Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2010-04-14 07:14 pm
azurelunatic) wrote2010-04-14 07:14 pm
Britney's Legs
Apparently I have strong feeling about legs. That's what I discovered after finding that Britney Spears, who is ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
norabombay's perfect-template-for-all-your-imaginative-projection-needs pop diva of choice, consented to release pre-Photoshop photos along with their post-touchup incarnations.
I'm not entirely sure how it was that I found my way to the Daily Mail article on the pictures, but that's where I wound up. And sometimes it's not just "don't read the comments", but "don't read the article's commentary". Tucked in a short list of things that were digitally removed, I found:
It wasn't quite seeing red, perhaps more of a lurid pink*. Whatever the other problems Britney has, embodies, and/or inflicts on the world, please acknowledge a few things about her.
She is an entertainer.
She dances.
She rehearses the routines for each performance, whether it's to be a stage performance, a music video performance, or g-d knows what kind of performance.
She performs the routines for her music videos, which of course include multiple takes to get stuff right.
She performs live shows on stage.
She is a healthy young woman, able-bodied and clearly capable of withstanding hours of physically demanding rehearsal and/or performance on a daily basis.
Britney Spears is, if she is nothing else, an athlete who trains regularly for her job. She has muscular calves and thighs, like any other athlete who spends that much time engaged in a leg-intensive sport would have. She does not have the same legs that a woman of average build who takes part in ordinary activity but is not an athlete, has. She does not have the same legs that a very slender woman has. She does not even have the same legs that a plump woman who is not an athlete has.
Dear Daily Mail, classifying the proud muscular calves and thighs of a dancer as an "imperfection" does not even remotely help the issue that your article was trying to address, the impossible standards that women's attractiveness is held to. Even as you decry it, you're buying into it. Those legs are not actually fat. A good half of the leg-related photoshoppery, possibly more, looks to have gone into removing muscle mass, smoothing over muscle definition, making a flexible and strong woman look like a mass-produced, unathletic little dolly.
Stop doing this. Stop buying into the concept that every woman's ideal of beauty is the same. All of the types of women -- athletic, average, slender, plump, and more -- can have beautiful legs, and their legs will look different. Stop believing that beauty and femininity excludes obvious physical strength. It's all well and good that you're waving these pictures and decrying the concept that women are being held up to an impossible standard**, and that the standard is unhealthy, unrealistic, and damaging. But you're still implicitly reinforcing that this impossible standard is beauty, that women who fall outside of it also fall short; that they are authentic but less than beautiful. Don't fall into that trap.
Strength with grace is inherently beautiful. Don't even begin to attempt to tell me that you think it's not.
*I'm getting a lot of mileage out of that phrase today. Also, I dearly want more clothing in that color.
**[18:58] <cadenzamuse> although I still have this difficult-to-articulate niggling difficulty with Dove's campaign
[18:59] <cadenzamuse> something about them talking about "real beauty" when they're still trying to sell a product
[18:59] <mathsnerd> muse: me too!
[18:59] <cadenzamuse> I dunno
[18:59] <Azz_> The message is valuable, but they're riding their advertising campaign on top of it.
[19:00] <cadenzamuse> yeah
[19:00] <cadenzamuse> I think that's it
[19:00] <Azz_> They're exploiting the much-needed message in order to sell their product, and the fact that the message is desperately needed is carrying it everywhere, with the "this is an ad for us" rider.
[19:01] <cadenzamuse> yeah
[19:02] <cadenzamuse> they make it out to be some altruistic thing, when ultimately I still think they're only providing the needed message as a way to sell their product
[19:03] <jeshyr> ... their /beauty/ product, worse.
norabombay's perfect-template-for-all-your-imaginative-projection-needs pop diva of choice, consented to release pre-Photoshop photos along with their post-touchup incarnations. I'm not entirely sure how it was that I found my way to the Daily Mail article on the pictures, but that's where I wound up. And sometimes it's not just "don't read the comments", but "don't read the article's commentary". Tucked in a short list of things that were digitally removed, I found:
Imperfections that can be clearly seen in the un-airbrushed shot include [...] her larger thighs ...
It wasn't quite seeing red, perhaps more of a lurid pink*. Whatever the other problems Britney has, embodies, and/or inflicts on the world, please acknowledge a few things about her.
She is an entertainer.
She dances.
She rehearses the routines for each performance, whether it's to be a stage performance, a music video performance, or g-d knows what kind of performance.
She performs the routines for her music videos, which of course include multiple takes to get stuff right.
She performs live shows on stage.
She is a healthy young woman, able-bodied and clearly capable of withstanding hours of physically demanding rehearsal and/or performance on a daily basis.
Britney Spears is, if she is nothing else, an athlete who trains regularly for her job. She has muscular calves and thighs, like any other athlete who spends that much time engaged in a leg-intensive sport would have. She does not have the same legs that a woman of average build who takes part in ordinary activity but is not an athlete, has. She does not have the same legs that a very slender woman has. She does not even have the same legs that a plump woman who is not an athlete has.
Dear Daily Mail, classifying the proud muscular calves and thighs of a dancer as an "imperfection" does not even remotely help the issue that your article was trying to address, the impossible standards that women's attractiveness is held to. Even as you decry it, you're buying into it. Those legs are not actually fat. A good half of the leg-related photoshoppery, possibly more, looks to have gone into removing muscle mass, smoothing over muscle definition, making a flexible and strong woman look like a mass-produced, unathletic little dolly.
Stop doing this. Stop buying into the concept that every woman's ideal of beauty is the same. All of the types of women -- athletic, average, slender, plump, and more -- can have beautiful legs, and their legs will look different. Stop believing that beauty and femininity excludes obvious physical strength. It's all well and good that you're waving these pictures and decrying the concept that women are being held up to an impossible standard**, and that the standard is unhealthy, unrealistic, and damaging. But you're still implicitly reinforcing that this impossible standard is beauty, that women who fall outside of it also fall short; that they are authentic but less than beautiful. Don't fall into that trap.
Strength with grace is inherently beautiful. Don't even begin to attempt to tell me that you think it's not.
*I'm getting a lot of mileage out of that phrase today. Also, I dearly want more clothing in that color.
**[18:58] <cadenzamuse> although I still have this difficult-to-articulate niggling difficulty with Dove's campaign
[18:59] <cadenzamuse> something about them talking about "real beauty" when they're still trying to sell a product
[18:59] <mathsnerd> muse: me too!
[18:59] <cadenzamuse> I dunno
[18:59] <Azz_> The message is valuable, but they're riding their advertising campaign on top of it.
[19:00] <cadenzamuse> yeah
[19:00] <cadenzamuse> I think that's it
[19:00] <Azz_> They're exploiting the much-needed message in order to sell their product, and the fact that the message is desperately needed is carrying it everywhere, with the "this is an ad for us" rider.
[19:01] <cadenzamuse> yeah
[19:02] <cadenzamuse> they make it out to be some altruistic thing, when ultimately I still think they're only providing the needed message as a way to sell their product
[19:03] <jeshyr> ... their /beauty/ product, worse.
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1) Original "Campaign for Real Beauty" was to sell cellulite cream. All the other stuff (non-profits, etc.) came after.
2) Dove is owned by Unilever. Unilever also owns Fair and Lovely, a skin bleaching line sold largely in Africa (and I think also in Asia? But I forget). Skin bleaching, along with being racist and having to do with unrealistic beauty standards, can also be incredible dangerous. Campaign for Real Beauty my ASS. (Trying not to soapbox here, but let me know if you want citations, etc.)
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A long newspaper piece covering both the racism of the concept of whitening creams, as well as listing some of the health risks
A Business-y paper about Fair and Lovely describes some of their offensive ads
A WSJ article on whitening creams, to counteract the "Hey, look, I can Google!" nature of some of these citations
A specific critique of Unilever's lightening creams v. Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty
The Dangers of Skin Bleaching (yes, it's from the Tyra show. Sorry.)
Once again, to be fair, Fair and Lovely does not use many of the chemicals listed as causing the terrible side effects. But that's the industry that Unilever is a part of, and is benefiting from.
Also, as a disclaimer: I recognize that I get to say this from a place of incredible racial privilege. I'm a super-pale, WASP-y girl living on the East Coast of the U.S. I don't want any of this to be read as disdain for or criticism of people who choose to use these products within their own racial, cultural, and economic contexts (or people who feel they have no choice but to use these products).
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I've met Maureen Shirreff, the creative director who was/is responsible for that ad campaign. She was pretty clear about the fact that they can use a good message to sell their product is awesome, but at the end of the day, it IS about selling the product. I was overall quite impressed with her, especially with how she responded to my question about lack of WWD in the campaign. (Basically, "that's a good question, we did run a campaign of women with scars and the stories behind their scars with a skin cream in Europe, but it didn't test well in the US." Which didn't exactly answer MY question, but at least it was on her and Dove's radar.)
Further context: I was in a course on Critical Perspectives on PR/AD (which turned out to be full of PR/AD grad students and thus much less "critical" than I was expecting in discussion if not direction), and the professor knew Shirreff and invited her to come and speak. Do I think that Unilever is a great company? Nah, I don't. Shirreff did talk about how Axe was also a Unilever brand with a completely different and somewhat contradictory marketing strategy. But I have less ire at the Campaign for Real Beauty, because, I mean, it's advertising. They're ALWAYS trying to sell you shit. But no one at the business level is pretending otherwise. Shirreff was 100% honest about the fact that although she was really happy to be promoting a more positive body image through the campaign, at the end of the day, it's because it makes money. It's not for the common good.
Anyway, I really liked Shirreff on a personal level, regardless of my feelings about the campaign or Unilever, which probably comes through in this comment, so feel free to take this with a grain of salt/ask further questions. I just thought I'd put this out there for discussion, since there seems to be a lot of speculation about Dove's motivations and operations, and I do know a bit about that from the horse's mouth, so to speak. (For example, how separate the brands are - in terms of marketing, entirely and completely separate accounts.)
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But you can't take several inches off Britney Fucking Spears, and then stretch the legs you leave her with to make her look taller.
She's an international popstar and professional dancer. And as you said, no matter what, it can't be denied that she uses her legs.
The legs she has are these flat out spectacular legs. Exactly what the legs of professional dancers look like.
I'm pissed.
because if somebody who is basically one of the 50 most beautiful and known women in the world gets this treatment? People kill themselves trying to look like she actually looks.
What the hell do they think of the rest of us?
(I am going to give them a pass on airbrushing out the camel toe....)
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I"m a ok with a certain level of photoshoppery of publication photos. Stray hair, camel toes, red eye, maybe a pimple- there are things that I would like removed from my own photos.
They do not in any way change the fundamental size and shape of the subject.
That's where I get pissed. Why try to erase half of her?
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But then, I'm not the Daily Mail, so I don't know for sure, and this is coming from someone who spent most of her life with male privilege, so if what I said sounds like it could have come from there, I apologise.
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This is a sentence with three things classed together. Two are genuine imperfections, which either means that they left her thighs in there as a ringer or due to lazy writing, or they really do believe that her THIGHS OF POWER are a (human, real, no-one's perfect) flaw.
She's got a full flock of the bruises you pick up from being a theatre person; when I was in drama class there wasn't a week that I didn't have a leg-bruise or two. Even when I have an honestly-earned bruise that I display as a badge of honor or a trophy (depending on how I got it, heh) I don't classify it as "flawless", even though I wouldn't try to cover it up like I would if it were a pimple or something.
She's got some dry skin on her feet. This is, again, human but not perfect.
Male privilege does mean that you missed out on childhood and teenage female fat-shaming, so you may be missing a secret dictionary that comes with that. "Large" is, in context, not a neutral description of a relative size. It is a coded term for "fat". "Large thighs" are a problem that is described in beauty magazines, along with tips and tricks for addressing that problem in ten minutes a day, worry-free, results not typical.
Also, the Daily Mail has the sort of reputation on social issues that even I, as a foreigner, am aware of.
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I grew up in a Mail reading house; I persuaded my paretns to switch when I was a late teen, and now they won't touch it either.
I do buy that theory. This is the paper that, famously, supported Hitler right up until the invasion of Poland, and wrote article after article talking about how the country was being swamped by immigrants then was surprised when they found out a lot of readers vote BNP.
The tone of that article is entirely consistent with their normal editorial line. Best selling newspaper in Britain :-(
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We aren't freaking Barbie dolls and Britney definitely isn't either; why the hell do they have to keep feeding us this bullshit that we're supposed to be?
(Angry comment is angry. :D Now that's done, hi! I came this way because of the fic drive. Nice to meet you.)
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By the way, nice to find an intelligent person on LJ, I hope you don't mind I added you. I found you vie zarhooie.
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Your comment resulted in an hour or two of fascinated Googling, attempting to find examples of what my actual ideal of female beauty is, and I wound up discovering the work of Russian painter Zinaida Serebriakova, and in particular "Portret Mademoizelle Niewiedomskoj", 1935
Muzeum Sztuki Awangardowej, Moskwa
http://georgeeliot13.blox.pl/resource/serebryakova01.jpg
It isn't exact, but it's close enough to point to while flailing my hands and making evocative gestures. (Apparently my ideal got set while I was 15 and falling ass-over-teakettle in love with a girl who could have been mistaken for a sister. I appreciate other standards of feminine beauty, but this one is my favorite.)
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There was an episode of some reality show Jessica Simpson is hosting on the other day. They went to Africa and visited a tribe where women spent 2 months in a "fattening up" hut in order to get as big as possible for their wedding day. Apparently their standard of beauty was for the women to be a rotund as possible, while the men were extremely thin.
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Dove isn't really on my Hot Issues Radar; I included the link because I was chatting with
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But those were some YUMMY legs, and I would be ready to scratch eyes out of any idiots who called those legs a *flaw*.