I think you've just shown your colors: "disgusting." How many obese or overweight women are that way because they know that they will never reach this unattainable goal of a size 2, or 0, or whatever nonexistent size is worn by the latest star of the moment. And I think the important thing is to stress HEALTHINESS

Even though I am fully recovered from Bulimia, I am still very sensative towards these subjects. i am very thankful that Dove launched this campaign to increase younger girls' self esteem. Growing up everyone viewed me as the perfect girl; athletic, popular, and excellent grades. I always showed to be extremely confident, but on the inside I was the complete opposite. Seeing this video tears me up inside because I know what young girls go through when they see those type of ads. I remember thinking thats exactly what i want to look like when Im older and I'm only 19 but still to this day I have an image of what i want to look like when Im older. People who advertise the wrong idea of beauty have no idea what they are causing to so many young girls. They have no idea that even though we are recovered, we struggle every single days of our lives to keep us from falling, to keep us from going back to the dark world of perfection. I was always trying to be someone I wasnt and was angry at myself for not being able to be thin. Im not fat but Im def not close to skinny either. My self esteem increased dramatically my senior year in high school when Dr. Moore, the principal, announced the ten nominees for homecoming queen. I never did imagine I would make it as far as i did. I was second runner up. from the moment I heard my name on the intercome, i felt loved and accepted by my classmates. Walking down the halls people would come up to m to tell me they were proud and excited for me/ They would comment on how pretty I wsa and how I was the only one who was not stuck-up. After experiencing this, I realized there is no need for trying to change the way I was. I realized people loved me and accepted me the way I am. No one but I saw the fat, ugly girl. I was fortunate to experience this because I know not all of us get to be nominated or experience something like this, but this is why I once again thank Dove for the campaign, and I am 100% with the team.

Hey!
Well its great that watching the videos has made you think this way.
Couldn't you use your photography skills to promote natural beauty though??

i can remember being in elementary school and wanting glasses because the rest of my family had them, i thought they were cool, no one ever called me 4 eyes that i remember and if they did i'm sure i didn't care. i have a beauty mark on my cheek that i insits makes me face look fat, but in acctuality it's the fat under the skin, not the mark that makes it look fat. for years i have refused to smile wide for pictures because it scrunches my face and makes it fatter. freckles, glasses, what clothes i'm wearing, none of it matters. it all comes down to weight and i don't blame the media, or my parents, or the kids who teased me at school, no one thing put this in my head, it was a combination of everything. my parents have battled obesity their entire lives and i've watched it along with the anorexic images on tv add years of being teased about my weight by the overweight kids in school and bake for 22 years and you get me. i do not think i'm ugly, i KNOW i'm fat. i weigh 165 and 5'5 i should be 130. the fast food industry is as much to blame for this as anything else, however it's my choice to eat what i eat, not theirs. it just seems that healthy foods are more costly than something dipped in batter and deep fried! there is hope for the future at least, the various salads put out by the fast food chains, apples and milk being an option instead of fries and soda in kids meals, and of course the campaign for real beauty which warms my heart to the core. but for the rest of us...i don't know if it's possible to heal. no matter what i weigh i'm sure i'll always wish it was less, no matter how i look to others there will always be a chubby little girl looking back at me from the mirror.

the onslaught film and the evolution film (especially the later) made me feel horrible as a woman. for the last 3 years i've been taking a photography class at the local vo-tech and i fully intend on becoming a professional photographer. the process they went through in evolution... i know how to do all of that. they just used photoshop, and i could slow the film down and tell you how to do it step by step. i fully believe in making people feel good about themselves but if i truly do what i'm determined to do when i grow up i will be cutting down the self esteem of millions of little girls just the way mine was.

i couldn't watch either of those films without crying and i cry as i type these words. it's almost impossible to break into the field of photography without conforming to everyone else's standard of beauty, in terms of the images and your dress as well. my instructor knows i'm talented and determined but he doesn't see how i can become successful and continue to dress the way i do. i'm what people who don't understand me would call "goth". i also have blue dreadlocks. i've had them for 3 years and they are quite permanent at this point and i would have to cut them off. he's told me to get a hair cut many times. i don't know what to do.
do i conform my work to their standards? do i conform myself to their standards? conformity is against everything i believe in, but i want this more than anything. enough to hurt millions of girls just like me? enough to loose what makes me me?

i'm so confused...

I strongly agree with the onslaught film. I am a 17 year old who, is very outgoing. i am very happy with who i am and although i have times where i dislike certain things about my body for the most part i am a very postitive person. I have a younger sister whom i am very close with who is 13. Me and my sister are best friends and she has recently been diagnosed with annorexia nervosa. I pains me to see her a pubesent preteen suffering from this painful disease, she has lost 15 pounds from her petite 5'2 frame (she only weighed about 100lbs b4). Being her role model, she voices to me on many occasions how much she looks up to me and wants to be just like me when she is older. I try and ensure that when i am around her i dont make comments like omg this shirt makes me look fat or things like that and it angers me when we go shopping and she puts on a size 00 jeans (they actually make sizes that small) . . . .and thinks that shes fat. It is almost painful for me to watch her go downhill and disappear right before my eyes. Despite my best efforts to make her eat she still refuses. . . .it has come to me threatening not to go shopping with her or not going to the movies together if she doesnt eat.. . . . our relataionship has become totally different now! i sympathize with grils suffering from this disorder because the media makes it hard for us to ignore the pressures of looking like "a millioj dollars" or looking as skinny as lindsie lohan or models on the run way. as a society we must cange the wa way the media is connecting with young teens and young adults!!

My feelings when I watched the Onslaught video were definitely mixed. I have been very blessed with good genes and a healthy weight and diet. However obesity runs predominantly in my family so I still sympathize with women who are overweight and their struggles with self image. Since turning thirty last year I am also becoming more aware of the concern with the aging process and how to do it gracefully so to speak. The media really does scrutinize women and belittles them with a barage of images of hot young, abnormally skinny women geared more towards selling product then boosting self esteem. I love fashion and agree that visually some merchandise is more appealing on an attractive thin young model but as a woman it does concern me the overwhelming slant on the advertisements. Are we supposed to believe there are not healthy happy older women wearing the latest fashions worth looking at or that woman who are more curvy are hopeless as far as fashion is concerned? With those I am only speaking of the products actually geared towards women. Men are baraged with images of younger, hotter, steamier images and now even more increasingly with images of starlet moms who have dropped all of their baby weight weeks after delivery and normal women everywhere struggle with trying to conform themselves because their partners wonder why they don't look as hot as Heidi Klum strutting the Victoria's Secret runway after child birth. I feel some of the advertising is encouraging that we can try to look our best and put our best foot forward. I would however like to see more models in the Victorias Secret catalogs and other advertisements showing different shapes and ages...unless Victoria's Secret and other advertisers mean for only twenty-somethings to purchase their merchandise. If only there were a way to demand and boycott purchases from certain advertisers until they start using more realistic models in their ads. Until that perfect day comes...I think it is great that this campaign exists! Keep it up!! LET EVERY WOMAN KNOW THEY ARE BEAUTIFUL!!!

I'm going to agree with not supporting the fact that women should just sit tight if their overweight and unhealthy. But my primary goal for this post was to talk about the films that I just saw and how I read the article about the woman who cries all the time from Jane magazine. I could watch eeryone of those clips and feel moved, but talk about crying...The one about Amy hiding in the house really hit home to me! I have traveled a long and winding road about distorted body image, since I was about seven years old and stepped on the scale-thinking that I weighed too much compared to other girls in my school or in my family. I was never obese at any time in my life, nor am I now. I'm 5'3 and weigh 123lbs, and very proud of that. I'm quite athletic and very into nutrition.
However, it has not always been that way. I took my first diet pill when I was about fourteen years old. Diet pills were only the beginning for me, as the next couple of years went by diuretics, laxatives, higher dosed diet pills with ephedra in them and bullimia, plus startvation came into my life. I finally got down to below 108 lbs. and also began losing my toenails, hair and my period disappeared for a very long time and when it did come back, I would be deathly sick and curled up on the floor shivering with piercing pain rushing through my body. I was literally falling apart, and if followed for longer- could have died.
No matter what anyone told me, how beautiful someone told me I was, or how thin- I never believed them!
Now pushing the big 25 in my life, married and having a beautiful two and a half year old son, I look back and can only fathom the damage I have done to my body, and regret every minute of it. I could never turn back the clock on that, no matter how young or old. I have seen all the ad's for Dove and I think they are remarkable and uplifting to women in this day and age. I also see how in this film about Amy- the boy never see's what is wrong with her and tears are flooding my eyes now, beacuse I only think of my husband and how beautiful he has made me feel, how I still can conjure up thoughts about myself that are negative, but how he never seems to have them.
Because of my own struggle and the women around me, I have vowed that the one thing my son will know and will do is to respect a woman, period, end of story. Women are very important to each other, but it also takes a mother to teach a boy respect, and if those boys who are not learning this as children grow into men who expect a playboy model to show up at their doorstep, they will treat women badly and cause them to feel worse about themselves. So I think that a respectful, informed man is just as important in these campaigns as well, because our world is not only feminine, and most of us do seek to feel beautiful to a man.
I will close with this, whoever is reading this, please reflect on what it is that makes you happy, who makes you happy and how do you really feel about yourself- honestly. Whatever you do- do it healthfully, that is the only way.
Mona Willson

I completely agree with you. Why should it be seen as acceptable for people to be obese? Obesity is not healthy. It shouldn't be the norm in America. When did a five four woman wearing a size twelve (both sizes are the national average in America) become acceptable? That is obesity! Why should it be acceptable to anyone that clinically obese people are now in ads, because it's the disgusting norm in America? Did anyone think that making it acceptable to be fat; would only lead more people to be fat? A fourth of American adults are obese. The more acceptable this becomes the bigger the epidemic will become.

Don't get me wrong, I do believe that some overweight people can be really beautiful. That's not my point. The problem is that today there are even songs saying "Give me the food, I said give me the food /Give me no fruit if you love me" and campaigns saying "Real women have curves", which is as offensive to a skinny girl as it would be to a fat one to see a slogan like "Real women have a waist". It makes no sense that we're actually supporting fat people as a new stereotype. It would be reasonable to just put some overweight people in the ads, without telling people that if you're not that way, then you're not even a woman to start with.

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Why not show teenage girls that acne is as normal and acceptable as being "overweight".

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I'm sorry, but you're totally wrong. Being overweight is not normal and should not be lightly accepted. Why do you people continue to ignore that obesity is a health problem not a beauty issue?
That only proves that if today's stereotypes didn't support skinny people than obesity would even be much more severe than it is now!

I am a 47 year old single mother of a 15 year old daughter. The first time we saw the onslaught video together, we both noticed a slant toward body image as the culprit of media attack on women's self-esteem. My daughter and I thought this was odd since we both have acne. We discussed the damage to our self-esteem brought on by the beauty industry who show only women with FLAWLESS SKIN, and agreed that this portrayal was JUST AS DAMAGING to our self-image as skinny models are to our body image. We also discussed the beauty industry's attack on my wrinkles and sun damage. I told her I got those by playing side by side with my brothers on the beach instead of cowering under a beach umbrella reading books like my sister. I'm proud of my wrinkles and have long since come to terms with my pimples not defining me as ugly. My daughter still struggles with acne being her number one source of self-loathing. Thanks for the help Dove. Why not show teenage girls that acne is as normal and acceptable as being "overweight". (Acne medications, soap, potions, lasers, cyro-surgery(freezing), etc. are the same not-miracles as exercise,diets, pills, lipo, gastro, etc. are for women with weight issues. Believe me, I know,) P.S. I also wear glasses and refuse to put plastic on my eyeballs to be accepted as beautiful.

I lv the way Dove is doing their campaign. I think it's wonderful but I also agree with Isuzu. I still think the models they use are pretty skinny and in good shape. I wish they would try to have girls with a little more meat. Many girls aren't as skinny as that. I wish they would have a but more stomach to them. I mean, I think that having those models are okay but i'd really enjoy woman who are larger than the sized woman they are showing. Because as I look at those woman I still feel like they are so beautiful and I am so not. Don't get me wrong, I think Dove is really helping the world but I wish they'd use bigger woman than they already are. I know that they still have to get good sales and $ and having thin models has always been the way to do that. And I personally think that that might be some of the issue still. That they care about this issue but yet........they need to still sell their products. I personally think that if they had bigger models that that would get just as much sales becaue of all the woman who support all that. And so many woman do.

The Onslaught video brings to light what has been talked about for many generations in Family and Consumer Sciences Education. The history of the profession was based on bringing information to the consumer that is non-biased and give facts about how a product works, to assist in making an informed decision about what is needed for purchase for a family or business.
I love the message this video brings to light. Breaking away from the thought that you are not of value because of the ability to purchase beauty, to "fit" into someones perception of beauty or to move away from the notion of women as objects of beauty and adornment only, not of substance, is a great movement.

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We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
Author: Margaret Atwood

I think you are right, even though Dove is doing a great job with their campaign promoting more realistic image of women, the ones who show in their commercials are not even the average, they are still good looking and in good shape.

I liked the film. I think that it's ridiculous to make models look so thin. Which model would you like better, one who was thin and just standing there, not smiling or anything, or a model who wasn't as thin, but having fun with a big smile on her face? I would pick the second one! I think it is partly a smile that makes a person beautiful.

hi everyone! i am doing a paper on the campaign for real beuaty website and community with in it. i was wondering if anyone could give me information about the cite, if they think it has been effective, and if there is anything that you would change about it. myslef and my prof are the only one's that are going to be reading this paper and it is very informal! so if anyone could throw me some information that would be great, thank you!...and if you would rather email me than write on the discussion board let me know!!!