Catpaw - diary of an angry cat

Dove soap has a new video out - a frightening and illuminating short that is the perfect companion piece to their earlier work, evolution.

The new video is a blitz on the senses, travelling at high speed through all the artificial images of beauty, society is assaulted with on a daily basis. In many ways, the new film is much more hard hitting - more difficult to sit through because it brings the attack on the female body down to a level that is much more visceral than before. It shows, very clearly the impact it is having on young girls. Just go to http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com

Dove’s Campaign For Real Beauty is a great piece of marketing. I understand that. Dove is in the business of making money - don’t fool yourself about that. But they have opted for the high road - and I’m afraid, the long, difficult and lonely road. They are not stooping to using women who have been reshaped, bodies slashed apart until they resemble either young boys or little girls. Women who have starved themselves until they have less body fat than a famine victim.

It is beyond tragic that a portion of society pray at the alter of malnutrition and push that perverted image as the height of beauty. These people are the power brokers who use their power to reshape women into their own sick image. They are convinced their’s is the only legitimate vision of beauty, that any woman who dares have hips and breasts that are her own is fat, ugly, old, boring and more.

The fashion industry, this includes all the magazines that drool over emaciated actresses who have starved themselves into a nightmare of artificial perfection, have a lot to answer for. As do the marketing agencies that pander to this sick heroin/famine chic. Anything for a fast buck, screw the consequences, screw the public.

The industry is made up of dysfunctional people with a psychotic view of the female body. I am never sure if they are veering into paedophilia or not, but from the look at the images pushed onto us, I’d say .. yes, yes they are. Women have their bodies altered so they have huge deer like eyes, no breasts, thin hips, size 0. Sorry, but women were never meant to be this. Is this beauty before or after the photoshopers get their hands on the image of the wasted model and make her thinner, paler, sicker? These models are no longer women, they are clothes hangers, racks of bones. They are reshaped to look like children with oversized, oversexed lips and pouty looks. The fashion and advertising industry know they could never get away with using children like this without fear of a vicious backlash from the public so they carve up women’s bodies to suit their needs.

And size 0 is yet another fashion industry artifice to make the buyer believe they are fat and unfit to walk in the real world. Zero is the number for nil, nothing. Is this really a size? Who are they to dictate what a woman should look like?

The fashion industry is the worse purveyor of violent paedophilia dreams and the advertising agencies just lap it up. Take America’s Top Model for instance. Less Canadians get too smug, we have our own version of this so called talent show for the morbidly underweight. It is hard to avoid seeing ads for this show, they are everywhere, flashing at the speed of light across the tv screen. This is the peak of modeling?

What have we learned from this show - models strut down the catwalk wearing straight jackets. Yes mental illness as a fashion accessory. Its bad enough mental illness is used as the crime drama’s whipping boy for nearly every murder committed, now its being trotted out as a tool for models to display their dubious talents. The straight jacket is a symbol of pain and internal torture, not a cute little jacket to wear to dinner.

Speaking of pain, how about the episode where the models had to stage a crime scene and pose as the victim. Have these people lost all touch with reality? Pose women as murder victims and then rave about how truly beautiful they are? Beautiful victims of stabbings, shooting, decapitation, strangled, organs stolen, drowned, pushed off roof or down stairs…. Do I have to continue? Or do you get the message? There is no beauty in this level of violence. Somehow this group of borderline personalities have convinced, not just the women who participated, but the viewers that this episode was all about modelling and beauty. It was about violence, pain, humiliation, about smashing down any self respect the women may have had.

But should we expect anything different from this industry? Fashion and advertising execs are so busy congratulating each other on their mutual brilliance and their growing bank accounts, they don’t give a damn about the damage they are doing. Someone needs to shake them out of their dreamworld. They are receiving huge paydays for this emotional butchery. They need to crawl out from beneath the rocks they live and see the damage they are doing.

If you doubt the damage? Then why has the Dove Campaign touched such a deep nerve? Listen to the comments on the street - she’s so fat, oh she looks old, is she ever wrinkled, she’s let herself go grey, she is sagging. Then look at the contradiction being served up to young girls. Society wants them to be forever young, but hurry up and get sexy. When we allow pole dancing kits*** and thongs for 6 year olds to be sold, then as a society, we have abdicated our rights too willingly. This is a further pressure to sex up our children - don’t become a real woman, stay our plaything forever, size 0, pliant, dependant.

Women are not allowed to be human. Somehow during the last decade the right to be normal was airbrushed away, replaced by a vicious, psychopathic vision of starvation, humiliation and pain as beauty. And this image is being served up to your daughters in huge doses.

*** Daily Mail article about these kits

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