REDEFINING
BEAUTY
The Downside
To ‘Real Beauty’
But is Dove’s idea of change what
we should be focusing on?
Not everyone agrees with the
importance the campaign places
on physical beauty. In an April
2013 piece for The Cut, Ann
Friedman wrote:
These ads still uphold the notion
that, when it comes to evaluating ourselves and other women,
beauty is paramount. The goal
shouldn’t be to get women to
focus on how we are all gorgeous
in our own way. It should be to
get women to do for ourselves
what we wish the broader culture would do: judge each other
based on intelligence and wit
and ethical sensibility, not just
our faces and bodies.
Pozner acknowledges that the
beauty message is problematic, but
deems it necessary. “Until we get
to a point in the culture where the
dominant messages about girls and
women are not focused on their
physical bodies, then we do need
to actually reaffirm a broader and
more innate, internal definition of
what beauty is,” she told HuffPost.
Both critics and champions of
HUFFINGTON
02.09.14
the campaign have also pointed
out that just because women are
redefining beauty, doesn’t mean
they are actually feeling differently about themselves. Some
see this as a call to change the
conversation entirely, as Friedman suggests, others as evidence that Dove’s message about
beauty is important and neces-
“We can’t just be getting
people stirred up; awareness
and conversation isn’t
enough. We actually have
to do something to change
what’s happening.”
sary. An estimated 80 percent of
American women feel dissatisfied
with their bodies, and 81 percent
of 10-year-old girls are afraid of
becoming “fat.” Can a series of
ad campaigns really change institutionalized body hatred?
The Dove team feels strongly
that the campaign will be around
for a long time to come. “The conversation is as relevant and fresh
today as it was 10 years ago,”
MacLeod said. “I believe we’ll be
doing [this campaign] 10
years from now.”
Nina Bahadur is a writer
for HuffPost Women.