A division of the corporate giant Unilever, Dove is an international manufacturer of personal care products such as soaps, deodorants, and moisturizers. In 2004 the brand launched its now-famous “Campaign for Real Beauty,” a series of advertisements created by the Ogilvy & Mather agency. The ads typically showed a group of women of various shapes, colors, and ages clad only in undergarments (and sometimes wearing nothing at all). Plastered all over billboards, buses, and magazines until the campaign shifted focus to girls’ self-esteem in 2010, the images were meant to challenge standards of beauty that idealize youth and thinness, to encourage self-esteem in women, and, of course, to sell Dove’s products.
This video was created by filmmaker Tim Piper in 2006 and uploaded to YouTube as part of Dove’s extended marketing plan. In a minute and fourteen seconds of stop-action photography, “Evolution” shows the process by which a regular woman’s face is transformed into an advertising image—and highlights the startling extent to which such images are manipulated. As Ogilvy & Mather intended, the video quickly went viral, garnering more than 20 million views (and counting).
Watch “Evolution,” and respond to the following questions.
Aside from promoting Dove’s “self-esteem fund for girls” (final frame), what seems to be the underlying PURPOSE of this video? What point does it make?
What two separate processes does “Evolution” analyze, and how are they related?
Do you detect any IRONY in the title of this video? Why, or why not?
OTHER METHODS Explain how the video uses COMPARISON AND CONTRAST of three distinct images to support an ARGUMENT.
In this video, Dove questions our “distorted” standards of beauty. Using visual evidence, write an essay or create a video about someone or something you consider beautiful but others do not. Your subject could be a person, a building, a work of art, an animal, a natural phenomenon, an object you hold dear. To prepare for your draft, list some of the criticisms that have been (or might be) leveled at your subject and explain why you disagree. Then counter the criticisms with your own perspective, using details from your experience and observation.
CONNECTIONS While Dove claims to be striving to raise girls’ and women’s self-esteem, Meghan Daum, in “Narcissist — Give It a Rest” (Chap. 12), complains that a person “can be called a narcissist merely by having self-esteem and showing a little ambition — in other words, for trying to survive in the world.” What is a narcissist? How, for that matter, would you define self-esteem? Using examples from both selections as well as from your own experience and observation, write an essay on the role of self-esteem in contemporary American culture. What, according to Dove, contributes to low self-esteem among girls in particular? How, according to Daum, can having a positive sense of self work against a person? Why do you suppose parents and educators focus as much as they do on enhancing children’s self-esteem? (Consider, for instance, youth sports leagues that don’t keep score, or teachers who avoid red ink when commenting on student work.) Do you think such efforts will benefit children in the long run, or harm them? Why?