#15- Victoria's Secret Hate.. whoops, I meant Love... Your Body campaign

            After watching the documentary “Miss Representation”, I immediately thought of the Victoria’s Secret “Love your body” campaign.

The idea of this campaign can be interpreted in so many different ways. One way is to say that Victoria’s Secret wants you to love your body just the way it is. However, when you look at the models on the ad, this just doesn’t seem like a realistic goal. The models placed in this ad are tall and really scarily skinny. Their bodies have been photo-shopped and airbrushed to “perfection.”

Another way to interpret this ad, which is more realistic to the picture they have, is by saying that when you look like the models you will love your body, and that you can look like the models by buying Victoria’s Secret products. This isn’t true. You can’t look like an airbrushed and photo-shopped model just by wearing a certain product.

This ad severely objectifies women. This can be seen in the smaller black text. It reads “Meet our newest bodies.” Not “meet our newest angels,” (Victoria’s Secret models are called angels) or something similar. No. They had to call these women “bodies.” By calling them bodies, they are treated as something unimportant and replaceable. They are not strong or independent women. They are used only for their looks, and when they don’t look the right way, they will be thrown out and new “bodies” will be found. This is terrible. Women are not just some object that you can throw out when they get to old.

This ad is also very guilty of treating women as sexual objects. This problem has much of the same logic found in the above argument. Look at how these women are dressed. They were wearing close to nothing and their bodies are extremely retouched before they are allowed on the ad. If one were to compare the before retouching and after retouching, the differences would be drastic. These women are not realistic and they shouldn’t be treating as something that is only for looking at. These women have thoughts and feelings just as much as anyone else and this advertisement treats them as if they are just to be looked at.

Despite all of my objections to this advertisement, it is effective. This advertisement would make any woman in the world feel insecure about their bodies, which just creates an endless cycle of objectification, sexual and otherwise. These women want to believe that the product will make them look like the women in the ad, but that just isn’t true. No one can look like the women who are artificially created. However, the women are still willing to try and will use Victoria’s Secret products to try and obtain the society constructed view of beauty.