Tag Archives: Campaign for Real Beauty

Wrong Direction: Shonda Rhimes and Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty

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Laurie and Debbie say:

Shonda Rhimes is a powerhouse, and a force for good in the world. Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” is one of the first things we blogged about, more than twelve years ago (yes, really) and we’ve always had mixed feelings about it.

Now, twelve years later, Ashley Nguyen writes at The Lily about how Shonda Rhimes is teaming up with Dove to take the Campaign one step further. Terrific, you say? Well, kind of. They are doing a lot that’s right:

After announcing the project in March, Dove and Rhimes created a call-out for women to submit their stories. They looked at more than 4,500 submissions before deciding on the women featured in their first two films … Real Beauty Productions uses a 100 percent female crew to produce the films because, as Rhimes told The Lily, “If you can, why not?”

On one level, reminding women people that beauty isn’t a narrow box is always useful; in 1994, when we released Women En Large: Images of Fat Women, we certainly put a great deal of time and energy into doing just that.

But …

It’s not 1994, or 2005. It’s 2017. It’s becoming clearer and clearer to activists in all fields–from police terror to mass incarceration to gentrification to body image–that the personal story is simultaneously incredibly important and disastrously insufficient. We need personal stories to humanize people, to interest bystanders, and to galvanize change.

We also need to look at the systemic issues, the things the personal stories don’t address and can’t change. In the case of body image, self-worth, and “real beauty,” here’s a short list:

  • The systemic story that a woman must be beautiful to be important, valuable, interesting, or even to like herself is bullshit.  When Rhimes says:

I think my definition of beauty is me at my most. Feeling my best, as confident as I can be, doing my best work. Being at my happiest. I also think it’s the moments where I’ve decided to just be me, despite what anybody else thinks, despite what anybody else might judge, despite what anyone else has been thinking about. It’s just me being me without even noticing anybody else or their judgment.

Why does that have to have anything to do with beauty? We would never say that a man doing his best work, or at his happiest, is at his most beautiful.

  • By any real definition of beauty, everyone can’t be beautiful. For one thing, beauty is cultural and not all of it travels. For another, some people don’t want to be looked at; others don’t care. Focusing on “real beauty” as something for everyone ignores the option of “I don’t want to be/I don’t care about being” beautiful. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness.
  • If everyone was in fact beautiful, wouldn’t that erase beauty? One thing we use our eyes for is to find things and people that please us: some of them are beautiful, some are attractive, some are interesting, or cleverly decked out, or surprising. And many things and people that we see are not particularly visually memorable. In the case of women, why should that one characteristic define them?
  • We should never forget that when we’re talking about women “beauty” is at least partially code for “sexual availability,” and lots of women, including many who might want to be beautiful in other contexts, have extremely good reasons not to want to be lumped into “sexually available” or even judged on our sexual availability.

Yes, Shonda Rhimes and Dove are doing a kind of good work together. If they make one woman feel better about herself, we can cheer that success. What we’d really like to see, however, is Rhimes (probably without Dove, which would lose its vested interest) take on the bigger question of why being at our most, feeling our best, as confident as we can be, doing our best work, being at our happiest is not enough.

Beautiful or Average? We Pick Door #3!

Laurie and Debbie say:

What’s wrong with these options? Liz Dwyer, writing at Take Part, discusses “Choose Beautiful,” a commercialized “positive body image campaign” from Dove, in which “women participating in a social experiment suddenly had to decide whether they’d walk through a shopping center entrance labeled ‘Beautiful’ or one labeled ‘Average.’

Dove has been on the commercialized, dishonest “positive body image” trail since 2005, and we have been right there calling them out for just as long. This campaign, however, sets a new, even lower, bar.

The basic assumption of the campaign is that women with a positive body image will walk through the “beautiful” door, and there is something wrong with women who choose the “average” door.

If a woman didn’t want to label herself as beautiful, according to the ad, she might have low self-esteem. Indeed, in the clip we see and hear some of the women explaining their decision. … Causing a woman to doubt herself doesn’t exactly seem empowering. Yet plenty of women are applauding Dove for the feel-good-about-yourself-no-matter-what tone of the ad. There are comments across social media that the clip had people in tears. Meanwhile, other women see this latest campaign from the company as a driver of poor self-esteem.

Of course there is value in encouraging women (people!) to feel beautiful. However, there are so many ways to love your body without identifying as beautiful. Our favorite is, “I’m just fine, thank you!”

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Maybe I’m “striking.” Maybe I’m “fascinating.” Maybe I’m not the least bit conventionally attractive, but the people who know me well can’t take their eyes off me and I like what I see in the mirror. Maybe I’m beautiful in some way that isn’t generally recognized.

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Maybe I’m in some category (old, disabled, disfigured) that automatically exempts me from “beautiful.” Maybe I have some feature or characteristic that is generally considered to be not beautiful but I’ve learned to use it creatively and turned it into a form of beauty. Maybe I’m considered beautiful in my country and not in yours.

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Maybe, although Dove would be terrified to hear it, I don’t give a rat’s ass how I look. Maybe I’m beautiful in some contexts and some styles, but not in others. Maybe I’m actually “average,” even though Laurie and I don’t know what that means.

Most important, maybe I’m just fine the way I am and I don’t care about your damned door labels, or your dollar-driven social engineering.

And let’s not forget who’s doing the social engineering. Remembering that one of the five cities where this experiment was tried is Delhi,

Dove’s parent company, Unilever, has a long history of wanting some women to feel downright unattractive in order to move its products. In India, Unilever makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year selling bleaching creams for skin under the brand name Fair & Lovely. The brand’s notorious advertisements have long depicted darker-skinned women whose lives are miserable—they only get jobs or dates after they’ve whitened their faces with the product. 

So which door should these women with darker skin walk through? How about after they use bleaching creams? What would happen to Unilever’s products if they were “just fine, thank you.”

What would make more women feel beautiful, or just fine, thank you? Stop pouring billions of dollars into trying to make us worry about which door we should walk through. That would be a just fine start, thank you.