It's a kind thought. It's a nice idea. But Christ people, can we lay off the over-praising of superficial qualities?
I find this pretty shallow, in and of itself. Spouting cliches left and right, yelling "Beauty comes from within! Women need to know this and stop judging themselves so hard!".
No. Stop, right there. Just stop. Women don't need to do shit. Society needs to stop telling women that their only worth is in the way they look to others. People need to stop with cheap campaigns that only promote stereotypical values in the disguise of 'helping' women, or teaching them something.
This video ticks a lot of the same boxes as the purity documentary The Virgin Daughters I saw during my final weeks of the thesis project (while mindlessly CAD-ing, it's really nice to have something educational on in the background), where the clearly very loving father of an adoring family blessed his family and children each week by saying kind things and lifting up their good points. He began praising every boy by telling them about the things they did or the way they treated others - their actions. He praised every girl in a similar way, after first telling her that she was beautiful, because this would lead her to 'not need to seek that sort of affirmation in men'. Although correct me if I'm wrong, praising superficial qualities first of all sounds like a sure way to make a girl conscious about the way she looks. "Honey, you're smart, but first of all you're beautiful, and that's what's important."
I know they're not trying actively to be dicks about it, but rather are trying to lift up women in this society that's kind of a dick by default towards women and a lot of other less privileged groups, and that's a good thought. What's bad is that the trait they're trying to 'boost awareness of' is the trait which is used to define the 'usefulness' of a woman (or other positive traits) - beauty. Now I might come across as a total hypocrite for this post, being a nerd for fashion and my last post literally being about beauty in the form of Vogue editorial spreads, but I have a firm belief that it's not all we should be praising the women around us for, or measuring them to.
Obviously compliments are nice. I like compliments, and I'm sure you do too. When someone tells me they think I'm pretty, or like my hair or whatever, I'm really happy about it. It's nice to hear that you look nice. But if that was all I ever heard from anyone, say if my family hadn't told me how smart or driven they thought I was, or teachers in school hadn't praised traits that weren't superficial, or if all I'd ever hear was "You're so pretty!", it would be all I would be able identify with. Beauty is the measuring stick of society, and those who don't conform to societal standards are considered less a part of us.
A week or so ago Hemingway showed me a Korean 'comedy', 200 pounds beauty. It's out there on Youtube, subbed and in full, if anyone's interested - I found the movie so disturbing that there's no way I'm linking it here. It's about overweight ghost-singer Ha-na, who sings for a slim, pretty lip-synching idol called Ammy. After Ammy humiliates Ha-na, Ha-na tries to commit suicide, only to change her mind and decide to get plastic surgery. Like a lot of plastic surgery. Like her entire self plastic surgery, in order to 'feel more confident' and 'be able to live'. Long story short, she changes everything about herself to make her more attractive to Sang-min, the handsome agent in charge of Ammy's career, and suddenly everything's going great for her - she gets out of speeding tickets and everything, her career takes off as a singer (under a false identity of course), and Sang-min falls for her. In the end (yes, I'm spoiling it now, so spoiler warning SPOILER WARNING!) she tearfully breaks down at her own concert, admitting to plastic surgery and to the horrendous earlier crimes of being overweight and unattractive, while the crowd chants "It's OK!".
...It's OK. We forgive you. Because you're beautiful now. I was sickened. I literally felt nauseous watching it. I know Korea has a pretty far-gone obsession with beauty, with rigid social standards as this American-Korean girl points out in her seriously depressing article, but when it hits you like that, like it did while watching that movie with someone who couldn't for the life of him understand why I was so upset - that's when it sinks in just how ingrained this behaviour and these attitudes are in our society.
If you want to take anything from this rant I've posted, it's this - watch Jean Kilbourne's Killing Us Softly.
While I haven't touched on advertizing in this rant, it just goes to show that the pattern is extremely widespread, and often manifests in ways we don't even think about. It's the systematic objectification of women, of which the beauty craze is a major part of, that holds so many of us back in ways we most of the time never even understand are actually there. We should notice. We should make an effort to notice, not just to keep saying 'beauty comes from within!' and think that we've done our job to help stop the epidemic of eating disorders and complete destruction of self-esteem among women.
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