I don’t need Dove to inform me on the state of body confidence among women and girls. If I asked any of my female friends about when they first felt insecure about their body (note the when, not if), I can almost guarantee they’d likely say it was in their early teens. Maybe well before.
This is not just anecdotal: one recent Be Real survey showed that 79% of 11 to 16 year old girls say that how they look is important to them, and almost 60% admitted to worrying about their appearance.
Dove’s Super Bowl advert – which is set to the tune of ‘It’s A Hard Knock Life’ from Annie the musical, and shows girls facing knocks and tumbles as they play a variety of sports, only to then reveal the fact that 45% of girls quit sport before the age of 14 – should not have stopped me in my tracks for stating the bleeding obvious, but it did.
After the dire story told by the statistic, the film cuts to a girl scrutinising her body in front of a mirror at the swimming pool.
Luckily it ends on a more positive note, showing the girl putting her goggles on and cannonballing with her friends into the pool.
The information is nothing revolutionary. The real reason why the advert felt attention-grabbing is because its story is touchingly centred around selling body positivity in a way that goes beyond lip service to ask what the roots of low self-esteem are.
In advertising, that is far from the norm. In fact broadly the opposite is true.
A survey by the eating disorder charity Beat found that 96% of those with experience of an eating disorder encountered seeing adverts that could be harmful for their recovery – these were usually adverts that encouraged dieting or other weight loss fads. Of those, 80% reported seeing such adverts once a day and 40% saw these multiple times a day.
In November last year, the ASA said Dove received over 100 complaints over its ‘Cost of Beauty’ advert, which told the real life story of a woman who developed an eating disorder after seeing beauty content online.
Thankfully the ASA rejected the claims as the message remains important.
Sadly, we know that previous generations were bombarded with messages that said skinny = beautiful.
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Kate Moss, the icon of “heroin chic”, and the image of 90s cool Britannia, who has featured in countless adverts from perfume to Diet Coke, has admitted her regret for uttering the phrase “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” in a 2009 interview.
The admission came in 2018, almost ten years after the fact, by which point her quote had long been adopted by various pro-anorexia websites used by those suffering from eating disorders.
Refreshingly, the supermodel also admitted that she feels that the modelling industry has changed for the better. She would be right – there are countless more examples of diverse models in fashion advertising.
And yet, today we live in a world where dermatologists are concerned about girls as young as ten pushing their parents to buy them anti-ageing products after seeing influencers talking about the products on social media.
Adverts for plastic surgery in Turkey, albeit mercifully not usually targeted at girls under 17, exploit body insecurities with messages like “Mommy makeover” directed at mothers as their body changes.
The ASA has banned several of them but its surely hard to crack down on every misleading fad, especially in the age of Instagram.
The principle plastic surgery adverts adopt is not dissimilar to selling adult skincare to tweens as their interests, social groups and bodies begin to change and they start to face peer pressure – preying on insecurities in order to sell short fixes dressed up as hope and confidence.
Has anything changed since the last Dove Super Bowl ad?
The last time Dove advertised at the Super Bowl was 18 years ago in 2006. That was the same year the film version of The Devil Wears Prada came out and highlighted the fashion industry’s toxic approach to body image, with protagonist Andi, played by the slim Anne Hathaway, ridiculed for her size as she set about her career.
The advert Dove displayed at the Super Bowl that year showed images of girls with phrases like “hates her freckles”, “thinks she’s ugly”, “afraid she’s fat” to the tune of True Colours, in order to highlight its ‘Campaign For Real Beauty’ message.
I turned ten in 2006 and it is bleak to think we’re still here. But unfortunately we are, because while our obsession with being skinny might not be quite as all pervasive, young girls, and women young and old alike, are still as obsessed with wanting to change how they look.
Even if a few players like Dove take a positive approach to body image, too many advertisers haven’t and still don’t. It certainly shouldn’t still feel so refreshing to see it at the Super Bowl.
