In Susie Orbach’s “Fat is an advertising Issue,” she takes a negative point of view towards the imaging that the modern media puts on women, and the adverse effects of the pressure it puts on all the women, (old and young,) of the world. While I do think the essay’s heart is in the right place, I think the moral side of the argument is kind of distracted by some advertising agenda for Dove body care products.
The essay kicks off pretty hard with some pathos, trying to remind women of the way adverts and modern media images make them feel bad, and trying to get the men to understand the plight of our loved ones. One of the biggest ways it makes an emotional connection to the audience is by reminding them how this effects not just “their loved ones,” as a vague, all encompassing idea, but by specifying “their wives, mothers, lovers, sisters, and daughters.” This automatically conjures up the feelings we have for those people, and will inversely make us feel contempt for anyone or anything that would make them feel bad.
The piece doesn’t forget to take a subjective point of view either. Orbach gives us statistics of how women around the world have reacted when such images were immediately injected into their cultures, giving us the logos of the essay. The results aren’t pretty.
The kairos was a major part of Susie’s work. While images are nothing new, the concept of advertising has had a sudden jump in our culture lately. If you look, pretty much every flat surface outside is probably dominated by some company wishing to push their product on us, (and a good number of them have pretty women on them.) In fact, this recent issue is what caused Dove, (the company she’s working for,) to start the “Campaign for real beauty,” to get real women to feel less self conscious about their bodies.
The company, though, is where I think the main problem with this essay lies. While I do think that the double whammy of a published author and a credible company does establish good ethos, the credibility of the Dove company is used a bit too much, almost like the essay itself is advertising. Sure we get a good message about trying to feel more assured in ourselves and trying not to put pressure on women about their bodies, but when this message is regularly interrupted by the brand name “Dove,” it does cause me to question the motives of the article deep down. Is the article trying to put Dove on a pedestal by making all other beauty product advertisers look bad?
If so, this would in part undermine the point the article was trying to make in the first place. If the essay is making a seemingly anti-advertising stance, wouldn’t constantly reminding people where the reader that all this good will is brought to you by Dove be kind of hypocritical? I know that the purpose of the essay wasn’t JUST about advertising, it was about the negative feelings the images of perfection in advertising make women manipulate women make them feel bad. But by doing the OPPOSITE, and saying, “Despite what the ads say, you look GREAT! (Now go buy some Dove skin care soap,)” couldn’t it be argued that your doing the same thing, setting yourself up as a messiah of self image to deliver these poor women from the bonds of self-doubt brought to them by the other beauty care companies, therefore exploiting the same emotions, just in a different way? Because if you look at it that way, their really no different than Dove is no different than the other companies, their just taking the approach from a different angel.
