The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty has recently released a national report, Real Girls, Real Pressure: A National Report on the State of Self-Esteem, that reveals the current devasting state of self-esteem among young girls in this country. The study was conducted this year among eight to 17 year olds in the US and some of the statistics the study reveals are extremely sad, although not entirely shocking.
75% of girls with low self-esteem reported engaging in negative and potentially harmful activities, such as disordered eating, cutting, bullying, smoking or drinking, when feeling badly about themselves– compared with 25% of girls with high self-esteem.
61% of teen girls with low self-esteem admit to talking badly about themselves (Compared to 15% of girls with high self-esteem).
Dove has takent the initutive to address these issues by conducting workshops around the country for young girls. They have already reached about 2 million women and hope to reach a total of 5 million by 2010. Among the people who are hard at work with Dove is Jess Weiner, a popular body acceptance activist.
Although I think workshops such as these are a fantastic idea, I think the issue at hand needs to begin with a much higher source. If the images we see in the media on a daily basis continue to be just as vulgar, crude and exclusive of all types of women and men, how can we ever expect to truly change how we think?
As much as I rely on the Fatosphere to help me learn to accept my body and love it, the work seems to be temporarily undone when I am over-exposed with negative media images or when someone makes a dumb comment about my body. It takes a whole lot of work to get me back to a place of positive self-image after one of these encounters.
I am not saying that media is all to blame for my fight to maintain a positive body image and level of self-acceptance. At the end of the day, it is my responsibility to filter what I watch, see, read, etc. and to not let people’s ridiculous comments get to me. But to say that we have a body image crisis in this country and to do nothing about what causes that crisis, just doesn’t make any sense. It’s like we are putting a bandaid over the problem without fixing the source of the problem.
All in all, I think these workshops are a step in the right direction and I might even try to conduct a few of them in my community (Dove provides workshop tools on their website).
Gah. Those results are sad, but not shocking. Unfortunately, my opinion of Dove has been permanently soured and so I roll my eyes every time I see one of their ‘love your body!’ commercials. Dove is owned by Unilever, which also owns Axe Body Spry. Gag. Thanks for the self-esteem, folks, now I too will feel good enough about my body to strip down and hurl myself at the nearest man!
I often feel immediately crappy watching MTV or looking at fashion magazines (only in waiting rooms if there’s nothing else). I will never be that young/thin/pretty/well-dressed/well-made up. I think it’s beyond insane that magazines photoshop these pictures to be even thinner, remove cellulite, enlarge boobs, shrink arms and thighs, change their faces to be totally symmetrical. How can a real girl every measure up to that, when not even the models themselves look that way?
I think this culture, especially the USofA, is f*&%ing up their girls, and to a lesser extent, their boys, with this crap. I think the massive amounts of mainstream porn that everybody with an internet connection has free easy access to is going to worsen the situation. How can anybody measure up when the images they show, of models who spend all their time and money trying to make themselves photogenic, are still not good enough?
I won’t even go into how most women, even Palin and Clinton, college professors, scientists, are judged first and harshest on their looks and clothes, hairstyles, cleavage shown, regardless of what they know or have done.
I hear Europe has a lot less plastic surgery, boob jobs or botox.
And Unilever also promotes skin-lightening products in southeast Asian countries.
But I do enjoy the fact that Dove is at least TRYING.
I was wondering where on earth they found enough girls with high self-esteem to participate in the study, but looking at the fine print, self-esteem is apparently ranked on a curve. I’m curious how many of these young women would self-identify as having “high self-esteem.”
Dove is owned by that company but it isn’t ran by that company. Let’s not get the delusional activist disease here. Look at it logically. If Dove is doing these commercials promoting healthy self-esteem, then someone there doesn’t agree with Ax or anything else. Which tells me they probably aren’t too happy about what goes on with the other companies. It’s like the overbearing owner of a company that is ruthless and dictatorial but his son is nice, smart and sensible. His son is one of the managers but he’s not the owner. He doesn’t approve of what or how his father runs his business so he does what he does to juxtapose…sorry for the rant, but I hate when we get this, “this company is owned by this company which does this so…” Sometimes (not all the time) its not that simple.
Regarding UNILEVER: both the AXE and the DOVE campaigns are about selling Confidence…it’s just that the AXE ads are aimed at guys and the DOVE campaign targets women.
If “confidence” can be called “believing you’re okay/acceptable/attractive no matter what”, then I can see how they’d want to show Y-chromies that using AXE can cause attractive women to dry-hump you in the elevator as you ride up to your boring job – thus inspiring confidence.
To women, I guess, they want to show that when you’re happy and confident in yourself in general, no matter what size you are or what you look like, your self-confidence will let your individual beauty shine out.
Clearasil has some similar ads involving people whose heightened confidence (due to Clearasil-clear skin) causes them to be over-friendly to strangers or in situations that are normally tense or awkward.
To me, the ads are all related. Not evil, just advertising.
My sentiments exactly hope…you always say it right.