While I applaud the effort anyone puts into a handmade envelope, I've been mulling over these two for a while. I've got a few big philosophical things to say about them, first and foremost that I find them deeply, deeply disturbing.
I grant you I don't have a TV. I don't follow or worship celebrity. I am blissfully ignorant of pop culture, and I don't think you could stuff a fashion magazine down my throat if you tried. I am deliberately distant from this crap, and such deliberate distancing was crucial to my personal process of healing and rebuilding my own body image. (In my youth, I was NOT so distant from such advertising culture.) There is a reason I find this blather appalling, and this pretty much sums it up.
No wonder our women, especially young girls, have serious body image issues (and eating disorders and cutting disorders and everything else that goes along with self-hate) when they're barraged with this crap... and then internalize it as their standard of beauty.
So here we have the emaciated warrior. I will confess I like the woman warrior aspect of it, but good lord, this waif hasn't the muscle to heft a spear! She is skin and bones, people! I look at this skeletal frame and wonder if she actually has enough body fat for her body to function hormonally. If I saw a young woman like this, I would be concerned about an eating disorder. This is so skinny it repulses me, and it repulses me further that women see this starved image and aspire to look like that.
Now, creepfest #2. I can't see enough of this one's body to know whether she's got a healthier figure or not, but let's deconstruct that eye makeup. Good lord, this woman looks beaten. She looks happy to be beaten. You have to turn this envelope over to see the rest of the ad, but...
...look! She's kinda sorta chained up! WTF?? Chained and beaten? And this is sexy? What, exactly, is this ad selling? (I'm not even sure- clothes? perfume? a submissive woman?)
I'm not a prude, people, and I love me some good pin-ups. There is a big difference between showing powerful, sexy women and objectifying women and starving them. I'm sure we can argue the finer points of this, and I imagine this blog post will generate some interesting comments... but I just have to go on record by saying that images like this creep me out. I have a very, very different standard of beauty. [Edit: Please keep your comments polite. Mean-spirited comments will not be published.]
Oh, and by the way...
...operationbeautiful.com is well worth a visit any time, but especially after reading this post.
