You may have noticed, I was Atriosed yesterday. Later, I’ll show you the little sitemeter graph. It’s quite impressive. Thanks, atrios.
First, the weather. I’m checking in on the hurricaine blog, but I can’t get it to load, which means that either the hurricaine is really bad, or my internets are wonky again. Okay, loaded. It doesn’t look good. Stay safe everyone!
The sponsor for today is Dove. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. A while back, Dove introduced an ad with “regular size” women. When I saw it, I thought, yippee! I’m the last person to be excited about this. For years, my only defect was my short height. People are still pissed at me when I can down a whole chocolate cake and not gain an ounce. But still, most people I know come in all shapes and sizes and not the stick figures we usually see in all the ads for anything–cars, makeup, clothes, snack products. Apparently, only skinny people are allowed to purchase these things.
A few weeks ago, CBS did a little segment on the new ad. In it, they interviewed one of the women from the ad, who was strikingly beautiful, but short, and a size 6. That’s right, a size 6! And she’d been told by one model agency that she was too fat. All the women in the ad are attractive, but their bodies are not the stick figures of other ads. So they interviewed a director of a model agency, a quite unattractive woman (why is it that the people who run model agencies are unattractive?). She said she didn’t like the ad. Why?
Because people don’t want the reality. They want the fantasy.
Okay, now I get it. I think I’m seeing how things are now. This explains a lot of things. It explains why we don’t get the hard truth from our fearless leaders. “They want the fantasy.” As Anbruch used to write all the time, “Everything is beautiful in Bushworld.”
You know, I’m not opposed to a little fantasy. I like indulging in movies, books, video games. But eventually, we all have to come back and deal with reality. And I think the stick figure ads are dangerous because they’re so prevalent, you start to think they are reality, that everyone but you is a size 0. Especially dangerous for young girls.
And indulging in fantasy is bad foreign policy too. Too bad Bush can’t get some good stick figure models to help him out with the Iraq thing. But he’s got some slogans: Freedom is on the march; Stay the course; We’re making progress. Too bad most of us have been trained on slick ads so we can see through it all.
