I know that there are many of you out there who think that the Dove Soap Campaign for Real Beauty, which ostensibly aims to encourage women to re-think the images of “beauty” is, well, kind of a contradiction in terms. After all, here’s a massive corporation trying to sell you beauty products while simultaneously insisting that massive corporations have absolutely no business telling women how they should look and feel. And those nay-sayers would have a point, I guess.

And yet, when I watch their advertisements (the latest, “Onslaught”, via Jezebel, is posted above and you can watch the earlier one, “Evolution”, here), the message is so right-on. “Talk to your daughter,” reads the ad copy, “before the beauty industry does.”

I can’t imagine what it must be like to raise a daughter in this media climate. I just can’t.

I like J. K. Rowling’s take on it, by the way.

Waif-like models were condemned by JK Rowling yesterday as “empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated clones”.

The author of the Harry Potter novels said she did not want her daughters, Mackenzie, one, and Jessica, 12, to emulate women whose only function was to support the trade in “over-priced handbags and rat-sized dogs”.

Oh! Ouch!

You know, if those books she writes don’t pan out for her, I think Ms. Rowling could have quite a bright future as a blogger. That’s some weapons-grade snark, right there.

What else does she have to say?

Writing on her website, she revealed that her “rant” was prompted by photographs in a magazine of a very young woman “who is either seriously ill or suffering from an eating disorder”.

She added: “She can talk about eating absolutely loads, being terribly busy and having the world’s fastest metabolism until her tongue drops off (hooray! Another couple of ounces gone!), but her concave stomach, protruding ribs and stick-like arms tell a different story.

“This girl needs help but, the world being what it is, they’re sticking her on magazine covers instead.”

I don’t think I need to run this down for you guys. You know the deal. The world of fashion and fashion publishing (and the movie industry, and TV, and music videos, and on and on) present an ideal of “beauty” that is an image of sickness, of starvation.

It’s disgusting, really. People all over the planet don’t get enough to eat and yet our culture endlessly rewards women like Posh Spice, with her plastic doll body and glassy-eyed, “Please Feed Me” expression. Why would anyone want to emulate that? “Mommy, when I grow up, I want to have comically huge double-D breasts, an 18-inch waist, and a face like an angry monkey!” Mmmmm, what could be more sexy than skin like paper, lifeless hair, limbs like sticks, and bones that jut out of all kinds of places where bones aren’t exactly supposed to jut? (Not to mention things like a crumbling skeleton and organ failure.)

But back to Rowling:

She recounted a conversation with a young actor on the set of the latest Potter film, who was talking about a girl who was called “fat” by classmates, although she was anything but. The author added: “… is ‘fat’ really the worst thing a human being can be? Is ‘fat’ worse than ‘vindictive’, ‘jealous’, ’shallow’, ‘vain’, ‘boring’ or ‘cruel’.”

In other words, is being “fat” worse than being Ann Coulter?

Not to me; but then, you might retort, what do I know about the pressure to be skinny?

Or the pressure to write incredibly shitty books that no one actually reads, which will apparently not just give you the body of a stick insect, but makes you mean as hell. And kind of a psycho.

But that’s another story altogether. You were saying, Ms. Rowling?

“Maybe all this seems funny, or trivial, but it’s really not,” Miss Rowling wrote on her website, jkrowling.com.

“It’s about what girls want to be, what they’re told they should be, and how they feel about who they are.

“I’ve got two daughters who will have to make their way in this skinny-obsessed world, and it worries me, because I don’t want them to be empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated clones; I’d rather they were independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, opinionated, original, funny a thousand things, before ‘thin’.”

Yay!!

If I had a daughter, I would tell her something along those lines every day, I think, “I love you just the way you are. You are the most beautiful girl in the world. You don’t need diets, pills, miracle creams, injections, or surgery or any of that bulls*%t to be beautiful. You are perfect and I will always love you no matter what. Now kiss me and then finish your collard greens.”

Period. End of story.

What do you guys think?

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