Fantasy beauty, fiction, and the real world
You may have recently seen the mini-uproar about the distorted Ralph Lauren ad, which had bloggers and most sensible people outraged over the continuing insanity about perceptions of female beauty.
Poking around articles about the ad led me to other articles on the fashion industry and pressures on women to attain impossible ideals. Some folks claimed the Photoshopped woman was "perfect". Some claimed that it was merely artistic expression and no one should take it as an actual guideline for how women should look.
Then I found an excellent article in the Huffington Post about the evils of the fashion industry (though I think it can pertain to Hollywood as well). I've long thought that this increasing emphasis on energy-depleting thinness and a state of constant weariness and fraility was just one more way to keep women down. The author, Johann Hari, brings up the work of Naomi Wolf, who focused on this very idea. She manages to match these societal ideals of beauty with times in history when women were changing their typical roles:
"Wolf points out something remarkable in the shifting tides of the fashion world. Whenever women become stronger in the real world, fashion models - our collective vision of Beauty Incarnate - become weaker and scrawnier. In the 1910s, it was considered beautiful for women to have soft, rounded hips, thighs and bellies: most women's natural shape. In the 1920s, when women got the vote, the idea of what was beautiful shrank. Suddenly models became bonier and feeble - and women started to starve themselves. In the 1950s, when women's rights receded, women could be curvy and eat again. With the 1960s and the rise of feminism, models became smaller and smaller - until today, when women are breaking glass ceilings, and emaciated models are the norm."
I think this is disturbing, and even moreso in that women are complicit in these standards. Search the comments of any article on embracing fuller figures and you'll find a bunch of women railing against such a "disgusting" notion. In fact, a Canadian designer recently had two of his staff resign when he decided to use three plus-size (actually sizes 10 &12 US) models in his runway show. While I do agree that an embrace of fuller figures shouldn't mean a hatred of smaller ones, it's frightening how powerfully women can rail against the directive to just be themselves--as they naturally are.
Thinking about all this made me wonder if writers are complicit in this, in setting unattainable ideals and continually sending the message that one must be perfect in order to have a romantic happy ending. Or is it fantasy, and artistic license, and we can do what we want? Surely everyone wants to read about and imagine themselves as a perfect person with a perfect life and a perfectly handsome boyfriend. But I think I personally tend to enjoy a little pinch of realism amongst the fantasy.
I can remember standing over a table of romance novels, and saying to myself that I would refuse to buy any romance book that had a heroine who was petite with a heaving enormous bosom. I couldn't find one. Book after book had nearly identical descriptions, though occasionally there were different hair colors. I finally managed to find one that had a secondary character who also had a heaving enormous bosom, but she was very tall and extremely curvy. Eureka. I actually fell in love with that character, and found her and her abrasive beau a lot more interesting than the doe-eyed, stereotyped heroine.
For my own characters, I do make the women beautiful, but I try to embrace different types. Tall, petite, curvy, slight, athletic, big hips, etc. I'm probably more idealistic about the men, to be honest, but I do know that I've written in a few softer tummies rather than always ripped abs. And they're not always porn star-endowed, either. I think characters can still be idealistic and enchanting without being plastic.
These are just my random, ramblingly connected thoughts. If you have any of your own, do share. Is it more important to portray more realistic ideals in ads showing actual people than it is in fiction? Or do they both set the tone for societal norms? Or are they both just forms of artistic expression and shouldn't be taken so literally?
I also leave you with this Dove film, which is three years old, but still compelling:
Thanks for reading.
Poking around articles about the ad led me to other articles on the fashion industry and pressures on women to attain impossible ideals. Some folks claimed the Photoshopped woman was "perfect". Some claimed that it was merely artistic expression and no one should take it as an actual guideline for how women should look.
Then I found an excellent article in the Huffington Post about the evils of the fashion industry (though I think it can pertain to Hollywood as well). I've long thought that this increasing emphasis on energy-depleting thinness and a state of constant weariness and fraility was just one more way to keep women down. The author, Johann Hari, brings up the work of Naomi Wolf, who focused on this very idea. She manages to match these societal ideals of beauty with times in history when women were changing their typical roles:
"Wolf points out something remarkable in the shifting tides of the fashion world. Whenever women become stronger in the real world, fashion models - our collective vision of Beauty Incarnate - become weaker and scrawnier. In the 1910s, it was considered beautiful for women to have soft, rounded hips, thighs and bellies: most women's natural shape. In the 1920s, when women got the vote, the idea of what was beautiful shrank. Suddenly models became bonier and feeble - and women started to starve themselves. In the 1950s, when women's rights receded, women could be curvy and eat again. With the 1960s and the rise of feminism, models became smaller and smaller - until today, when women are breaking glass ceilings, and emaciated models are the norm."
I think this is disturbing, and even moreso in that women are complicit in these standards. Search the comments of any article on embracing fuller figures and you'll find a bunch of women railing against such a "disgusting" notion. In fact, a Canadian designer recently had two of his staff resign when he decided to use three plus-size (actually sizes 10 &12 US) models in his runway show. While I do agree that an embrace of fuller figures shouldn't mean a hatred of smaller ones, it's frightening how powerfully women can rail against the directive to just be themselves--as they naturally are.
Thinking about all this made me wonder if writers are complicit in this, in setting unattainable ideals and continually sending the message that one must be perfect in order to have a romantic happy ending. Or is it fantasy, and artistic license, and we can do what we want? Surely everyone wants to read about and imagine themselves as a perfect person with a perfect life and a perfectly handsome boyfriend. But I think I personally tend to enjoy a little pinch of realism amongst the fantasy.
I can remember standing over a table of romance novels, and saying to myself that I would refuse to buy any romance book that had a heroine who was petite with a heaving enormous bosom. I couldn't find one. Book after book had nearly identical descriptions, though occasionally there were different hair colors. I finally managed to find one that had a secondary character who also had a heaving enormous bosom, but she was very tall and extremely curvy. Eureka. I actually fell in love with that character, and found her and her abrasive beau a lot more interesting than the doe-eyed, stereotyped heroine.
For my own characters, I do make the women beautiful, but I try to embrace different types. Tall, petite, curvy, slight, athletic, big hips, etc. I'm probably more idealistic about the men, to be honest, but I do know that I've written in a few softer tummies rather than always ripped abs. And they're not always porn star-endowed, either. I think characters can still be idealistic and enchanting without being plastic.
These are just my random, ramblingly connected thoughts. If you have any of your own, do share. Is it more important to portray more realistic ideals in ads showing actual people than it is in fiction? Or do they both set the tone for societal norms? Or are they both just forms of artistic expression and shouldn't be taken so literally?
I also leave you with this Dove film, which is three years old, but still compelling:
Click to viewThanks for reading.