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Body Impolitic and the Dove Campaign

Lauren

Badgerbag pointed out an interesting blog that studies the Body Politic, aptly named Body Impolitic. See their picture galleries of beautiful unconventional nudes.

One of the first posts on their blog today discusses the Dove brand “Campaign for Real Beauty,” a campaign that I was at first skeptical about. Looking at their site, however, has given me something to feel hopeful for:

Dove’s global Campaign for Real Beauty aims to change the status quo and offer in its place a broader, healthier, more democratic view of beauty. A view of beauty that all women can own and enjoy everyday.

In order to achieve this important goal, the Campaign for Real Beauty includes the following initiatives:

  • Creation of a forum for women to participate in a dialogue and debate about the definition and standards of beauty in society
  • Release of a global, academic research study that explores the relationship that women from around the world have with beauty and its links to their happiness and well-being
  • Advertising that inspires women and society to think differently about what is defined as beautiful
    Fundraising initiatives (sponsored by the Dove Self-Esteem Fund) to help young girls with low body-related self esteem
  • Self-esteem workshops with young girls in schools to help them foster a healthy relationship with and confidence in their bodies and their looks
  • Establishment of the Program for Aesthetics and Well-Being at Harvard University, through a grant from Dove, which will continue to examine the way we think and talk about beauty in popular culture and the effect that this has on women’s well-being
  • Creation of a global touring photography exhibit, Beyond Compare, Women Photographers on Beauty, showcasing diverse images of female beauty from 67 female photographers, and demonstrating that beauty is about much more than stereotypes

I can’t decide about the campaign. On one hand it is refreshing to see women outside of the Hollywood norm being represented with respect and presented with a considerable deal of sexiness and attractiveness because of/despite their unconventionality. Additionally, the goals listed above are awfully third wave. On the other hand this campaign smacks of the old “Girl Power!” theme in which we are sold beauty products through messages of feminine empowerment.

The overall message seems to be that women are entitled to “feel beautiful.” By buying Dove products, you too can reach your full potential.

Maybe I’m not so hopeful.

29 thoughts on Body Impolitic and the Dove Campaign

  1. eh, it’s an imperfect step in the right direction. Marketing has such an overwhelming influence that any non-evil message is helpful. If it doesn’t hurt, does it help?

  2. The Dove campaign is terrible. They had a billboard in my city with a picture of a woman with the words ‘fat or fab?’ and a pair of checkboxes. They still have a voting system on their site..’bald or beautiful’ and so forth..it’s ridiculous.

    It’s a ploy to get people to believe that they really do care about women’s self esteem…but how could they, when they want you to vote on how a woman looks and then buy products to ‘improve’ how you look?

    No matter what they promise, it comes down to one thing: “BUY OUR PRODUCTS!”

  3. It *is* a company that has a product to sell, after all.

    Personally, I enjoy the campaign (as does the boyfriend, who couldn’t stop staring at one of the ads on the back cover of a magazine recently) as the ads contain raw, un-edited photos of “regular” women – not even women who may be commercial or plus models, but people they just picked up off the street (I’m not sure if I read this from anything linkable or whether I heard reports from photographers among the modeling community). I don’t think it’s possible to be the most perfect campaign on earth simply because it *is* sponsored by a corporation, but I certainly like it for what it is.

  4. No matter what they promise, it comes down to one thing: “BUY OUR PRODUCTS!”

    True. And I know it’s imperfect and maybe even disingenuous, but isn’t it at least a little refreshing to see a company focusing on the beauty of someone sans makeup and fancy clothing and listening to The Right Music while sipping the Next Big Malt Beverage or hip brand of cigarette?

    Undoubtedly, the goal is to get you to buy their products, but I guess I separate smart skin care from lots of other types of things one can do to make onseself ‘sexy’ — maybe because I’ve been through the regimen of… let’s see. doxycycline, tetracycline, Triaz (prescption benzoyl peroxide), Differin (adapelene), and Accutane. hah Does that make me vain? Does that make me an accessory to The Man?

    I guess I do bristle a bit at attacks on skin care products far more than other vanity products, because they’ve directly impacted my life. I have good-looking, soft, (mostly) clear, healthy skin now, and it is due to Major Drug Companies and other people who just want me to Buy Their Product.

    The damndest thing is, though, sometimes their products just work.

  5. Chuck, if I can find something that can get rid of my cystic acne without damaging my damaged liver I will be a very happy buyer.

  6. I’m with the “step in the right direction” camp… Jacqui has a point — they do have a product to sell. I wish it weren’t presented as being so utterly groundbreaking, if I had my druthers… I’d prefer it to be more along the lines of how Bust Magazine presents their fashion models: completely normal, and drop-dead gorgeous.

  7. Deanna, I think you put your finger on what I dislike so much. They draw so much attention to how great! it is that they’re waging this progressive! campaign showing real! women.

    I think it would have been far more powerful not to draw attention to the models’ difference from Hollywood-ettes and instead just let them be.

  8. So… all I have to do is buy Dove products, and Dove starts marketing a beauty ideal that moves away from the stereotypes of womens’ mags and TV and movies?

    Shit, sign me up. I’m ready to go. Here’s my money. It’s just like a cultural theory-crit charity except I get free soap!

  9. “It’s just like a cultural theory-crit charity except I get free soap!”

    LOL. But I kind of agree! It’s not perfect, but as major marketing campaigns by major corporations go, it’s a lot better than most.

  10. I’m with the “step in the right direction” crowd.

    I was waiting at the pharmacy for my anti-baby pills and saw a pull out ad in Us Weekly. The woman in the ad looked like me in that her tummy has this lil pouch of flab. I was floored! I’ve seen the billboards around town and the models all looked too good. Of course, this ad was about some cellulite cream and the take home message was to trust a cream sold because it’s been road tested on real curves. Made me laugh thou.

    Oh…and I would have gone to the open casting call if the hubby hadn’t just bought me Dove 3 weeks prior. I’m too honest sometimes.

  11. I’m in the step-in-the-right-direction camp. I don’t really think we can expect companies to do anything major that really isn’t in their coporate interests (think that’s why we need government intervention for the rest).

    I’ve seen a few of the billboards on the EL, and I was so pleased to see gorgeous women of a whole range of body sizes.

    So, if it is a choice between this and companies that continue to put air-brushed, photo-shopped, stick-figures up, I’ll buy Dove products.

  12. We have the same campaign in the UK. And I was sceptical/interested when it first appeared. However, apart from the JUDGE HER NOW tick boxes it must be remembered that Dove is made by the same people who make the mens brand Lynx (well, that’s what it’s called here). The Lynx ads are a plethora of completely unreconstructed sexism where women strip in the supermarket because some dorky bloke smells good. Men also leave their houses and find women everywhere in bikinis doing everything for them becuase they are wearing this deoderant. The tag line is “the girls are ready”.

    I’d rather Dove used the women they used without asking for judgement and without it being such a big deal. However, I think they’d do far more for womens’ self esteem if “they” (as a parent company) made sure that all brands under their umbrella weren’t constantly shown as promoting the uber-women who is the skinny, bikini’d, up for it, ‘babe’ they show in ALL their other ads.

  13. I saw my first such ad yesterday, on a bus shelter in my work neighborhood in North Beach. This is in a two-block stretch that’s got maybe a dozen sex-oriented businesses on it, and there’s a lot of frankly sexual imagery in the neighborhoood from life-size photos of strippers to neon-light dancers with explicitly rendered neon-light pubic areas, and, occasionally, actual strippers cajoling passersby to come inside for shows.

    I tune it all out in psychic self-defense. But I noticed the Dove ad from a half block away while negotiating traffic. This despite the fact that the model in that particular ad was not especially far removed from the North Beach Pole Dancer body type. She just looked more real, somehow. Maybe it was the smile.

  14. I saw a Dove advert showing various women complaining about their flabby tummy, jiggly bum, fleshy thighs, etc. They seemed to think our beauty standards are probably unrealistic, but we all should at least try to attain them anyway. What’s so ‘progressive’ about that?

  17. I’m not so sure about the “buy Dove and you too can reach your full potential” stuff. I am glad to be able to open a magazine to an advertisement, “forget” to close it, and leave it on the ottoman for my pre-teen girls to view. Something is better than nothing!

  18. The Dove campaign, while not perfect, is indeed at least a half-decent step in the right direction. But the British poster makes a good point – Unilever, Dove’s parent company, also makes Axe (deodorant for men) which has commericals which really counter any positive effect from the Dove campaign. Or so it seems to me…

  19. I am not sure if the other commenting writers have seen the same ads that I have seen, or whether you have. But to me, the ads do not celebrate the female form as much as you might think in the first viewing. It’s more like the women of the advertisements acknowledge their “flaws”, consider them to be in fact flaws, but they are in a really happy mood about it, and they are in a womanly environment where they all happily hate themselves, celebrating Dove products that purportedly smooth and tone and flatten.

    But, part of me wants to use a phrase I’ve been using a lot lately in daily conversation – “not making the perfect the enemy of the good.” This campaign for real beauty seems to build on the feminist message, and give Dove a little more street-cred in my eyes. So perhaps we should be celebrating them, too. And our Buddha bellies.

  20. This reminds me of the wrong-note wincing that the first efforts to make racially-inclusive commercials gave me: yeeeesss, it’s good that they’re acknowledging that people less melanin-challenged than me exist – but they’re only doing it to sell them stuff. Do the plusses cancel out the minuses?

    Eventually black, Latino and Asian families in ads became less “Whee, look, we’re Inclusive!” backpatting on the part of the merchants and more common, and the nails-on-blackboard effect faded. Sometimes the baby steps in the right direction are really clumsy and fraught with tumbles…

  21. I reckon I’ll join the “step in the right direction” camp, because I have found the ads noticeable and a breath of fresh air too.

    That said, I’m not sure I agree that there really is that wide a range of body types. From the ads I’ve seen here in D.C., most of the women looked to be in the size 10 range. But maybe there was other kinds of diversity – tall and short, etc. – that I’m just not remembering. But I do remember noticing at the time the lack of plus size women (it’s important, I think, to realize the Dove women aren’t plus size, they’re about the average – they just might seem so given all of the very very thin models usually in ads).

  22. I was so glad this came up as a conversation topic, it inspired my first post! (I’ve been an avid reader for awhile)
    Dove has plastered metro stops in DC with posters for this campaign and so twice a day, five times a week I walk past multiple images of their “normal” models and then a huge banner that reads
    “Because firming the thighs of size two supermodels is no challenge”
    Great……so they are acknowledging that using tiny models in an ad for thigh firming cream is ludicrous…….But they are still telling the rest of us we need to buy their thigh cream.
    And I’m torn between thinking it is good to have the natural female body on display and feeling like its just another reason to have semi-nude women on display to sell a product.
    Full disclosure: I often see these before I’ve had any coffee, so maybe the models perkiness (they all look really excited to be dancing around in their underwear) is just too much for me on my way to work.

  23. I really appreciate your opening compliments on my work, and bringing our blog question about these ads to a different audience.

    Sunya Harjis, “Shit, sign me up. I’m ready to go. Here’s my money. It’s just like a cultural theory-crit charity except I get free soap!” is terrific!

    Having devoted the last couple of decades to taking beautiful nude photographs of real people, I am so starved to see anything other than emaciation in the media that my initial response to the giant women in my BART station was to stand there and appreciate the partial reality of their bodies. On the other hand, this is yet another way to set up women’s bodies to be judged, as if gray was the opposite of gorgeous.

    And, of course, there has never been a thigh cream which wasn’t an expensive fantasy.

  24. I just don’t see how asking viewers to judge and rate a woman’s appearance while selling products so the viewer can ‘better’ themselves, ie. fit into the beauty standard better can be seen as ‘progressive’ in any case…let alone when coming from a massive company that profits from women’s insecurities. ‘Firming’ creams and ‘anti-aging’ products from a company with a campaign about ‘real beauty’..?

    What a joke.

    It’s just a pseudo-progressive marketing ploy made to sell products and get the attention of certain comsumers so that we praise them because they are ‘trying’ and then support them.

    Check out the bit about ‘firming’ cream..’firming’ cream is cellulite cream. Not to mention, the women in the ad are hardly curvy.

    It’s not a step forward…it’s a slap in the face.

  25. Pingback: Body Impolitic - Blog Archive - » The Campaign for Purchased Beauty - Laurie Toby Edison: Photographer

  26. Well I guess if people want to, they can get upset about an ad campaign. I can think of some other campaigns to get upset about. This new Dove one isn’t so much on the top of my list.

    I love people bringing in evidence of sexist ads from other parts of Unilever’s brand lines. It’s like everyone left of “extreme Republican” has gleefully blotted out that corporations exist to make money. Things have to sell to make money. When I say this campaign makes me want to buy Dove products, the advertisers might get the drift that I’m ready to buy a new kind of idea: instead of “here’s what’s wrong with you and here’s a product to fix it”, I’d like to buy “well you’re not so bad, but if you want a quick fix…”

    Blaming Dove for failing to market “you’re perfect just the way you are” is like blaming your boss for expecting you to work. He doesn’t get paid unless you work, and Dove doesn’t get paid unless you’re buying their soaps, lotions, and thigh creams. What I am firmly in support of is easing the hysterical pressure placed on women to be more beautiful, more skinny, more youthful. I am willing to accept “be a little more beautiful” in place of “BE MORE BEAUTIFUL.” I am willing to compromise with capitalism.

    Especially because many, many, many more women are interested in being beautiful than in being accepting of themselves. Let Dove’s marketing arm take a little of the feminist burden of proving to women than women are okay, that’s my theory.

  27. Former Jose – technically, in the modeling/commercial world, size 10 is considered to be “plus-size.” In fact, anything above a size 8 is considered to be “plus-size.” On the ironic flip size, most companies that only use plus-size models to market plus-size clothing don’t use models smaller than a 14. But now we’re getting off topic… 😛

    However, there is a “wide range” if you look closely at different elements – some women have larger tummies than others, some have (much) larger breasts than others, some have longer or shorter legs, some have chunkier legs, etc. While the range of sizes may not be that large, I have seen a couple that I would certainly categorize as several dress sizes larger than the others. There may not be size 18 and 20 women, but unfortunately marketing research has shown that using such women in a capaign that is supposed to appeal to all women actually hurts sales and damages the campaign overall because the “average” women thinks that she doesn’t identify with that (or in some cases, doesn’t want to BE that – no matter how much body-diversity awareness we might promote). And again, unfortunately, since this *is* an ad campaign sponsored by a company that has a product to sell, they do have to pay a certain amount of attention to the marketable audience.

  28. (To expand upon the comment I just made, Sigrid and Stacy are several sizes smaller than, say, Julie and Lindsey. Lindsey is at least a 14, if not a 16.)

  29. This ad campaign is the topic of discussion on my local NPR station today, on a program called “The Connection“. Thought you all might be interested. You can either listen live (11am ET, July 18) or I am sure archives will be available.

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