Positive Ads

In light of the oppression of negative ads towards women in the pop culture, there has been the start of more positive ads. These types of ads portray more body types, less stereotypes, and more identity in women than ever before. Ads like this one above clearly have the potential to promote a healthier lifestyle and more acceptance of the body as a whole.

This ad is an ad from the magazine Self, and is an ad for the website The Body Shop, which sells cosmetic type items such as perfume, make-up, and bath oils. Reading the words in the ad they clearly read “There are 3 billion women who don’t look like supermodels and only 8 who do.” The Body Shop website truly believes this. They sell cosmetic items, yes, but this ad emphasizes that women do not, or have to, fit into the mainstream image that the media gives us. This ad gives hope and reality to every girl that sees it.

Look at the image. It is a spoof of a Barbie doll. Barbie, as all know, is a very tall, usually blonde, anorexically skinny doll for young girls. Barbie instill this ideal image of what women should be at an early age, as most girls get their first Barbie at the young age of about 3. Even on most kids’ television stations, like Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network, young girls are being repeatedly shown images of Barbie, as she is marketed as the perfect woman and perfect girl’s toy. This ad takes that idealized image and gives in a better and realistic light. They show a fat Barbie with poofy, instead of poker straight, hair. From an initial visual perspective, as most viewers will see the Barbie before the words, they begin to break down the stereotype of the ideal woman built up by pop culture in the minds of women everywhere. They then further the tearing down of that stereotype with the words at the top. Most women do not realize that most other women around them do not look like models until someone tells them. This ad does just that.

In her essay, “Sizing Myself Up: Tales of a Plus-size Model,” Kate Dillon shares her personal experience in the modeling industry. How it tried to force her to be a specific body size as “at five-eleven and 125 pound, I was ordered to lose ten or twenty pounds…I’d try to sleep all day so I wouldn’t eat…after one show season…I’d been living on coffee and cigarettes.” She explains how she finally snapped and left the industry and got healthy again, only to magnificently return as a plus-sized model, and had a very successful career at that. Dillon, much like this ad, gives women hope, courage, and reality that they are beautiful just as they are. That they don’t have to conform to the model ideal to be considered beautiful.

Susan Gilman offers the same opinion in her essay, “Klaus Barbie and Other Dolls I’d Like to See.” In this essay she describes Barbie as being, “torpedo-titted, open-mouthed, tippy-toed… if you didn’t look like Barbie, you didn’t fit in.” This is becoming more and more forced upon the younger generation of women with the rise in reality shows like America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway, where the models are literally the size of the tiny store mannequins and are chided often if they grow even 5 pounds bigger than that. What is a young girl to do with values and images like this being pounded in to her head, but to being dieting and eating less trying to conform to the world’s standard of “beauty?” This ad tries to do the opposite and should be praised for it.

This ad not only presents a more realistic body type for Barbie, it also points out the outrageous difference in real body type rates as opposed to what the media would tell women. In doing these two things, it offers more than a realistic look at life and a woman’s body, it gives women hope that one day, no matter what size they are, they will realize they are beautiful and that others will regard them as such. All it would take would be more ads like this that encourage women to be who they are in their body size, and for women to pick up on that message.