If you have a daughter, the message depicted in this video might be one of the most important she’ll ever hear.
Update: The more I watch this video, the more I’m moved. So I did some research.
The music — which is perfect, BTW — is “La Breeze” by the (now-defunct) band Simian. The line Here comes the breeze that’ll blow you away is a perfect narrative layer atop the video content and provides a somber counterpoint to the otherwise turbulent music.
Dove’s onslaught piece is the second one in a series produced by Dove’s ad agency, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. The first piece, called evolution, is equally powerful and fights for the same cause as does onslaught. It’s below.
Kudos to Dove for stepping outside its industry’s mainline messaging and (a) reaching out to young girls, and (b) differentiating itself from its competition.
7 responses so far ↓
Mea Culpa // October 7, 2007 at 10:11 pm
This video is so disturbing and true.
It should also be noted that is it is just as important for parents to talk to their boys as well…boys will grow up to expect the woman that the media presents to him as well, thus increasing the pressure on the girls to meet an ideal. This is not just a gender issue, it’s a human issue.
Children:
Female dissatisfaction with appearance – poor body-image – begins at a very early age. Human infants begin to recognise themselves in mirrors at about two years old. Female humans begin to dislike what they see only a few years later. The latest surveys show very young girls are going on diets because they think they are fat and unattractive. In one American survey, 81% of ten-year-old girls had already dieted at least once. A recent Swedish study found that 25% of 7 year old girls had dieted to lose weight – they were already suffering from ‘body-image distortion’, estimating themselves to be larger than they really were. Similar studies in Japan have found that 41% of elementary school girls (some as young as 6) thought they were too fat. Even normal-weight and underweight girls want to lose weight.
Boys were found to be significantly less critical of their appearance: in one study, normal-weight girls expressed considerably more worries about their looks than obese boys.
Adolescents:
Boys do go through a short phase of relative dissatisfaction with their appearance in early adolescence, but the physical changes associated with puberty soon bring them closer to the masculine ideal – i.e. they get taller, broader in the shoulders, more muscular etc.
For girls, however, puberty only makes things worse. The normal physical changes – increase in weight and body fat, particularly on the hips and thighs, take them further from the cultural ideal of unnatural slimness. A Harvard University study showed that up to two thirds of underweight 12-year-old girls considered themselves to be too fat. By 13, at least 50% of girls are significantly unhappy about their appearance. By 14, focused, specific dissatisfactions have intensified, particularly concerning hips and thighs. By 17, only 3 out of 10 girls have not been on a diet – up to 8 out of 10 will be unhappy with what they see in the mirror.
http://www.sirc.org/publik/mirror.html
Jennifer // October 8, 2007 at 12:25 am
Speaking as a female all of that is very true. In high school I went through the whole starving myself to look “better”. I have never been one of the slimmer girls in the class, but I have always been one of the most unique in intelligence and personality. As much as I abhor the modern female beauty marketing, I did buy into it for awhile. I realized after a few months that I was literally starving myself…I was attempting to eat less than 1,000 calories a day. I realized as I was doing research on a paper about conditions in third world countries, that I was eating less or the same than they do. Yeah, so that was unhealthy. I came to a realization that I did not want to subscribe to the culture and the images that make me feel inadequate and fat and horrible (unfortunately, I still got a lot of that from my mother, but that is a completely different issue (mostly)). Fortunately, I had awesome friends to hang out with, loved me for who I was, not who I should have been, and they kept my body image healthy.
To me, its about loving who you are, being intelligent and thinking for yourself. Fortunately, Dove has realized this as well. Kudos to them. I have heard about this ad campaign and charity before now, but these are the first ads/films I have seen of it… Well done.
Maybe we can save more bright young women from body image hell before it’s too late. I am seeing a backlash in American culture over this…perhaps this is just the beginning…. I can hope can’t I?
btw - the best way to teach girls that they are OK no matter what? yeah, cons and fandoms…they helped save me. The people/culture you meet there is one of acceptance and love (for the most part)…I mean, c’mon, just walking around something like Dragon*Con will give a young woman something to chew on in terms of what is the “correct” body image… Female Klingons, Stormtroopers, elves and Fairies of all stripes… this gives a person pause…
Well, it did me.
Thanks for posting!
Reality on a TV ad, finally. — Reality on a Stick // October 9, 2007 at 1:14 pm
[...] by this post at Graceful [...]
CuriousC // October 11, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Great post. wow. I hope you don’t mind if I link back to this someday in one of my posts? Thank you.
Neal Watzman // October 12, 2007 at 7:17 am
Great post, Jeff! It’s those and other cultural messages that make it so hard for people to value themselves as they are.
Chop of Horrors: Faith Hill’s Redbook Cover « GracefulFlavor // March 27, 2008 at 10:05 am
[...] 27, 2008 · No Comments In the spirit of Dove’s Onslaught campaign, here’s a look at a 2007 Redbook cover featuring singer Faith Hill. Now, Mrs. [...]
rationalpsychic // April 9, 2008 at 12:49 am
My kids live with my ex-wife. I’m going to e-mail this link to her tonight. Sometimes it doesn’t matter whether you buy what’s being sold. When they’re selling this hard, you hardly stand a chance.
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