famished for meaning

i hadn’t heard about the dove ad campaign nor come across it until yesterday. i went to amy’s site, who said that she started some shit on justin’s site because she got pissed off by what she read.

he was picking on fat women.

actually no, thats not fair. he said:

“Real beauty = Being a chunky fat woman?”

as expected, his audience, which consists mainly of horny boys drooling over nipple slips and teenage celebrities, went wild with it and slammed the campaign because they did not want fat women splashed all over the billboards and TV screens.

you know what? fair enough.

although i don’t think those women are fat at all, i really couldn’t be arsed about the opinions of justin and his band of horny boys.

however, i decided to write about it after loki left a link to it in the comments.

i kept going back to the website and reading their tagline:

“real women have real curves”

and i kept getting more pissed off.

because you know what?

some woman have curves. some women don’t. some women are fat while some are thin.

they are ALL real women.

i’m a size 4 - i don’t have the curves that a size 12 woman does.

am i less real? is it my turn to feel ashamed about my body? is that what we are going to do now? are we going to start a “fat is phat” or “fat is the new pink”campaign?

i am sure that there are a lot of skinny women out there feeling pissed off and offended because they don’t have curves and are, at least according to dove, not ‘real women’.

i think its a great idea to use women of different sizes in an ad campaign. it’s good to encourage acceptance of all sizes. it’s brilliant that they are talking about ‘real beauty’.

but it’s not okay to do it at the cost of alienating the skinny lot.

and don’t tell me that they won’t do that. all the comments on different sites, forums or blogs now have a “thank god we’re being shown real women, not those skinny coke head freaks” feel to them.

this guy said (in defense of the campaign):

They are average, normal American women….

These women tend to be the ones who write cute love notes on the waxed paper that wraps your PB&J, my friend. They are usually not coke-snorting freaks with a warped sense of reality–where fake tits, must-have “help” or nannies, and a carrot-only diet is the way to go. Model-like women are really the abnormal ones. Rarely do normal, bring-home-to-mom model-types exist. Trust us.

so skinny chick = freak or bitch or less loving?

thanks a lot!

and i love how the marketing department of dove is pretending they’re geniuses that have discovered something new, by saying:

“It is our belief that beauty comes in different shapes, sizes and ages,” said Philippe Harousseau, Dove’s marketing director on the “Campaign for Real Beauty.”

no shit, sherlock.

“Our mission is to make more women feel beautiful every day by broadening the definition of beauty.”

or coming up with one that celebrates curves, thereby excluding non-curvy women, which in any case does not happen to be the target market, since you ARE selling an intensive firming lotion to the curvaceous lot. oooh, did i forget to mention that priceless bit of information?

yep, real women have REAL curves but they still need to be firmer.

bottom line? weight does not define how ‘real’ you are and has nothing to do with your beauty. i applaud the effort but i HATE the tagline.

and the underwear.

i mean, who the fuck wears white cotton underpants?!

i don’t know if any of you have come across this one yet:

drink ads ordered to use ugly men!

Drinks companies have been ordered to use uglier men in their advertising campaigns.The Advertising Standards Authority believes “balding” and “paunchy” men would be less likely to encourage women to drink to achieve social success.The new advertising code stresses that links must not be made between alcohol and seduction.

A campaign for popular sparkling drink Lambrini has become the first to fall foul of the new rules.

The Authority objected to a poster which showed three women “hooking” a slim, young man in a parody of a fairground game.

The industry regulator instructed the firm: “We would advise that the man in the picture should be unattractive - ie overweight, middle-aged, balding etc.

ridiculous, isn’t it?

first of all, ‘ugly’ is a horrible word (when used to describe the way someone looks). secondly, to then bracket someone who is MIDDLE AGED (since when did age have anything to do with looks??? and isn’t brad pitt over forty?) or overweight or balding as that is even worse!

this is so goddamn hypocritical - for as long as i can remember, beer ads (aimed at men) have been showing hot women. in fact, almost all advertising aimed at men shows a chick with big tits, long legs, big hair, red nails and mouth, going ga-ga over the man for using that particular brand. and you know, its all good since it’s just a woman, and she was always meant to be decorative anyway.

but now that we’re objectifying MEN and using the hotter ones in ads, to encourage women to do (bad, bad) things like drinking beer (i find their faith in the power of advertising quite misplaced, to begin with), it’s suddenly all wrong.

i can’t believe they are allowed to get away with this crap.

however, on the plus side, based on their stupid qualifications for ugly, my dad (and most of the adult male population) can finally star in a commercial!

(for the prologue, click here)

So, yeah. Apparently what I wrote hit home. Several times. I’d make a baseball analogy here, but then the little pink mafia would take away my rhinestone-encrusted tiara, and as we all know, a queen without a tiara is just a bitchy straight man. And that would be very bad.

I’m not advocating a ban on relationships, period. Nor am I encouraging people to stay single and content with their platonic friendships, because lets be honest here…no one’s actually really content with the idea of being single forever. There may certainly be acceptance of the possibility, as I’ve found in my own case, but sticking with the case study of Sin, I know that I’d happily prefer to die having been in a meaningful relationship with someone rather than without. But really…does it have to be an all-or-nothing game?

This is not game theory in Advanced Economics 101 people. It’s really much simpler than everyone thinks, and perhaps I can say that smugly from on top of my high horse (how high? It took a step-ladder to get up there!) because I’m not currently going through the ennui, but who says that you have to choose between friends and lovers? And more importantly, why can’t friends be lovers (and vice versa)? I’ve never believed that you can love someone without first being friends with them, and that view is one of the few in my life that hasn’t undergone a radical metamorphosis in the last decade or so.

Conversely though, it’s not necessary that a friend become a significant other. I think the biggest problem that gay men face in their lives is that even though we never want to admit it, we’re all secretly scuttled by the “Newer! Bigger! Better! Shinier!” plague. Who and what we have is perfect while it’s present, but we never seem to stop prowling and being on the lookout for something more, something that we’re convinced is lacking in our current straits, even though it may not be. And part of that, I’m convinced at the risk of generalising indiscriminately and carelessly, is because our own self-esteems are riddled with more holes than a particularly large hunk of Swiss cheese. I can count the number of gay men I know who had healthy, self-affirming childhoods on one hand, and I think that there are certain emotional and intellectual scars that never fade, no matter how much they may scab over. Scar tissue is still ugly, even though it may cover gaping wounds. Most of us remain convinced that there’s something wrong with us, something terribly, drastically, horribly unheimlich, and that no matter how good our lives become, we’ll always be the outcasts, the children who were different, the people who didn’t make sense or seem quite right. And convinced of our own fallibility, we project a combination of ideals and our own insecurities onto those people whom we adore, maybe subconsciously, but mostly with a sense of guilt that comes from deep inside, those dark corners of our minds and souls that we don’t like to acknowledge. Friends, lovers, family…we hope that they’re not perfect, because we’re certainly not. We hold them up to impossible standards that we don’t want to admit are impossible, or at best highly improbable, and in some ways they turn out to be dark mirrors of who we are. All of our failings, our dirty little habits, imperfections, secrets and lies, we pre-emptively start to accuse the other people in our lives of them because it’s easier to denigrate shortcomings when people other than ourselves display them.

This is turning into one of those “I’ve not slept for three days and am roaringly drunk during my college days, so come on, we’ll have an intellectual conversation at two a.m.” passages, isn’t it?

But I think it’s true. I don’t think any of us like to think of it that way, but come on…isn’t there always that tiny part of you screaming “It’s never going to work out!” each time someone new (especially in the romantic context) enters your life? Sure, it’s easier with friends: the demands and obligations, not to mention expectations aren’t quite as intense or as omnipresent as they are with boy/girlfriends, but who hasn’t had a knock-down, drag-out, hair-pulling fight with the people they’re closest to at least once? And the forgiveness is always a bit easier, because the whole thing humanises friendships, turning them into comfortable zones where you know that the other person will never have the ability to walk away from you unless you do something truly unforgivable. Because hey! They’re not infallible and ergo, can’t expect you to be either!

There are, of course, the lucky few who do manage to live happily ever after. But we all hate them, don’t we? Or at least we envy their ability to wade through the maelstrom and come out standing, in one piece and largely undamaged.

But mostly, we (and by “we”, I mean “I”) hate them. In a loving, tender way, of course.

(courtesy of the sexiest, smartest, wittiest blogger on earth)