I am a real woman, with a real woman’s body– not the body of an 11-year-old boy.
I am a Renaissance nude trapped in a Twiggy world.
I am Everywoman.
For the youngsters out there, Twiggy was the popular 1960s model who launched the anorexic waif look, which has been the scourge of curvy women for decades.
Slowly… very slowly… our society is becoming aware of the dangers of idealizing unrealistic female body traits (like the thigh gap, pictured here) and pushing media-defined “beauty” ideals on young girls. The social media focus on “Photoshop Fails” has helped some realize that the perfect body pictured in the Victoria’s Secret catalog was created by a dweeb with good computer skills– not by Mother Nature.
In a series of shocking but thought-provoking images, Stop the Beauty Madness is a new ad campaign that attacks the “impossible standards” of the ideal woman’s body, as well as attacking stereotypes of what or who women should be. (See some images after the jump). From #StopThe BeautyMadness…
Today, there is more than a choir singing out the truths of true beauty. There is a great groundswell and the numbers are rising daily. We are a new tribe, and we know it is time to take back the streets-OUR streets. We know that begins with lifting our self-esteem, our self-imposed standards of worth, and honoring our deepest truths about what it means to be “enough.”
We are not only working towards this change. We are witnessing this change. We women KNOW we are done with competing, done with comparing, and done with playing the ugly/beauty game. We are waking up from the crazy beauty hypnoses we have been under.
We are determined to Stop The Beauty Madness in our ourselves, our mothers, our sisters and our daughters.
Part of this includes calling out the ugly truths hidden in our culture and our own minds. That’s what this campaign is about. It’s about strong words that reveal the ideas that need to be seen for what they are. It is not always pretty to see what is hidden deep in our psyche (or even just slightly under the surface), but it is important to see it clearly so that we may call it out and change it.
Do we get cultural push back? Yes. Does that stop us? No.
Welcome to a new world – one we are creating right here and right now. In this new world, our beauty is defined by whole-self qualities, not eye-to-nose and bust-to-waist-to-hip ratios. In this world, we KNOW we are more than our appearance, our size and our shape. In this world, we are throwing off our role as sales-hypnotized consumers and getting on with the task of changing the world.
Now more than ever this world needs us to stop shrinking behind ideas that are too small for us.
So we are here in mass to disturb the peace in beautiful, powerful ways. We are here to create a new culture around beauty. We are here to save ourselves and our children from our own childish and destructive obsessions. We are here to stand tall, AS IS, and get on with our lives.
At Stop The Beauty Madness, we are here for you, me, and most of all… US. We hope you join us by sharing the ads, taking our eCourse and adding your own voice to the conversation.
More images here.
Check out this article: ‘Stop the Beauty Madness’ Brands Ads with Brutally Honest Messages on the Huffington Post.
I wish you were correct about women today getting beyond the radical images of beauty shown in our popular culture, but I fear such is not the case. As an example, one of the major manufacturers of women’s clothing has just come out with a size 000, and young women are falling over each other trying to fit into them.
I totally agree with you. Women’s awareness of body image manipulation by the fashion industry and the media has decreased since the early 1970s. Just look at the acceptance of ultra high heels.