goal, they need to be taken out and shot! I guess this will go on until some far-off future date, when science and medicine will have advanced to the point where all humans are genetically-altered, perfect freaks. But who will those models of perfection be?

What if they're Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes? Won't that be a kick in the ass!