Fleshy thighs on parade

I realize that as a woman who does not happen to be a supermodel, I’m supposed to appreciate and even feel empowered by Dove’s “Real Women for Beauty” ad campaign. You know the one I mean. On billboards and bus stops across the country, six “real” women pose in white bras and panties, their fleshy thighs, generous hips and presumably surgically unaltered breasts on spirited display.

Apparently this is more than just an ad campaign, it’s a political movement. “For too long, beauty has been defined by narrow, stifling stereotypes,” Dove’s website explains. “You’ve told us it’s time to change all that.”

I don’t remember telling Dove anything. But now that they mention it, I actually feel a little sick to my stomach.

Why? It could be the fact that the lead product of this campaign is, ahem, cellulite firming cream. With glorious, backhanded brilliance, Dove is sounding the trumpets of body acceptance while also selling woebegotten “real women” a cure for their realness.

“Firming the thighs of a size-two supermodel is no challenge,” reads the text on the website. “Real women have real bodies with real curves.”

But that’s not really what fazes me. After all, the crazy-making yin and yang of self-love and self-loathe is as old as advertising itself, and Dove is hardly the first company to sell solutions by inventing problems. If anything, this “realness” aesthetic, with its Lifetime Channel aura, should seem arcane and middlebrow.

Besides, the Machiavellian irony of employing vaguely feminist rhetoric to sell cellulite cream ought to be more bemusing than offensive. Same goes for the “million faces album” on the website, to which thousands of women have submitted their photos along with such phrases as “Beauty is being yourself” and “We are all goddesses and should never let anyone tell us otherwise.”

So why am I feeling so uneasy? Is it simply that we’re now shocked by any woman in the media who isn’t built like a silicon-enhanced greyhound? It’s tempting to say that the ads prove how shallow we’ve all become.

Here we are in 2005, in the same summer that the health manual “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” the very touchstone of hairy-arm-pitted, bra-burning exuberance, is celebrating its 30th anniversary, and women are clucking their tongues at models who don’t meet the preternatural standards of Tyra Banks and Kate Moss. Has the cultural preoccupation with “narrow, stifling stereotypes” become so ingrained that we’re repulsed by our own reflections?

Actually, I think not. In looking at these ads, what’s shocking about them has more to do with a curious invasion of privacy than with neuroses surrounding jiggly flesh. Seeing these women blown up to dozens of times their actual size above the thoroughfares of American cities is a bit like seeing an enormous picture of one’s own bedroom on display to anyone who drives by.

We love our bedrooms, we’re comfortable in them, there’s nowhere we’d rather spend our nights. And part of the reason for that is that they’re private spaces, sanctuaries whose access is limited only to ourselves and the ones we love. The bed may be unmade, clothes may be strewn across the floor, the thread count of the sheets might not meet current bourgeois standards, but we love this space because of the ineffable, unquantifiable ways that remind us we’re at home. These are qualities that don’t translate into photographs, let alone enormous billboards.

Naked bodies -- especially, it seems, those of women -- work much the same way. Although the visual impact cannot be underestimated, there are hundreds of other sensory expressions -- smells, textures, the sound of bare feet walking across the floor -- that simply cannot be represented in advertising. That is the reason we have professional models. They show us their bodies without invading our privacy or their own. An underwear model represents intimacy while at the same time protecting us from the rawness of actual intimacy. Her genius lies in her ability to be generic. And this is something Dove’s “real women” just can’t do.

That’s why so many of us react not with a rallying, “You go, girls!” but with a string of panicked questions. “Who are they?” we ask. “Do I look like that? Should I not look like that? Do I look better than them? Do I look worse?”

The first question can be answered on Dove’s website, which supplies profiles and journal entries of each of the models (where there’s “real” there’s always a journal). The other questions reveal an irony far greater than the fact that at the root of all this body acceptance lies a fear of cellulite. These amateur models remind us how much we need professional models, not for their jutting bones and flawless skin but for the way they throw themselves in front of traffic so that we don’t have to.

These ads are unnerving because intimacy can be unnerving. Public exposure cancels out intimacy all together, which means that what’s shocking about these ads has less to do with body size than the shock of seeing our bedrooms in the harsh midday light. We may gasp, but I suspect what we’re saying without realizing it is this: “Leave this work to the pros, girls. Real women have better things to do.”