Dove or dodo?

Amy Alkon has a wonderfully interesting debate running over at Goddess Blog about the "real women" in the Dove ads: 

If you want me to hurl, speak admiringly of those wunnnnnnderful Dove ads that use "real" women (ie, of the "wide load" variety)...

You realy need to visit her blog and read the whole thing, but Amy concludes:

The women are chunky. Saying so doesn't make you sexist. It makes you a person who states the obvious. It's sad, too, because being a heavy women diminishes your opportunities in jobs, life, and love. You can say it "shouldn't" be that way until you turn green -- but that won't change a simple fact: it is that way.

I don't agree with her at all on this, which is interesting since we have quite similar aesthetics in addition to agreeing on most things having to do with politics and religion.  First of all, I don't even think those women are particularly chunky.

And I think that those studies that measure the success of "attractive" and "slim" women actually are talking about women roughly the size and shape of the women in the dove ads, i.e., women who exercise and are of "normal" body weight--but do carry the adipose layer that is part of the female anatomy.   In common parlance, this is what is usually meant by "slim and attractive." 

But there's a big difference between carrying around 20 more pounds than the actress who would play you on the sitcom of your life, and being sloppily overweight in a way that affects people's judgement of you negatively--and would be measurable in a study.   Neither Jack nor I has a problem being taken seriously in our work, and we're both "chunky" by anyone's objective standards.

Being the chucky-but-fabulous girl in these discussions is always a bit like being the American at a table full of Europeans who are bashing ugly-Americans.    When you finally say "Ahem!" they wave it away, saying, "Oh, but you're not really an American!"  I have actually had people say to me, "Oh, but you're not really fat, not in that way!"  Which is illuminating in itself.  So there are kinds of fat?

Well, maybe there are.  There's so much mythology around size and shape. I'm 5' 7" and 1/4 German, with wide hips and shoulders.  Right now I'm a 14, but even at my slimmest, when I had jutting hip bones and prominent ribs on my chest, I was a size 10--yet whenever anyone guessed my size they put me at a 6.  Put clothes on those women in the dove ads and invite them over for a barbecue, and they wouldn't look "chunky" anymore.  They only do now because they're almost naked against a stark white background and 50' tall on a billboard--and because Dove is making a "point" of their bodies:  They're supposed to look real and defiantly proud and self-satisfied, "healthy" in a 1930's German nudist-camp way, and "brave" of course, for daring to show themselves--I think it would have been far more radical to portray them as sensual, sexy and voluptuous.

I think at root it isn't whether or not you have to be thin to be attractive.  Thin girls, like blondes, may have more fun, but that too is a generalization, not a rule.  I've known huge girls who got tons of action, and moderately overweight girls who "hid" behind their weight and didn't date because of it--one friend acknowledged once that she'd had so many bad relationships she knew that shed gained weight to protect herself from getting into another relationship.  You have to remember that Queen Latifah and Mimi on the Drew Carey show are roughly the same size.  And I'm not necessarily into either women or fat people, but Latifah could probably have me.

At bottom, I think the only rule that really holds is that attractive people are attractive--it's a bit of a wonderful mystery, in all.

Comments

[Kelly]

I hate the Dove ads, because they seem to cynical and they're clearly targeted to make Dove look sensitive and open to the needs of the modern woman, but they're just so sloppy, and they aren't "revolutionary" in any way. Like you said, if they hadn't made a big deal about the size/age of these women and had presented them as sensual and voluptuous, and ideal, that might have been something interesting. But slapping a photo onto a billboard and putting a couple of checkmarks next to it actually just looks like they were doing a poll of their demographics and they had the intern try to create a campaign out of it.

[Donna B]

Hillary, you should also put here your comment on Amy's blog about the irrationality of trying to control attraction, etc- your last paragraph there. Very well put.
Can I use that as my excuse for various bad choices, huh?

[Ysabella]

It's annoying when some people claim to oppose this ad on "health" grounds. If women identify with images on ads, and start thinking it's okay to be a *gasp* US size 10, the terrorists will win!

I'm a size 20 and a triathlete, so people with that attitude can lick my salty underside.

One of my favorite bloggers/writers, Wendy McClure, got an opinion piece into the Chicago Sun-Times about this, in response to Roeper et al. She ranted on her blog about the columns written about the Dove ads, and sent in a less-vitriolic opinion piece, which was printed. All of this can be found at her blog:

http://www.poundy.com/

[Jackie Danicki]

Also, re the "obesity epidemic", see this. If Tom Cruise is obese and President Bush is overweight, I think this is an "epidemic" we can live with. (Not that there aren't LOADS of very fat people in the US - and in Britain - but I actually do not care about them. If someone wants to eat themselves to death, it's none of my business.)

[KateCoe]

I was amused at Meagan Daum's reaction to the ads in today's LATimes. Considering her body of work for Vogue, et al, I'd say her adversion to the "real people" aspect of the ad is pretty self-serving. I mean, what if the consuming populace decided that ordinary women were as attractive and desirable as the denizens of Vogue's editorial spreads? Would she ever get work again at a fashion mag if she had written how great the Dove girls looked?
What if women stopped believing what fashion magazines tell us?

[Tania]

I may be the only person in creation whose first thought, when she first saw the Dove ads, was, "Wow, those women have good abs."

My second thought: I doubt it was thanks to the lotion.