Fat is an Advertising Issue

After reading the required text, I was able to conclude that many products in the world, specifically DOVE products, in a way can negatively affect the human race, females to be exact.  Susie Orbach was brought in to help the DOVE employees confront questions that were relative to their advertisings of the company’s product in order to make the campaign effective.  These questions included: how does this marketing help women’s and girls’ self-esteem, how could it harm them, how can they spread good feelings about women’s bodies rather than promoting insecurity, and how can they give women a chance to enter into a new, contented relationship with their bodies?

Products are advertised in certain ways, such as in magazines and showing “perfect” bodies, in order for the company to get more sales, but the outcome of doing so is the fact that it’s promoting females to have unhealthy practices.  Along with using products, females want to look like the DOVE models that are in the product advertisements.  As a result, other companies, such as Revlon, were following DOVE with advertising their products in the same way.

                The unhealthy practices of young females have spread from the US to other parts of the world.  After doing research with Anne Becker, the Harvard psychiatrist and anthropologist, Orbach found out that 3 years after the introduction of TV into Fiji, 11.9% of adolescent girls were puking into the toilet bowl trying to change their Fijian build into one that resembled the images shown through their TVs.  Orbach states that after looking at magazines, young females’ self-esteem lowers significantly, proving that the advertisements are negatively affecting the human race all over, making us unhealthy people.

                A different way to go about advertising DOVE’s products with a healthier and positive effect could be to produce bold, startling, appealing images of women in all their elegant variety that would dent the visual field, so that women could appreciate themselves for their differences and uniqueness.