RETHINKING BEAUTY

nude but not crude
I was listening to this story on NPR's Day to Day about Dove's new "Pro-Age" advertising campaign which made me think of this essay from last month's The Atlantic Monthly.

The gist is this: Dove's new campaign may push the envelope on redefining notions of feminine beauty by including older women (nude, no less) in this new campaign but how much is this actually challenging our narrow social bias indeed about what an "ideal" body type looks like?

As Postrel notes in that Atlantic Monthly piece about an earlier Dove campaign,

"The “real women” pictured in the thigh-cream billboards may not have looked like supermodels, but they were all young, with symmetrical faces, feminine features, great skin, white teeth, and hourglass shapes. Even the most zaftig had relatively flat stomachs and clearly defined waists. These pretty women were not a random sample of the population. Dove diversified the portrait of beauty without abandoning the concept altogether."

The main difference with the new campaign is that the women are older and while this is no small move in an ad culture that fetishizes youth, notably, the vast majority of the women featured all have strikingly fit bodies. Sure, they may not look like a 20-something athlete in prime condition but imagine that same person 30 years from now and you'd probably end up with many of these women: aging but still attractive in rather conventional ways. There are no women with bad skin - sorry, liver spots don't qualify - almost no women who'd be characterized as overweight, no women who a reasonable, open-minded person wouldn't call attractive based on most of us are already taught through media and advertising.

This isn't to dismiss Dove outright but it's to note that what they're doing is far less than revolutionary and more like a small nudge towards a more inclusive model of beauty that still stays comfortably within our expectations.

--O.W.