Dove Beauty Campaign Highlights Women's Extreme Loathing of Bodies

A new Dove campaign sheds light on a decades-long problem of women who loathe their bodies. Turns out most women spend every 15 minutes despising their bodiesand 72% of young girls feel tremendous pressure to conform to popular beauty standards. While these are illuminating findings, they don't exactly explain the impact of these daily and habitual beliefs on body image.

Dove tried to remedy this problem by recruiting 7 women from different race and ethnic backgrounds, as well as age and other factors. They then hired an FBI-trained forsenic artist to sketch the women based on how they would describe themselves. After the first drawing was complete, the FBI-trained forsenic artist would take their cue from another women who was asked to describe the same woman. The differences between the self-described image and the image described by another person were astonishingly different. The point of the exercise? To highlight the fact that you don't need a clinically diagnosed eating disorder to loathe your body.

Check out the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpaOjMXyJGk

Most women are taught to loathe and criticize their bodies from the time that they are old enough to understand body parts like hips, breasts and stomachs. Perhaps their is a fundamental problem between what we are teaching our girls to believe and think about their bodies and food. Research shows that eating disorders are caused by a combination of factors including depression, dieting behaviors, excessive weight concern, and a "loss of control of eating" (as scientistist refer to it). Maybe it's also time that we start to view obesity, anorexia, and other related eating disorders as a set of problems that derive for our neurotic views of our bodies and our starve and binge relationship with food. I applaud Dove for taking a step in the right direction to do just that.