Beauty, and Pedro the Cranky Taco Guy

I only just saw the Dove ads a few weeks ago. Since then, I've read a few blog entries, articles and commentaries on them.

I saw the first ad in an Oprah magazine I scanned in line at the grocery store. I didn't realize it was an ad, and thought the magazine was running an article on body image. My heart actually lifted in my chest looking at the picture of these women posing in their underwear, I felt a flush of anticipation and a thrill of giddiness. I felt an electric spark of recognition, an expanding sensation of possibilities.

I suddenly coveted that magazine with a fierce, obsessive determination, but I couldn't spare the money so I put it back on the shelf with a promise that I'd hunt that edition down at a discount book store and buy it. And I did, I went looking and didn't find it, but it still lingered in my mind, that image. I needed to find it again, to examine those women's bodies in leisurely detail! It wasn't until a week or so later that I realized the picture I'd seen was part of an ad campaign and I could open any recent women's magazine and see the same ad, an ad that is advertising an anti-cellulite cream.

So what is it about these ads that made me react with such obsession? There are critics who call these women fat and unattractive; there are some who say the women are beautiful despite their larger thighs and softer flesh. I hate that qualification, that word: despite. How about, beautiful because of their substantive thighs and fleshier torsos? That's how I see it. I suppose these critical comments only confirm for me that beauty is all about perspective, that how we see beauty is entirely something that we can train our eyes to see or not see, according to our own preferences and psychology.

I don't see what these critics see. I think these photos are perfection.

My eyes see women who are sublime, healthy, vital, comfortable. I think I've trained my mind and eyes, over the years and on my own journey to accepting my body, to prefer this sort of female figure. It's hard for me to fathom that not everyone sees the same thing, that not everyone agrees these women are radiant and that their bodies are patently fabulous.

I know the ad campaign is complicated by the fact that women's bodies are nevertheless being used in the service of capitalism; I know there is some question of whether or not any airbrushing was done on the models; I know that an ad like this still has the power to make a woman size 14+ feel inadequate; I know that people will continue to define their own versions of beauty regardless of this one ad campaign.

And yet, I'm thrilled at this small blip on the radar screen of popular culture because it may force some people to think about how and why beauty has become defined and codified by a relatively small cabal of advertising execs and beauty industry employees. There really are so many different ways of seeing and appreciating.

Here's an analogy: some people may think a spacious, modern-style house is the height of housing nirvana. I think those houses are ugly as sin. I myself know a shabby, tiny, slightly seedy looking house would make me swoon with delight, because that's where I see beauty. And maybe I've just been trained to see that way, to carry my own values and upbringing into the way my eyes perceive a random collection of woods and nails and dirt.

The problem is that while people may privately have their own beauty ideals, the mainstream American media is far too often guilty of just presenting one ideal. In terms of physical beauty, they have one tall, thin ideal. It's not that mainstream models are not "real" -- of course they are real, living women who don't deserve to be hated -- it's that popular culture has the power to enforce and cultivate desire and to imply that anything outside the realms of that desirable body is shameful. Only showing one image, one body as desirable, over and over again in magazines and movies and television, can inspire a sense of invisibility and worthlessness in anyone who doesn't fit that ideal.

I really don't understand the big deal. What's so threatening or unusual or freakish about using all kinds of different models to sell products?

But the fact that I get fucking ecstatic and my heart skips a beat -- like I'm looking at some forbidden, taboo pleasure -- when I see an ad like this, surely is indicative of how sweet and rare it is to see anything that strays, even momentarily and not very radically, from the standard ideal.
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A few entries back I mentioned a day where I was struggling with a pervasive sense of anger.

Sadly, I haven't been able to shake it, along with a nasty case of dissatisfaction. I may well be on my way to bitterness, soon, and after that it's just a long, slow descent into recriminations, defensiveness, fatalism and a victim mentality. Also, wearing all black and slouching.

It's still little things that are bothering me. Like a diversity workshop for my job, where the trainer, with great use of dramatic pauses, announced that Leonardo DaVinci and Michelangelo were G-A-Y, obviously expected this to blow our minds and expand our consciousness. Or the mass of my female friends who suddenly are getting engaged or swept off their feet. Or the fact that my dishes never ever clean themselves, the bastards.

I saw this advertisement on the side of a building yesterday, and it summarizes exactly how I feel: cranky and absurd.

This anger must be trying to tell me something. I think the anger is a sign that I care really, really strongly about some things. You know, I'm not a person who believes in the pursuit of and inalienable right to the elusive "happy". I don't think such an end goal exists. And yet, I have this vast well of wants, of imagined destinies. In fact, I'm slightly horrified by my own wants, my insatiable desire sometimes to just go out and ravish the world, devour it -- it's unseemly, this emotional appetite.

Today I was trolling the Internet for celebrity gossip and was reading rather cursorily about Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt. She was quoted as saying that the break-up of their marriage wasn't due to a disagreement over children, but that she wants and will have children. That she will have "it all".

Something about that perspective made me want to crouch beside the Jennifer Aniston in my mind and say to her "Stop it. Stop wanting it all. I can't have it, and neither can you. Just stop deluding yourself."

Part of what I've been feeling is isolated, bereft, even when surrounded by people. Like I'm a transparent overlay floating over a scene, part of it but not touching. Like I'm the outer layer of a two-paned window, or of a thermos, or an airplane hull -- the hard shell that's separated from its mate by a vacuum of air, removed from the warmer things closer to the center.
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Because this is, supposedly, a fitness blog, here's a rundown of my physical pursuits in the past few weeks:

Running: infrequent, but still hanging in there
Swimming: a few times a week, a fair mixture of laps and lazing around on my back
Dancing: some salsa classes where my two left feet are in obnoxious rare form
Roller skating: a sally to check out the local roller-derby girls, wherein I discovered that the roller rink is the perfect place to upgrade my acquaintance with Top 40 hits
Biking: a lovely 10-mile ride at dusk
Walking: pounding the pavement with NPR as my faithful companion