#1 April 16th, 2013 10:12 AM

blissed

Member

Duv

You describe how you look to a forensic artist who can't see you. He then sketches you.
Then a stranger who has seen you describes you and the artist does a second sketch.

http://vimeo.com/64077961

My suspicions are that it's fake. If the artist didn't do negative self described portraits and nicer images of the stranger described portraits, then the whole exercise would have been valueless and they wouldn't have got paid by Dove.

Does anyone else agree or am I being too harsh. We're expected to count the artists financial subjectivity out of the result. To me it looks like the artist has employed some obvious characature exaggeration. A nice sentiment, deviously exploited. Anyway go out and buy some dove soap dove dove dove dove dove

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P.S. Why has everybody got to be beautiful, there's more to hotness than beauty, is beautiful the only value placed on great movies or art? To me hotness is just as diverse.

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Last edited by blissed (April 16th, 2013 10:19 AM)

viva

Member

Re: Duv

yeah a bit dove-y. I don't know. It seems like he wouldn't have matching hairlines on each of the sketches if he really hadn't seen the person. I kind of believe that he didn't see them and that this was how the experiment ran... I also believe he drew ugly, harsh people first, and then pretty, open people second, regardless of what the people said to him.

But something really effected me and made me tear up. The way the blonde woman said, when she found out her perception of herself was negatively skewed, "I have a lot of work to do."

I went to a women-only festival this weekend. It was amazing for lots of reasons. I went to a workshop, and one part of it was speaking to another person as if they were ourselves, and then that person repeated your words back to you. The process was flawed, the workshop facilitator not very good, but what I saw was woman after woman being so, so hard on herself. Sure some said, "I am loved, I accept love". But most said some variation of "I need to be more accepting, I need to be more nurturing, I need to be more giving, I have to love myself more, I HAVE TO BE LESS HARD ON MYSELF, I have to be better, I have to be stronger...."

It broke my heart. When will it be enough? When will we just let go of the pain and the work? We are failing because we're not beautiful, we are failing because we are beautiful (but don't believe we are).

We are failing all the time no matter what. That woman, seeing her face when she realized she was beautiful, there was no joy there. Only pain, the opening of great chasms, and a dispirited, "I have a lot of work to do."

Indeed, Blissed, why do we all have to be beautiful?

viva

Member

Re: Duv

I like this poem.

    1.
    I say, ‘I am fat.’
    He says ‘No, you are beautiful.’
    I wonder why I cannot be both.
    He kisses me
    hard.

    2.
    My college theater professor once told me
    that despite my talent,
    I would never be cast as a romantic lead.
    We do plays that involve singing animals
    and children with the ability to fly,
    but apparently no one
    has enough willing suspension of disbelief
    to go with anyone loving a fat girl.
    I daydream regularly
    about fucking my boyfriend vigorously on his front lawn.

    3.
    On the mornings I do not feel pretty,
    while he is still asleep,
    I sit on the floor and check the pockets of his skinny jeans for motive,
    for a punchline,
    for other girls’ phone numbers.

    4.
    When we hold hands in public,
    I wonder if he notices the looks —
    like he is handling a parade balloon on a crowded sidewalk;
    if he notices that my hands are now made of rope.

    5.
    Dear Cosmo: Fuck you.
    I will not take sex tips from you
    on how to please a man you think I do not deserve.

    6.
    He tells me he loves me with the lights on.

    7.
    I can cup his hip bone in my hand,
    feel his ribs without pressing very hard at all.
    He does not believe me when I tell him he is beautiful.
    Sometimes I fear the day he does will be the day he leaves.

    8.
    The cute hipster girl at the coffee shop
    assumes we are just friends
    and flirts over the counter.
    I spend the next two weeks
    mentally replacing myself with her
    in all of our photographs.
    When I admit this to him
    we spend the evening taking new photos together.
    He will not let me delete a single one of them.

    9.
    The phrase “Big girls need love too” can die in a fire.
    Fucking me does not require an asterisk.
    Loving me is not a fetish.
    Finding me beautiful is not a novelty.
    I am not a fucking novelty.

    10.
    I say, ‘I am fat.’
    He says, ‘No. You are so much more’,
    and kisses me
    hard.

blissed

Member

Re: Duv

That's good! especially no. 5.

I was thinking, calling someone fat shouldn't be an insult. But calling someone fat is very clumsy language. Everyone has fat. Using the word that way makes all fat bad. If it was bad we wouldn't all have it. 

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Last edited by blissed (April 17th, 2013 05:57 AM)

Laney

Administrator

Re: Duv

That's a beautiful poem

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Laney

Administrator

Re: Duv

A response from Scientific American: You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think

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blissed

Member

Re: Duv

The writer of the article has missed the point and so have the scientists they're writing about. They're treating more attractive and less attractive as absolute measurable things when they're subjective. It's the nature of that subjectivity that the Dove film was addressing.

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Laney

Administrator

Re: Duv

Though it is possible for subjective constructs such as self-perception to be scientifically measured, there will always be a huge number of extraneous variables affecting the results. While I'm more inclined to think they were better controlled in the studies cited by Scientific American than in the Dove commercial (which was just that, a commercial), that's not really the big issue here.

Whether in reality we're more attractive or less attractive than we think, the point is that the majority of people worry about how attractive they are and it affects other aspects of their lives. I guess that to some extent it's part our nature to be insecure and we will never be able to achieve a utopia where everyone is happy all the time. But it would be better if as a society we could foster self-acceptance so we could spend our time and energy on more constructive, less egocentric things than fretting about our appearance.

Last edited by Laney (May 23rd, 2013 10:49 AM)

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Editor/Admin/Forum queen

viva

Member

Re: Duv

I love self-enhancement bias! It makes me feel so good about myself!

blissed

Member

Re: Duv

Self enhancement bias = Self confidence

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Last edited by blissed (May 23rd, 2013 11:01 PM)

viva

Member

Re: Duv

ha, right on!