Love your body and be "really" beautiful...the advertising way

I was sitting on the couch last night with my cat and a tub of mint-chocolate chip ice cream watching the Olympics when a commercial caught my eye. Victoria Secret’s new ‘Love Your Body’ campaign for their ‘Body’ line of bras.

                Of course this commercial was of stick-thin VS models parading around in their underwear lovin’ their bodies and bras, which had me stopping mid-spoon in mouth with my ice cream and rethink my life a little bit. I then, of course, did what any normal person does in this day and age. I googled the shit out of this.

                As it turns out, Victoria Secret does offer their product from a 32A right up to a 40DD, which incorporates a wide range of shapes of women; they just don’t advertise to them. Again, we have a huge company who is launching a “body love” campaign of sorts, yet keeping their advertising focused. I realize that Victoria Secret does have an established brand centred around this iconic “Victoria Secret model,” they’re not just going to change their whole image because people are calling for more diverse advertising.

                This is slightly reminiscent of Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign, which went down in a flaming pile of good intentions. Now the Real Beauty campaign still exists, it’s just been kept under the radar since its slow painful death by the hands of the media.

                For those who do not know, Dove’s Real Beauty campaign focused on advertising using “real” women, of all ages, sizes and skin colours. At first the world jumped on this bandwagon and Dove started to work towards empowering women to feel good about their “real beauty”. This didn’t last long, with a casting call for models for the Real Beauty campaign being leaked from Craigslist looking for “real women” who have “beautiful arms and legs and face” with “flawless skin, no tattoos or scars” and “well groomed and clean, nice bodies, naturally fit not too curvy not too athletic.” Needless to say “Real Beauty” was the look they were going for, only if you fit the criteria for really beautiful.

                Another huge issue that cropped up is that Dove’s parent company, Unilever, also owns Axe, whose marketing tactics are known to objectify women with racy ads featuring “hot” women that all the men want to be with. Well the media world blew up! How can you have one company pushing to work against these objectifying ads and another company sticking them right up in your face? Most of the Axe ads don’t even feature a woman’s face; just parts of her body contorted around a man, giving her the semblance of not even being a real person, just an object.

I'm sure they have a great personality....

                The result? If you’ve noticed, both Axe and Dove really have toned down their advertising. Where before you would see commercials and ads everywhere, they’re more and more sparse. Only now has Dove started to bring back the Real Beauty campaign and women’s empowerment endeavours. Trust me, I’m all for promoting healthy self-image and body love for every body type, but there is an issue when companies start to use this as a ploy to create sales. Much like Victoria Secret jumping on the body-love bandwagon to make some $$, Dove also made the mistake of using empowerment to empower sales.

                I think that at this point in time people are so tired of seeing all the things that they cannot be and cannot achieve as advertising. Speaking solely on Canadian stats, the national average size for a Canadian woman is a size 16, yet most clothes are advertised much smaller than that. Media and advertising is so detrimental to the mental health of women unless you fit societies standard for pretty and even then if you are thin you’ve got the other side of this argument shaming you for it.

                A study shows (note: I will add the study link as soon as I find it again), that as a society men like women around a size 12, women on average are around a size 16 and yet on average, most women want to be a size two! A size two! Unless you’re naturally very thin, most women are not built to be a size two; only a small part of the population is naturally that thin! We’ve crafted this perfect cyclone of body shame that doesn’t discriminate against what you look like and only exists to make everyone unhappy with themselves.