By now many people should have seen the following video.
This video is part of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. The video supposedly explains what has made people’s idea of beauty very distorted.
What is wrong with this approach? If Dove is trying to convey that short of fakery, there would not be beauty, then this can easily be falsified. One need only come across one very good looking person in real life. Even when one looks at babies, some are very good looking whereas others are not, and this doesn’t have to do with make-up, airbrushing, dieting, exercise or plastic surgery. If the message is falsified, then the messenger loses credibility, and this increases the risk of reinforcing the belief the messenger is trying to counter.
I believe that it is better to educate girls and women about what most people find optimally attractive in women, and explain why this is strikingly at odds with respect to fashion world imagery regarding an important correlate of beauty, namely the extent of femininity. Whereas this approach is not consistent with maximizing body acceptance, there is obviously a limit to the extent of body acceptance than can be engendered, and as nature would have it, what most people find optimally attractive in women corresponds to health, fertility and fecundity, which cannot be acquired by indulgence in negative health behaviors.
Note that Dove focuses on superficial aspects such as make-up, hairstyling and airbrushing in the model, but not the important issues of why most high-fashion models tend to have masculinized faces and very thin bodies. The answer is important information if one were attempting to reduce the incidence of unnecessary dieting among girls and women.
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