This Cathy comic strip ran in the Chicago Tribune and other national newspapers last week. The comic pertains exactly to what we are discussing this week in class. In the comic, the sales woman is trying to sell Cathy the latest and greatest fountain of youth. Cathy asks what happens when it wears off, and the sales woman's response directly relates to Cinderella. The idea is that fairy tales offer unrealistic ideas to girls, and those ideas carry over into actions within adulthood. Cinderella is forever a youthful, beautiful blonde who captures the heart of the handsome prince. The beauty industry sells this idea through the constant barrage of wrinkle removers and other rather frightening products that have even more frightening side effects (no discoloration of my eyes and random hair growth for me, thanks). Feminist criticism of literary fairy tales centers around this exact idea. Women in popular fairy tales are passive, youthful, beautiful, dutiful and prudish women. These women are the ideal and fit within the current popular definition of a beautiful desirable woman (although the fairy tales don't say anything about the size of Cinderella's chest and/or implants). Modern women devote a large part of their life trying to achieve the ideals that have been absorbed since childhood. The Cathy comic sums up the problem: a "fairy tale" life is unrealistic and unfulfilling for a modern woman.
Maureen’s post reminded me of the DOVE Campaign for Real Beauty, which was launched globally in 2004 and strives to make “women feel beautiful every day by widening stereotypical views of beauty” (Campaign for Real Beauty Mission). In “The Real Truth About Beauty: A Global Report,” DOVE discovered that only 2% of women around the world describe themselves as beautiful. Due to this, they aimed to challenge the normative model of beauty (e.g. thin, young, and blonde) with billboards, focus groups, websites, advertisements, and events displaying women of different ages, ethnicities, and sizes. Despite this large scale effort, the “fairy tale” ideal of beauty still predominates. Why?
ReplyDeleteWhat if the same organization that promoted “real beauty” profited by selling images of scantily clad tall, sexy, skinny women? Would this derail their mission to make all women feel beautiful every day? Unilever, a company that aims “to provide people the world over with products that are good for them and good for others,” not only markets DOVE products but AXE, a body spray for men (Unilever). The AXE commercials are extremely degrading towards women and often showcase armies of nearly naked beautiful (read: tall, skinny, blonde or brunette, young) women running towards a lone man wearing AXE. The slight gains the DOVE company has made in regards to beauty ideals are destroyed in a single AXE commercial. As a result, Unilever’s simple moral is uncovered: real beauty is impossible for nearly 99 percent of women, so use DOVE products and maybe you'll be attractive one day and if not, at least you'll think you're hot, but trust us, you're not. The Cathy comic illustrates this perfectly, suggesting, as Maureen noted, that “a fairy tale life is unrealistic and unfulfilling for a modern woman.”