Writing for life

Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo 27/02/2008

A beautiful, innocent young girl looks out from my computer screen. For a long moment she gazes, smiling enigmatically as a soft breeze tugs at her strawberry-blond hair. It’s serene, peaceful. And then it begins.

Image after rapid-fire image of the “perfect” body flash onto the screen. Promotions pushing products that promise to make women slimmer, lighter, younger, sexier. Called “Onslaught”, this is Dove’s latest online video in their “Campaign for Real Beauty”, which the company claims is all about restoring women’s self esteem in a world that bombards them with a body-image that’s impossible for a real woman to obtain.

Lest we forget, “Onslaught” is, in fact a very effective piece of online viral marketing. It’s produced not for some altruistic higher purpose, but to raise Dove’s profile and cleverly position its products as somehow more benign than those of brands that peddle this impossibly unrealistic ideal of female beauty. It’s an ad.

But it’s also an incredibly powerful and poignant minute-and-a-half exposé of the tremendous pressure being heaped on girls and young women in today’s society: pressure to conform to a standard that isn’t representative of anything real, much less beautiful.

As a parent with daughters I find the clip disturbing. “Talk to your daughter,” implores the film, “before the beauty industry does,” and after watching it you certainly want to do just that.

Women are being bombarded, on average, with around 2,000 advertisements a week portraying an image of beauty that’s artificial and ultimately unattainable. It’s no wonder so many end up with issues relating to their physical appearance, weight and body shape.

Another Dove online video – the fore-runner to onslaught, called “Evolution” – shows a beautiful woman being transformed for a photo-shoot. The hours spent on hair and make up are compressed into less than a minute, then it shows computer enhancement of the resulting photo to elongate the face, lengthen the neck, plump up the lips, enlarge and open up the eyes, accentuate the cheek bones and generally remove “imperfections”. The ethereal creature that graces the billboard at the end of the video bears little resemblance to the attractive woman who originally sat for the photo. “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted,” says the closing caption – and again, they have a very real point.

Even the dolls young girls – including my own – play with today are so far removed from what anyone would consider a “normal” body shape that it’s just not funny. When was the last time you saw a real woman shaped like “Barbie” or, perish the thought, one of the “Bratz”?

Advertisers, of course, will continue to peddle this nonsensical and unhealthy image of female perfection as long as it keeps selling product. The simple fact is that brainwashing girls to strive for an unattainable ideal makes good business sense: it ensures a perpetual and growing market for their products and services, but it does so at the expense of women’s self esteem.

Guess who’s the first line of defence against this disturbing onslaught?We are: parents. Not by shielding our daughters from it – that would be impractical, and almost as impossible as the artificial body image the beauty industry portrays – but by instilling our daughters with self confidence and an appreciation of their own self-worth from an early age. It’s up to us to help them see through the sham of commercialised beauty.

Maybe Dove is trying to distance itself from the pack in order to sell more of its own product. Maybe its parent company, Unilever, also owns brands guilty of peddling precisely the image of beauty that Dove purports to campaign against. But whatever their motivation is, they’re getting people thinking, they’re generating debate… and I for one am all for it.