'Stop the Beauty Madness' Campaign Fails to Actually Stop Anything

By Lauren Young on July 10, 2014

Photo Via stopthebeautymadness.com

Body positivity seems to have a hard time thriving in the media, with thin actresses claiming they’re fat and how loving your body is based upon the opinions of others as opposed to yourself.

The newest body positivity campaign, “Stop the Beauty Madness” campaign, that proves to be about as effective as every Dove body wash commercial ever created, features images of women with beauty stereotypes running alongside them to showcase the negativity surrounded by their appearance and our society obsessed with it. As much as Lisa Meade, the Senior Blogger and Community Relations Director for “Stop The Beauty Madness,” wanted to illustrate  these stigmas in her beauty campaign, the entire project seems to fall flat by reusing trite stereotypes and providing vaguely empowering statements that seem to make no sense whatsoever.

While the intentions of this campaign appear to be wanting to end the said “beauty madness” that plagues our society, it seems that this project skims the surface of all the ugly and instead focuses on aspects often criticized in our culture without actually doing anything aside from typing out those stereotypes and calling it “inspiring.” One of the images featuring a barely overweight female in a dress asks the question “What’s wrong with this picture?” to which it then proceeds to answer it with “Absolutely nothing.” And while I agree with this answer, I mainly agree with the answer because I don’t understand what is actually wrong with the woman featured in the first place. The main problem that exists in the fat acceptance movement is that it fails to actually feature fat women, and instead features women that are slightly overweight and are still deemed aesthetically attractive by our fat shaming media. The point of body positivity is representation, and failing to represent women in a body positive campaign negates the purpose of the entire campaign. Fat is not a bad word, and it’s a major issue that exists within the body positivity movement that claims it is.

Photo Via stopthebeautymadness.com

Another frustrating faux body positive way this campaign fails is that it throws other women under the bus while attempting to make other women feel better. While muscular women are often portrayed as being homosexual or being manly, using a slur for lesbians in a so-called “positive” campaign backfires when it just further reinforces stereotypes and negative female images. The images that feature black females, old women, and a female with Down Syndrome seemed to fail in their effectiveness as they proved to be more passive in their message rather than aggressive. Because whitewashing and the invisible nature these particular women encounter in our society is terrible and inhumane, and the message this campaign should be making is to attack these immense problems rather than state them and move on.

Lastly, some of the images in this campaign just flat out make no sense. When referring to the image of the Asian girl wearing glasses and her “cuteness,” it doesn’t really make sense. What is this statement challenging when it calls Asian females “super smart and sort of cute”? Among all of the harmful stereotypes that surround Asian women and how they are constantly infantilized and treated as passive and submissive, how does this statement combat anything? In the image depicting a blonde with the caption, “The rules are simple: She who has the pretty gets the purse,” the picture seems to get nowhere with its bland and useless message and yet again, challenges nothing detrimental to our current beauty standards. The major issue with this campaign is that it wants to challenge stereotypes without getting its hands dirty, but maybe getting its hands dirty would have actually made this project into the effective campaign it set out to be.

Overall, this entire “empowerment” campaign is pretty awful and seems to drown in its own sea of dull stereotypes without attacking them. It just applies common stereotypes to images of women and does nothing to challenge them. While it attempts to combat the sexualization of women it instead sexualizes women and crams them into a “body positive” campaign to put down other females and reuse “empowering” statements that can be found in your typical mascara commercial. It was an attempt, but not a great one.

 

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