skip to main |
skip to sidebar
A while back, Grim posted and Cassandra linked to the Dove “Real Beauty” video that went viral. I watched the video, thought it was lovely, and wanted to send it along to a couple of (female) friends. Since those friends would probably fall down in a dead faint if exposed to the poem in Grim’s sidebar, I went looking for another source. When I did, I was amazed and kind of appalled at some of the reactions. There was a lot of hilarity, a lot of scorn, a lot of trashing of Dove’s parent company, and so on. I was taken aback and ended up not sending my friends a link to the video. I didn’t however, give the reactions serious thought until I read what Ace had to say about the ad:
Dove did an ad, intended to go viral, putting across the message "Hey Ladies, you're more beautiful than you think."
Now, think about this. Dove does not know any of these 30 million women. So Dove could not possibly say if these women are more beautiful than they believe themselves to be.
It's the equivalent of telling ten thousand randomly-drawn strangers: Remember, you're all above average in skating ability.
[snip]
And yet, thirty million views. Women are starved for this sort of positive messaging, even when, if you think about if for five seconds, 1, it doesn't make any sense that Dove could tell you this about yourself and 2, Dove is obviously a corporation attempting to get attention by peddling an embarrassingly-transparently cloying-ingratiating message to women in hopes they're so starved for a kind word they'll take it anyway.
In the same post, Ace linked to an essay on the ad by Virginia Postrel and I read that, too. After reading both of these, I began to wonder if I had watched the same ad. Here are the two things I think are going on.
First, Ace’s interpretation isn’t quite right. Dove isn’t telling women they’re above average in appearance; Dove is saying that women are more attractive than they give themselves credit for. It’s not like telling 10,000 random strangers that they’re above average in skating ability; it’s like telling 10,000 random strangers that they’re better skaters than they give themselves credit for.
Now, with skating ability there’s no reason to think that most people will underestimate (or overestimate) their skating ability. There is, however, good reason to think that most women underestimate their attractiveness. As Naomi Wolf points out in The Beauty Myth, advertisers usually sell to women by leveraging - or helping create - women’s unrealistically bad opinion of themselves:
The advertisers who make women’s mass culture possible depend on making women feel bad enough about their faces and bodies to spend more money on worthless or pain-inducing products than they would if they felt innately beautiful. (p. 84)
Dove is simply talking explicitly about the basis of most advertising to women: women focus on their flaws and that makes them easy prey. So, yes, it does make sense that Dove can tell us that about ourselves - as, I think, Ace’s comment that “[w]omen are starved for this kind of positive messaging” makes clear.
Similarly, there is Postrel’s statement that:
There are many reasons to choose some women and not others for the video, ranging from how well they speak to whether they were available for the big reveal. But it’s hard to imagine that the director didn’t try to make the most compelling movie possible, choosing the sketches that showed drastic contrasts. Few, if any, viewers realize they’re seeing only about a third of the subjects of the “social experiment.”
The point of the ad is not to sell women a particular idea of reality; it’s to evoke recognition. Most women know that their friends and loved ones see them as more attractive than they see themselves. The ad isn’t telling us that as if it’s a banner headline; the ad is simply talking about something we all know anyhow - and gently pointing out that it isn’t a very realistic way to go through life.
Postrel also says:
But the campaign also encourages the perception that it’s normal, if undesirable, for grown women to obsess about their imperfections.
My reading on this is very different. I think the ad recognizes that this is something grown women do; in other words, this is a normal (in the sense of “usual” or “commonplace”) activity. That’s very different from “encouraging the perception that it’s normal”. Again, the ad is not trying to create a reality; it is reporting on the reality that already exists.
The second thing I think is going on in much of the negative reaction to the Dove ad is a rejection of sentiment. That is, when something moves us, we look for a reason to short-circuit that emotion. Hence, Ace’s point 2, about Dove being a corporation, looking for attention, etc. And hence Postrel’s references to the ad’s cleverness, and her warnings about it being “highly selective” and about how the artist didn’t work as sketch artists usually do. These are ways of saying, “There we go. No reason to be moved after all. It’s all a trick.”
Yet, again, we are not moved to tears because the ad convinces us of something. We are moved to tears because of recognition of something we already know: we women are awfully hard on ourselves. What is wrong with feeling touched and relieved that someone is talking to us about that - even if that someone is a huge corporation trying to sell us something?
Perhaps the problem with being moved by an advertisement is the fear that we will not be able to interrupt the connection between being moved and buying the product. Thus, rather than say, “Great ad, doesn’t make me want to rush right out and buy Dove” we feel we have to say, “Bad ad” to stop ourselves from immediately maxing out our credit cards on bars of soap with one-quarter cleansing cream. It’s as if we are all terrified that our emotions will be used against us. Perhaps that’s what Postrel fears when she says:
However media-savvy we may be, we tend to believe that a “documentary” reflects reality -- even if it’s quite obviously an ad.
I think women are smarter than that. My own reaction, for example, is, “Great ad. Doesn’t make me want to rush right out and buy Dove. But when I do want to buy something and my choice is between a version made by Dove and a version made by someone else, I’ll choose the one made by Dove.”
It seems pretty savvy to me to prefer a product made by a company that’s trying to sell me by telling me I’m fine the way I am over a product made by a company telling me there’s something seriously wrong with me that only its product can fix.
*****
Reading:
Cassandra is writing along somewhat similar lines and is doing her usual outstanding job. A must-read - although I’m afraid my post may fall into her “overthinking” category.
[Update: Do definitely read the comments to Cassandra's post. As of 11:45am on May 1, the commenters there seem remarkably media-savvy.]
Robert Samuelson is warning us that entitlements are going to have to be means-tested:
Sooner or later, the programs called “entitlements,” including Social Security, will be trimmed because they’re expensive and some recipients are less deserving than others.
Jonah Goldberg - and lots of other people - are telling us that an increasing number of disability payments are going to those who aren’t disabled:
... one rural Alabama doctor who signs off on disabilities for pretty much anyone lacking a good education on the assumption that their employment prospects are grim.
That points to the even bigger parts of the story. As the nature of the economy changes, disability programs are sometimes taking the place of welfare for those who feel locked out of the workforce — and state governments are loving it. States pay for welfare, the feds pay for disabilities.
The Washington Examiner (via Instapundit) reports that the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank, is lamenting the fact that food stamps are being used to buy junk food:
Not only should people know how their tax dollars are being spent, but food stamps shouldn’t pay for junk food at all, the National Center for Public Policy Research said Friday. [snip]
...said David Almasi, the National Center’s executive director. “When it comes to public assistance, I want people buying what they need with my money and not what they desire.”
The thrust of these stories is that the government is giving money - our money - to people who don’t need it, don’t deserve it, and/or haven’t met the requirements for getting it; or, alternatively, that the people who are getting the money aren’t using it “right”. So what should we do about this? Well, what can we do except pass more laws and do more oversight: set eligibility guidelines for entitlements - and check financial records for those getting them; set strict definitions of disability - and send people on disability off to government doctors for inspection; limit what foods stamps can buy - and send enforcement officers in to be sure stores are abiding by the rules.
The "regulate and enforce" approach has a certain plausibility and I’m certainly sympathetic to the view that if someone is going to spend my money, I should get to determine whether they really need it and how they spend it. The problem is that the implementation of this approach means we’re going to give an even bigger bureaucracy even more license to paw through people’s lives. That I am not at all sympathetic to, both because of the whole bigger bureaucracy/more license thing and because I’d like to leave my fellow citizens with their dignity intact.
So let’s think about these issues in terms, once again, of the Lifelong Endowment. You can read the whole long explanation of the Lifelong Endowment at the link but, put simply, with the Lifelong Endowment everyone pays some percentage of their income into a pool. Then the money in the pool is divided evenly among all of us. If you make less money, this is a net gain for you; if you make more money, this is a net loss for you. What would these issues look like if we had the Lifelong Endowment instead of our current benefit systems?
First, the means-testing is built in: the less money someone makes, the more he or she benefits from the Lifelong Endowment. That takes care of Samuelson’s problem.
Second, no one has to prove he or she is disabled to get this money and no one gets more money if he or she is disabled. There is nothing to be gained by healthy people claiming disability and nothing to be lost by truly disabled people working as much as they can. That takes care of Goldberg’s problem.
Third, everyone can spend their Lifelong Endowment money however they want. If they want to get all their calories from Coke and chocolate bars, that’s their business. That takes care of Almasi’s problem.
With the Lifelong Endowment, we can rest assured that we are helping the less fortunate among us; we can stop worrying about whether our neighbors are getting away with something on our dime; and we can avoid empowering more bureaucrats to be more nosy. What’s not to like?
After reporting that a recent Pew Poll shows:
...just 28% rate the federal government in Washington favorably. That is down five points from a year ago and the lowest percentage ever in a Pew Research Center survey.
Peter Wehner at Contentions wonders why voters nonetheless “continue to vote for politicians and support policies that entrusts more and more power to the federal government[.]” He concludes by saying:
One might think that Republicans should be able to leverage the public’s skepticism toward the federal government in a way that advances their interests. Of course, that should have been the case in 2012, too–and what the GOP got instead was a drubbing.
America can sometimes be a most curious country.
Perhaps the reasons Americans continue to vote for Democrats is because no one has any faith that the Republicans are the slightest bit interested in entrusting less and less power to the Federal government. Given a choice between two political parties equally interested in building up the central government, why wouldn’t most people vote for the party that at least pays lip service to using that power to help others rather than to the one that sounds happy to cut all kinds of entitlement programs except the ones from which they themselves benefit?
I'll be away from my computer for a while; at least a week, possibly several weeks. Accordingly, I'm shutting down comments for the whole blog until I return.
Ace of Spades recently linked to a Michael Crichton speech. One line stood out for me, independent of the topic of the talk:
… the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or another ... miss the cold truth---that there is very little difference between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric.
I would have disputed that until recently, arguing that the Republican Party was far from perfect but was much better for the country than the Democrats. Now, however, the Republican Party's decision to push amnesty for illegal aliens has convinced me of the truth of Crichton's statement.
I was quite distressed to discover that JaneGalt.net no longer exists. This site contained Megan McArdle’s pre-Atlantic writings and I have cited it more than once on my blog. Luckily, the old site is archived at the WayBack Machine. The WayBack calendar for the site is here; the WayBack archive of the “current” page of the blog is here - the blog had not been updated since January 5, 2008.
Although I am comforted to know that JaneGalt.net survives somewhere, I decided nonetheless to build my own archive of the posts from it that I would hate to lose. My first candidate was, of course, the post by McArdle entitled “A really, really, really long post about gay marriage that does not, in the end, support one side or the other”.
This post can be found at the WayBack Machine here. (I also saved the following post, entitled “A quick extra note on gay marriage”.)
While saving the “really, really, really long post”, I took the opportunity to re-read it. McArdle’s argument is summed up as follows:
My only request is that people try to be a leeetle more humble about their ability to imagine the subtle results of big policy changes. The argument that gay marriage will not change the institution of marriage because you can't imagine it changing your personal reaction is pretty arrogant. It imagines, first of all, that your behavior is a guide for the behavior of everyone else in society, when in fact, as you may have noticed, all sorts of different people react to all sorts of different things in all sorts of different ways, which is why we have to have elections and stuff. And second, the unwavering belief that the only reason that marriage, always and everywhere, is a male-female institution (I exclude rare ritual behaviors), is just some sort of bizarre historical coincidence, and that you know better, needs examining. If you think you know why marriage is male-female, and why that's either outdated because of all the ways in which reproduction has lately changed, or was a bad reason to start with, then you are in a good place to advocate reform. If you think that marriage is just that way because our ancestors were all a bunch of repressed bastards with dark Freudian complexes that made them homophobic bigots, I'm a little leery of letting you muck around with it.
She concludes with:
In the end, our judgement is all we have; everyone will have to rely on their judgement of whether gay marriage is, on net, a good or a bad idea. All I'm asking for is for people to think more deeply than a quick consultation of their imaginations to make that decision. I realise that this probably falls on the side of supporting the anti-gay-marriage forces, and I'm sorry, but I can't help that. This humility is what I want from liberals when approaching market changes; now I'm asking it from my side too, in approaching social ones. I think the approach is consistent, if not exactly popular.
The first time I read this, I found it the most compelling argument against legalizing same-sex marriage that I had read. I still find it that but it now seems to me that it also contains the seeds of its own refutation. Two of the examples McArdle provides of well-intentioned reforms that did not work out as those who proposed them “logically” believed they would are extending welfare to unwed mothers and loosening divorce laws. The first, McArdle argues, caused marriage rates to collapse. The second:
... made drastic changes to the institution of marriage itself. David Brooks makes an argument I find convincing: that the proliferation of the kind of extravagent weddings that used to only be the province of high society (rented venue, extravagent flowers and food, hundreds of guests, a band with dancing, dresses that cost the same as a good used car) is because the event itself doesn't mean nearly as much as it used to, so we have to turn it into a three-ring circus to feel like we're really doing something.
A couple in 1940 (and even more so in 1910) could go to a minister's parlor, or a justice of the peace, and in five minutes totally change their lives. Unless you are a member of certain highly religious subcultures, this is simply no longer true. That is, of course, partly because of the sexual revolution and the emancipation of women; but it is also because you aren't really making a lifetime committment; you're making a lifetime committment unless you find something better to do.
In other words, marriage in our culture has already been changed beyond all recognition, has been hollowed out. Yes, we (largely) retain the male-female aspect of marriage but we have changed everything else about it. Let’s accept that same-sex marriage quite possibly would, in ways we can’t reliably foresee, harm a society where marriage is flourishing; where the divorce rate is minuscule; and where most children are born in wedlock and grow up with their “original” parents. It is still not clear to me that there is much more damage that can be done by legalizing same-sex marriage in our society.
This is not a new argument, of course. Even David French, who seems to be staunchly against same-sex marriage, has written:
Imagine the incredulity of a Christian college student — themselves too often the product of a broken home, where they had a front-row seat to their parents’ contentious festival of self-love — watching a thrice-married fellow congregant rail against gay marriage. It just doesn’t add up.
Kevin D. Williamson puts the (to him parenthetical) point thus:
It should also be noted that the liberalization of divorce laws and the legalization of abortion together have had an effect on family life that renders same-sex marriage trivial by comparison. The patient has been shot twice through the head, and we are troubling about his swollen appendix.
He concludes with:
I might feel differently about defending the sanctity of marriage under the law if there were much sanctity remaining to defend.
I find myself in agreement with him on that.
Back in early December, in a comment (December 7, 2012 09:14 PM) over at Villainous Company, Grim said about a friend of his:
I'm not sure just how she does see the sacred, except that I know she sees it in relationship. I know this because she defines Logos as "relationship," which isn't entirely wrong: but let me draw the issue. Logos is the Greek for 'word,' and is the term used in the opening of the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God." So it's an important term.
Logos is related to our word for "logic," as well as being the actual word for "word," and in the Greek it has a strong connotation of order; but "relationship" is an interesting reading. And yet it's right, in a way. Logic is about ordering things correctly; and order is a kind of relationship, one to another, each in their place but in just the right 'relationship' to each other.
The idea of seeing the sacred in relationship reminded me at the time of something I’d read (probably in The Reason for God ) about the Triune God. As I remember it, the idea was that the three aspects (for lack of a better word) of God - Father, Son, and Holy Ghost - were in a constant dance with each other, each loving, glorifying, and delighting in the others.
This idea came up again (in somewhat different form) in the C.S. Lewis I'm currently reading which inspired me to do a little research. It turns out this is the idea of “perichoresis” (emphasis mine):
The fact that Father, Son and Holy Spirit bring glory to each other is precisely because of the love that they share in eternity, since to exalt the other is a supreme act of love. And pushing further still, I would suggest that a doctrine given a rather complicated Greek name, perichoresis, provides the best framework for understanding the Trinitarian form of God's glorification. This is the doctrine that the Persons of the Triune Godhead mutually indwell one another, and seems—although the biblical data are very faint—to suggest that the characteristics of the Godhead flow out of this perichoretic union.
I do not know, of course, if this is what Grim’s friend is thinking of when she sees the sacred in relationship but I like very much the idea of the sacred arising from an eternal dance. That seems quite perfect.
Posts
