Project #ShowUs gives you the power to change the way the media portrays women

Dove, Girlgaze and Getty Images' ambitious new campaign gives real women the chance to challenge beauty stereotypes, one stock photo at a time

14 April 2019 - 00:00 By and aspasia karras

In the way of Instagram, the algorithm has recently decided that I must be fascinated by "before and after" pictures posted by millions of women - for it always is women - documenting their "body journeys".
I confess to diving headlong into this particular rabbit hole once it presented itself and really setting off the algorithm so that now I am constantly inundated by these stories.
In this particular region of Instagram there is a common language expressed in a raft of hashtags such as #bodypositivity, #transformationtuesday and #fattofit. Each post is written in a first-person confessional format with a suitably upbeat conclusion, and each person's #journey has all the hallmarks of obsessive navel-gazing (quite literally) and a self-help recovery textbook.
I am fascinated because writ large in these personal stories of triumph over their fallible human bodies is every woman's battle with the so-called ideals of beauty, youth and social cachet.
The story that these Instagram feeds tell is the classic redemptive fairy tale that has driven the narrative about women and their role in society since these sorts of stories began to be told.Cinderella has nothing on these battle-worn women. The lowly, unseen and unsung prototype relegated to the kitchen, slaving away unloved and unappreciated, is rescued and transformed by magic and, in this instance, #hardwork so that her true beauty can emerge like a butterfly from the chrysalis and society can finally value her. She becomes a princess with all the trappings of princessdom - but primarily the love and adulation of a prince - and, by extension, society at large.The prototype of this "princess bride" is freighted with the baggage of millennia. You don't need me to tell you that it is a West European gaze that has informed the imagery that goes hand in hand with this idealised model of womanhood.As Gulliver on his travels explained when viewing a gigantic Brobdingnagian breast up close and personal: "This made me reflect upon the fair skins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen but through a magnifying glass ..."
To be fair, they have also not been represented in the artefacts of this culture - the many paintings and sculptures celebrating female beauty in museums and churches. Anything that strays from the ideal of beauty was "otherised" and considered ugly, so old women in particular were represented in gruesome detail as something to fear - crones closely related to witches, another category of women who was by nature dangerous and morally corrupt, until modernism challenged this dichotomy.
The aesthetic battle for a woman to be divorced from her physical appearance when making judgments about her worth, never mind her moral worth, has been central to feminist theory for decades, but it is only in the past few years that these ideas about representation are starting to take hold in popular culture.
Now women's media, the fashion industry, and the television and film industry are all being held to account. How many women of colour and non-binary gender are being reflected back at a society that is diverse and under-represented is a question on every editor's mind. They ignore these imperatives at their peril.
In a way this debate is moot. People moved on themselves and started representing their "real selves" and their "real beauty" in their own social feeds as soon as the word "selfie" found its place in our lexicon. The Kardashians in one stroke of blanket social media coverage altered the so-called ideals, morphing the female body into their new Kardashian model of hyper-sexualised hips and lips.
Is it real? Not really, since they spend hours in hair and makeup and have a full team of photographers and lighting experts creating these candid shots. But without a doubt, the ideal that used to sell product and ideology and launch a thousand ships has been briskly altered by a particular set of women bypassing the traditional media.
Which is why the latest Dove campaign, #ShowUs, is probably smarter than you think. It is a collaborative drive with Girlgaze and Getty Images to create a trove of stock imagery generated by women themselves in all their spectacular diversity. The aim is for traditional media to use these "real" images to diversify their content and reflect a multiplicity of women back at themselves. 
It is a circular argument that has a positive logic - the same logic Gulliver used. Cultural proximity will alter the ideals of beauty if you change the prism through which you view them.
• To find out more about project #ShowUs, visit dove.com..

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