I rode the escalator into the subway station. “Gray? or Gorgeous?” the older woman in the first poster asked. Down, I passed another poster, and the skinny, flat-chested woman in it asked me, “Half empty? or Half full?” It continued with a freckled woman, “Flawed? or Flawless?” And then, “44 and hot? or 44 and not?”
It’s Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, and according to the company’s web site, “a global campaign in which women from around the world are challenging beauty stereotypes, myths and perceptions.” According to me, it’s a cheap marketing campaign.
As I rode back up the escalator, the same group of women in white granny panties and wife beaters asked me the same questions all over again. The women on the posters were not models. It was frustrating how plain, even unattractive, they were. The ads seemed to say that you can either look like a model, or look like this. I blushed at my shallowness and couldn’t help but feel embarrassed, both for my superficiality, but also because I wondered if anyone else on that escalator was looking at these women and thinking the same thing: “What are they doing in a beauty ad?”
We all know what models should look like, and it makes most women feel invisible when they don’t look that way too. Dove sponsored a study that found that only two percent of women globally consider themselves beautiful. They say that body image dissatisfaction has been found consistently in women and girls as young as nine years old, and many of the studies found a desire to be thinner in girls as young as seven. “Fit? or Fat?” the advert asked.
Considering the numbers, how could I be so cynical? When little girls are dieting, when little girls are wearing makeup, when little girls are sticking their heads in toilets, someone should do something. Women spend hours on ellipticals, rather than playing sports, so they can count the calories they burn. They put makeup over their freckles. They get facelifts and breast implants. They wear colored contacts and dye their hair.
In India, they even use skin lightening cream. I read in an article about Bollywood that Indian actresses must be fair-skinned, because even though colonialism is a thing of the past, an Indian woman’s beauty is still defined by her whiteness. In Australia, where skin cancer rates soar, many people stayed out of the sun. My Pakistani friend though not only avoided the sun, but also religiously used Fair and Lovely crème, a skin bleaching lotion. I joked with her; how absurd, I said. She lashed back that everyone in India used it. How could you find a husband with dark skin? I looked at the Fair and Lovely crème. The bottle read Unilever, the same company that makes Dove.
It turns out Fair and Lovely that is one of Unilever’s best sellers. No wonder none of the ads ask, “Terrible? or Tan?”
Dove sponsors interactive workshops on Real Beauty in Canada for eight year olds and their mentors but then tells girls in India that they must lighten their skin to look beautiful and European. And this isn’t the only place we find mixed messages. Women’s magazines feature fatty desserts on their covers with articles on how to shed pounds on their inside pages. We learn to please our men while being independent women.
My friend and I rode up the escalator. I thought that if I were a mother, I’d want my little girls to see the ads. “Half empty? or Half full?” I imagined that she would answer, “Full!”
But the box reading “Fat” had been checked with a fat black sharpie. My friend giggled and pointed to the signs. “Gray, Wrinkled, and 44 and Not,” each negative box had been checked. Fair and Lovely stays on the market because it sells. Subconsciously, the model and ads affect us. But we succumb to them. We buy the crèmes; we go on the diets; we choose not only how to answer the question of half empty or half full, but to answer it at all, as if our breast size affects our worth, as if it matters. There was a little girl on that escalator, and I wanted to jump in front of the ads. It wasn’t because of the negative checks; I wanted to block the questions, the ads themselves. There must be other ways to boost our self-esteem.
