I'm old enough to remember cigarette ads on TV. The Marlboro Man would ride his horse on a cattle drive while he smoked. He was manly and cool and Westerny. We loved Westerns back then.
The tobacco companies lied to us about the health risks of smoking and their marketing teams led that charge. They told us we could keep on smoking, it was fine. We liked to smoke because it made us feel good. So we smoked and died.
Dove soap has a new ad campaign.
Dove’s latest campaign has taken aim at the sexualisation of women and the related beauty standards in gaming.
In collaboration with Women in Games, Unreal Engine and Lola MullenLowe, the campaign hopes to tackle the fact that 74% of girls feel underrepresented in video games.
With aims of ‘making virtual beauty real, the brand’s spot sees a virtual female character strip herself of her sexualised clothing and enter the gaming world as her own genuine self.
Here's an image from their campaign.
Cigarettes are bad for you and that girl is not beautiful. Meanwhile, AI art from Stable Diffusion is generating images of truly beautiful women that look like this.
The more AI art featuring beautiful women that I see, the more divergence I see when I'm out in the Real World™. At our local grocery store, almost all of the young women are overweight, tatted up, frumpy and glum. It's as if there was a competition to take what they were given and make the least of it. The delta between the way they look and the AI art women is massive. Meanwhile, Dove is trying to tell them that nothing is wrong.
Keep smoking, girls. It's all fine. The problem isn't you, it's men.
Meanwhile, male AI art users, driven by their lizard brains to seek out ever more beautiful women, are constantly refining their AI prompts to keep increasing the beauty of the images. The divergence between real women and AI women gets larger and larger all the time. Under the best circumstances, real women can't compete with the AI art. Now our culture, personified by marketing campaigns, urges them to not even try. Instead, men are supposed to change what they like.
I suggest having a smoke while you wait for that to happen.
By the way, here's the video that goes with Dove's new campaign.
"Meanwhile, AI art from Stable Diffusion is generating images of truly beautiful women that look like this."
ReplyDeleteIf a woman looks like that picture, she is in no fit condition for bearing children. If she tries, her body will have no reserves and it will wreck her, assuming that she doesn't immediately miscarry. Without significant medical attention, a full-term pregnancy would likely kill her. The only saving grace is that by the time a woman becomes that emaciated, she has generally stopped menstruating anyway, and so pregnancy won't be an issue.
Stable Diffusion is going just as overboard as Dove Soap is, just in the other direction.
The first Marlboro man didn't smoke and forbade his children from smoking. He was a friend of John Wayne. After a few years, his children convinced him of his hypocrisy, and he quit.
ReplyDeleteDove has done this for a long time. In the mid-2000s they had an ad that was to try to help girls feel good about themselves. Instead of the heavy make-up they were natural. I don't remember the actors in the ad being overweight. At the time, I was doing A/V for Wednesday night Confirmation at church, and our Pastor wanted to use it for her message to the confirmands. I was able to download it and get it on a DVD so we wouldn't have to rely on the internet or Youtube putting a commercial on in front of it.
You concentrate on women all the time. The other day, I saw a couple walking. The woman was dressed fairly well, casual. She had her hair up in a loose bun. The man was dis shoveled, unshaven, and ungroomed. The shirt was something that I only wear out in the garage when I'm working on the car or building something and going to get dirty. He looked like a complete loser, and I wondered why this woman was with him at all. I've never been a "dress for success" person, but this guy projected loser.
I think I've mentioned the house across the street is filled with 20-something girls. And they attract 20-something boys. None of them girls or boys are the typical stereo-type of millennial activists. They all seem to be responsible and mostly considerate of others.
I've got to know one of the girls a little. She's been working on various cars. She was in the street jacking up her brother's Ford Focus RS, and I stopped and asked if she wanted to use my floor jack. She took me up on that. And I've made it clear, I have plenty of tools she can borrow. And she has taken me up on it from time to time.
That microcosm of 20-somethings, plus my own 2 sons, gives me hope that the popular image of millennials isn't going to completely doom the country.
You might notice that even Dove's AI girl isn't nearly as hefty as the real woman on whom she is based.
ReplyDeleteApparently, even AI prefers slim girls.