Melissa is another to write to Lovable to complain about its current Jennifer Hawkins ad campaign. What she has written is so important that I’m reprinting it from the Collective Shout website, where she posted her letter yesterday. How much more evidence does Lovable need that its current campaign is harmful and its claims to want to change the cultural on body image just don’t stand up?
10 Responses
There are just so many reasons to boycott Lovable!
As if “G-rated” soft porn and hypocrisy weren’t enough, it is also clear to me, from letters like Melissa’s, that Lovable don’t actually care about women and girls who genuinely struggle with body image.
Did they consult someone like Melissa on this ad campaign? Did they ask the Butterfly Foundation for advice on how to promote a healthy body image? Obviously not.
My challenge to Lovable: rather than just giving money to charity, for the sake of appearances, take real action by employing someone from The Butterfly Foundation to be your body image consultant. Now that would be a useful and more honest partnership!
As much as I don’t want to shoot them down because they do some AMAZING work, it has to be asked, where are Butterfly on this? How was this partnership, with an Ad campaign like this, ever approved in the first place? How they can continue to support it, given the overwhelmingly negative feedback, puzzles me just as much.
I was involved in a small fund-raising event for Butterfly last year. Part of the promotion of the event, included an Avant card campaign. As it was displaying the Butterfly logo, the images chosen for the cards were carefully scrutinised with several rejected because they may have been interpreted as mildly sexual. They were in my view, artistic shots light years away from the Jen Hawkins images.
However, we were understanding of the need to protect the Butterfly ‘brand’, and a positive, artistic image was chosen which all were happy with.
That experience, leaves me more confused than ever as to how The Butterfly Foundation agreed to partner with Loveable; and further more, how they continue to support the Loveable partnership in the face of the recent criticism.
Melinda, thank you a million times from the bottom of my heart for making me realise that I am not alone in my absolute DISGUST with The Butterfly Foundation’s choice of partner!
I was at their Chrysallis ball earlier this year to support my best friend who is struggling with an eating disorder and both of our jaws literally dropped when we arrived to find that the men at the ball could “win a date” with supermodel Jennifer Hawkins! W.T.F.
So here my friend is, after years of therapy, trying to overcome cultural messaging that tells her she is nothing if she is not “thin hot sexy” as you put it, and yet here is an eating disorders charity GLORIFYING her for being beautiful.
I wonder how many fathers, boyfriends, husbands, and so forth put in a bid. This is an absolute disgrace. If Lovable are serious about challenging beauty norms, then why on earth did they choose someone who exemplifies the “ideal” of our time? and why on earth is The Butterfly Foundation partnering with them? This is a case of just wanting publicity and power and fame.
I will never support Lovable or The Butterfly Foundation again!
I work with teens every week and I would love a representative of Loveable to spend a day or 2 with my girls and then tell me that images do not erode their self worth!
There are any number of female role models, sportwomen or business women that Loveable could have used as their ‘body’ that would “represent happy, healthy and realistic body images”. Realistic women that are an inspiration rather than an unreacheable dream for our girls!
Thank you Melissa for having the courage to tell the truth!
Don’t you just love it when people try to reduce any critical comment to jealousy? I am not jealous of Jennifer Hawkins at all. She is a lovely-looking girl and good luck to her. But she is also abnormally thin (as the vast majority of models are) and abnormally tall. How exactly is she supposed to be ‘inspirational’ (an arguement for using thin models that I have heard used several times by industry reps)? Even if I were able to starve myself into some semblance of her thinness (which I am not able to do, nor interested in doing) nothing I do is going to suddenly make me one and a half times my current height. Nor is it going to supply me with an ever-present hair and makeup team and an airbrusher.
More to the point, why should I want it to? This is really the point here; the constant message that in order to be loveable I must conform to an unrealistic, unattainable, undesirable (from a health standpoint), arbitrary standard of beauty which has nothing to do with what most women look like. This is what causes the damage. It’s not the existence of models or even pictures of them, it’s the notion that this is a standard to which women are being held. It’s the overwhelming story that it doesn’t matter who you are, what you like, what you think, how you feel or what you do, if you are a woman, the only thing that matters is the way you look and that if you don’t measure up in that department, you are a waste of space. And, you must, of course, be jealous of the 0.3% (or whatever) of the female population that naturally looks that way and you should immediately dedicate yourself to spending inordinate amounts of time, money and self-abuse in trying to emulate them.
Then there is the blatant sexual nature of these shots. Loveable is advertising everyday underwear. Pretty everyday underwear, but not sultry, titillating come-hither stuff. But you’d never know it from the photos they have chosen to take. They have deliberately sexualised what should be a comfortable part of life. Again, the message is loud and clear, that even when putting her bra on, a woman should be thinking about what she looks like and making sure she measures up to the male gaze. A hyper-critical, advertising-created male gaze, which has precious little to do with real men, or at least never used to, until some of them were influenced by the increasing pornification of our society to think that satisfying this hyper-critical gaze is a woman’s job. Not to be an attractive, dignified, retiring, larger-than-life, charming, sweet, gorgeous, cranky, quirky, irascible, glamourous, shy, bookish, loud, sporty, smart, leggy, opinionated, petite, cuddly, Rubenesque, statuesque, zaftig, pixieish, feisty, clever, lovely, kind, gregarious, funky, creative, unique, individual woman, but a collection of bits to be criticised.
Even if they did want Jennifer Hawkins to model this underwear, why couldn’t she have been brushing her teeth, or putting her make-up on, or blow-drying her hair, or looking for the other sock, or flossing the fruit-toast out of her teeth, or having a cup of tea or reading the paper, or holding a baby, or brushing a child’s hair, or any of the things that women actually do in their underwear? While her shape would still be an issue to the vulnerable, it would at least make this story about women and less thinly disguised soft porn, designed to make women feel inadequate – because we all know that happy, satisfied women, who don’t feel there is anything wrong with them don’t make as good customers.
Here’s a tip, loveable. Women are going to need bras just as often whether they like themselves or not. In fact, women who like themselves are more likely to treat themselves well and will probably buy new underwear more often than women who people like you have conditioned to think they look terrible with their clothes off. Try treating women like people with brains and feelings. Try meaning what you say, instead of treating organisations like the Butterfly Foundation as a cynical exercise in buying good corporate citizenship. It will be better for your bottom line. I would say that it would also be better for your hearts and minds and ability to sleep at night, but about that, you don’t seem to care. think about it.
BTW, please feel free, anyone else, to add to the list of female characteristics that I came up with. I have already thought of a few more: go-getting, driven, organised, fluffy, motherly, disciplined… The list goes on! And yes, I included some that are about appearance, because I believe that our natural shape and size is a part of who we are that we should be able to own as part of us like all the other parts, neither good nor bad in itself, but part of the fabulous uniqueness that is us. It is when we allow it to be separated from us as a defining factor to be used to browbeat us that it becomes a problem.
Josie, I just read your comment and am horrified at how distorted it is! I too was at that Chrysallis Ball, also supporting a sufferer. If you’d read the program properly you’d have seen it was ‘Lunch with Jen’ not ‘a date’ and you would have noticed that many of the people bidding for it in the live auction were women! I also remember that the winning bidder was a woman and her husband and i’ve since heard she took her daughters and had a lovely lunch with Jen. If Jen wanted to be kind hearted enough to help a charity by auctioning off lunch with her, why are you knocking her!
And you want to tell me that you’re not ‘Jen bashing’!!
I can’t believe how many self righteous comments have been made here – just because Jen is a natural beauty should not mean that she is open fodder for constant criticism. Tall Poppy Syndrome at it’s worst!
Anne, I’m not sure what you mean by Jen-bashing and self-righteous comments – at least in this set of comments. I agree that no-one should be criticised for the way they look and I, for one, don’t have a problem with Jennifer Hawkin’s looks. I think she’s lovely. And she is just as much a ‘real woman’ as bigger and/or shorter women and I agree that this should not be about her personally, when she could be said to be just doing her job, or being charitable. But she, or any model with her proportions, is an odd choice for a company claiming to be blazing a trail for body acceptance and that seems to be the issue here.
Although if we are talking about constant criticism, the implicit and explicit criticism of celebrities who dare to look other than picture perfect (by the skewed standards of our time) is arguably much worse, much more widespread and more constant than the criticism Ms Hawkins is copping for being in this campaign.
Anne…you’ve missed the point! The criticism is not about Jennifer Hawkins ‘beauty’ natural or not. The ‘tall poppy’ syndrome which you claim this to be is just another version of ‘you’re jealous of Jen!!’
For an eating disorders charity, to use someone that is known solely for her ‘hot body,’ her ‘natural beauty’ which conveniently falls within the narrow definition of ‘beauty’ portrayed in women’s gossip magazines and men’s porno magazines, is odd. Actually odd is an understatement.
If someone (Anne?) could please address these criticism and concerns, or at least acknowledge them would be much more helpful than simply re-stating how ‘beautiful’ Jen Hawkins is, over and over again.
a) many girls suffering from eating disorders use images of Jen (or back in my day, I used Elle McPherson) to fuel their eating disorders. Why is the Butterfly Foundation associating with such images?
b) Jennifer Hawkins is revered for her ‘hot body,’ she is a former Miss Universe. For the Butterfly Foundation to associate with a model, a former Miss Universe who regularly gets her kit off for men’s mags, what does that say to those the Butterfly Foundation is trying to help?
c) If even the Butterfly Foundation chooses to uphold Jennifer as a positive role model for body image, (and we’re constantly told how ‘healthy’ Jen is) what hope is there for sufferers of eating disorders?
d) Why won’t the Butterfly Foundation choose a spokesperson/role model who stands for something other than modelling/bodies/beauty? ie. A successful woman, who doesn’t necessarily fit the beauty ideal AND doesn’t care if she does.
Sorry, but I’ve no respect for Butterfly. (who still remain silent on this issue, not addressing the concerns at all) I remember being young once, hungry and dangerously thin, suffering dizzy spells. For an eating disorders charity to promote the very things that caused this problem for me, is an insult and actually, it’s very depressing.