At first, I was taken aback by the Village Voice article on the new Dove ad campaign, as it starts with calling the model “fat.” But what I like about it is that it admits that when many of us (myself included) see an ad with an average-sized woman, there’s a moment of shock. Then there’s a moment of, “Yeah, right on!”
So, we’re walking down the Bowery a week or so ago and we see that Dove poster everyone is talking about, the one with a indisputably voluptuous “real” woman posing in her underwear and before we can censor ourselves we murmur practically out loud, “Wow! She’s fat!” and then we’re instantly ashamed because of course we’re too politically correct to ever think that for real except—we did.
In fact, this beaming, frankly fleshy model, big as she is, is a lot younger than we are and let’s face it, in truth she is no fatter than we are—and she looks to be in far better shape.
Though we like to think of ourselves as the most progressive person on earth, it turns out we are a lot more similar to most people than we care to admit: We, like everyone else, are so accustomed to looking at skinny, skinny women in magazines, on television, in movies, and virtually every place else that when we’re confronted with someone of a normal weight she seems completely freakish. So insidious, so poisonous is the tyranny of the super-thin that we recoil, if only for a second, at the sight of an average woman on a billboard.
Who could have predicted that when people in highly developed countries had more than enough to eat, the result would be a bizarre combination of widespread obesity and rampant self-starvation?
The rest of it gets a little shallow, but it’s an interesting read regardless.