Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty is a wonderful tug of effort to break down hardening stereotypes of feminine beauty. This is a wonderful step in the right direction. In any Intro to Women Studies class, the first thing everybody usually wants to talk about is the closed focus of society's norms of beauty for women. The crucial part of the discussion, I think, is that the problem with society's norms of women's beauty is that it is created by the desires of men and women themselves have not had the power to create it for themselves. That's why the norms are oppressive, and for the majority of the time are unrealistic. For a fantastic example do a simple google image search of "the perfect woman"....see the unrealistic sexual desires...most likely created by a man?
Now I just did a search on Dove. Apparently it is owned by the company Unilever and how much would you like to bet the number of female executives? What?! Zero...how did you know? I know that Dove is going in the right place of portraying semi-realistic images in their ads (not all of them, only the ones under the heading of "Campaign for Real Beauty"), but isn't the problem the authorship of these ads? And what is the intent behind the ads? A company is still a company that is fueled off of our money and they will say what they need to say in order for you to buy Dove. It reminds me of the SC Johnson ads that talked about how some of their manufacturing plants that made things like Windex were eco-friendly, fueled from the methane gas from landfills and how these products have a special green sticker on them so the consumer will know how their product was made. Of course I like the idea of using landfill fumes to energize a plant. But the real problem is the chemicals that are being produced from the products they are making in the first place.
There are these movements like environmentalism and feminism that have fought hard to make change. And then these ideas are corportized to try to gain a profit. Masked as eco-friendly because of a small adjustment made. They could take 10 steps, but instead they take one, and we applaud them for it by buying their products. Dove should make ALL their ads a "Campaign for Real Beauty" not just the ones that come on during Oprah.
On a good note for SC Johnson, the HRC gave them a score of 100 for the third consecutive year. So seems SC Johnson is taking another step or two.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)

No comments:
Post a Comment