Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty: Onslaught

Thanks to Rose, I found this video.

My kids go to Catholic schools, one to an all-boys high school (that would be the boy in case you're wondering) and one to a grade school. Dress codes are strongly enforced and the parents are very involved in the kids' lives, particularly in a moral sense. As such, the high school girls from the local all-girls Catholic school are not dressed like skanks in the same way as most of the girls at our local public school.

Despite the fact that the boys and girls go to different schools, there is a large number of the girls who make their way over to the boys' school every afternoon to socialize. If I was my son, I would be falling in love 23 times a day. (Before you start wondering, rest assured that much younger women don't interest me. At all.) In any case, those girls are absolutely drop dead gorgeous. They're not statistical anomalies and the school doesn't pick for beauty, they're just a whole lot of cuties. Maybe it's a reflection of their parents' love. Who knows.

My point is that for my taste, these "beauty" campaigns are anything but that. These girls don't need push-up bras and short skirts, they just need to smile and the guys are goners.

Flirting is a howitzer. A WonderBra is a pop gun.

I'm so glad that Dove is doing this that I'm going to blogroll their link. You can find it on the right hand side under "Friends."

Update: Pete's View argues that Dove's parent company, Unilever, can't have it both ways and that they'll lose some luster when people realize that the same corporation running these ads aims some products at the unpaid prostitute community. So what? Why would I care if there's cognitive dissonance? Unilever is giving me a resource to help my daughter love and respect herself. I don't begrudge Unilever's attempt to make a profit off of the skanks of this world.

In a way, this is a lovely example of fighting the system from within. Unilever is using profits from the sluts to try and guide them to greater self-respect. To me, that's positively brilliant. Pete has a more technical review of the campaign as well.

Some commenters over at Adverblog have missed the point entirely. One said, "they have crossed a line in having the nerve to Deign (sic) themselves as advisors to parents." That is dead wrong. Dove is reinforcing my morals and my love for my daughter. Abercrombie and Fitch have fought me tooth and nail. I will go out of my way to buy Dove products and I will never forgive or forget what Abercrombie have tried to do to my daughter's generation.