...need to show them this:

Those of us with sons need to, also.  We are bombarded via popular culture with retouched, photobrushed, gaussian-blurred, made-up, touched-up fantasy women.  Is it any wonder that men and women have strange ideas of what "beauty" is?

In 2002, Jamie Lee Curtis made a bold move, and had herself photographed "as is" and "as is after 3 hours of 13 people doing make-up work".  Four years later, Dove has produced the above film, showing, in sequence, the steps required to make a fashion model into...well, the fashion model pictures we all see.  The same need is there--to fight the illusion-makers, to give our young girls the knowledge and the strength to realize that what the media calls "beauty" is illusory.

I remember OmegaDad and I taking a bunch of nieces and nephews out hiking in the mountains of southwest Oklahoma.  One niece was 15.  Beautiful, charming, having fun, free and natural out hiking with us.  Two years later, when we visited at Christmas time, the same niece was four inches taller, 15 pounds lighter, hair and face perfectly made up...and she was not as beautiful to us then as she had been before.

It is difficult, the fight to have young women realize that the "beauty" they see in magazines, in movies, on TV, is false.

There are people who buy into these notions wholeheartedly.  Mothers who take their little three- and four-year-old daughters and doll them up and send them down pageant runways and off to glamor-shot sessions, then Photoshop the results until what the objective observer sees is a porcelain doll with all the character, the heart, airbrushed out.

Gods grant that OmegaDad and I can help OmegaDotter evade the traps, the lures to that impossible-to-achieve standard of what women should look like.  I don't know what or how to do it; all I know is that my parents managed to do it with me, and I hope to pass it on.

(Of course, it is ironic that it is a "beauty" products company that is producing this campaign.  One might even say "hypocritical".  But Dove seems to be repositioning itself to become the "natural beauty" products company.  We shall see; probably, says my cynical side, this is a passing phase.)

Technorati: Evolution, Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, pop culture