[inhales deeply, sighs]
There is this ad campaign that is widespread throughout New York City. Posters are affixed to the sides of buses, yellow checkered taxi cabs, and line the walls of subway cars. I guess Mayor Bloomberg allotted about $330,000 for this campaign designed to encourage "resilience" in young girls whose self-image is assaulted every day by images of super-thin, classically stunning models and celebrities.
I think it is all a very worthy cause. You can read one bloggers praise of the campaign here.
But I hate the ads.
Here is why:
As you can see from the example, each poster features a spunky looking girl in her tween years (which according to Wikipedia is 10-12, though J.R.R. Tolkien first coined the term in reference to the years of irresponsibility between your teenage years and full-fledged adulthood. Sorry for the tangent). The most prominent phrase is "I'm a girl" followed by "I'm beautiful the way I am." The best most important descriptors--in this poster "adventurous, friendly, healthy, curious, creative, and brave"-- are barely bigger than the requisite names of all the NYC public offices that made the campaign possible.
"Girl" and "Beautiful" are still the most important parts of this ad that is suppose to wean girls of their dependency on the mainstream praise of there external appearance!
I'm not as well versed in feminist critique of beauty ideals as I ought to be. I've never even read The Beauty Myth, a seminal work for those about to launch into a tirade about women being viewed as lovely objects, but I begin my rant in earnest nonetheless.
Let's presume I do not know English well, so I google a definition of beautiful. Here's what I get:
1. pleasing to the senses: very pleasing to look at, listen to, touch, smell, or taste.
I understand that they are trying to widen the definition of beautiful to mean something like wonderful, special, awesome. However, it still has its roots in being pleasing to someone else, someone outside yourself.
Using the word beautiful leads back to aesthetics, semantically. Then we get into the whole game of saying, "Well, sure you may not have the flawless skin of a porcelain doll (one of my own personal insecurities laid prostrate before you, dear reader), but you are beautiful in this nontraditional way." This is what is wrong.
It needs to be okay to not be beautiful. It is a dogged and devastating pursuit to match up to an unofficial guide of standards for being particularly pleasing to the eye. And guess what? Even if you are not "beautiful," you can still get an education, have friends, be employed, and even fall in love.
We still feel like it is cruel and unkind to not tell every human woman that she is beautiful. Because, I think, that despite all of our advancement we still have this issue that is largely linguistic--that saying someone isn't beautiful makes them less of a valuable contribution to womankind. We've expanded the definition of beautiful to make it a train everyone can ride, but it still remains focused on women's externality rather than the more meaningful aspects of their personhood.
You see?! Am I making sense?
I feel like we ought to remove beautiful from the list of descriptors that can be applied to humans.
And I don't think beautiful is the world that ought to be used to describe the plucky tween subjects in the campaign. I think the consistent tagline on all of them ought to be "I'm a girl, and I am an effing amazing human being!!!!!!!!!!!!!" (exclamation marks times one thousand)
I very intentionally left off "the way I am" because it is a concession--like an unnecessary defense against people that are considered more beautiful (or in my ad more amazing). Really, I think if they were going to misguidedly keep the emphasis on "beautiful" they should have at least left out "the way I am." But to elaborate on that thought would require several more paragraphs of angry typing, so let's be done.
Until another attempt to bolster girls' self-esteem in a completely heinous way deserves my unsolicited and disapproving opinion, I'm stepping off the soapbox. (Because I'm not hip enough to drop a mic, but I am still a girl and an effing amazing human being!!!!!!)
