Society
What is a "real" woman, anyway?
Published 26 March 2007
How women get dressed up for an underwear advertising campaign
As a journalist, you receive a fair few emails each week which rattle you (usually messages that, had they been sent a decade or so ago, would have been scrawled in green ink on the back of a peeling postcard). Last week, though, I found myself irked by a perfectly polite missive from a marketing woman, and couldn't immediately figure out why. She was, after all, just flagging up the bra company, Bravissimo's new TV advertising campaign, inviting me to come along and meet the "real women" who star in it (the inverted commas are hers).
It was that particular phrase, "real women", that bothered me. The trend for using non-model women in ads became popular three years ago, when the Dove cosmetics company used women from a range of sizes to plug a new skin-firming cream. This stratagem was hugely successful, and so it wasn't surprising when other companies, such as Nike, followed suit.
Visually, this trend is great. The women featured in the Bravissimo ads - such as 43-year-old business travel consultant Junie Briscoe-Peaple - all look radiant, healthy, happy and attractive. Given that Bravissimo is a company for "big-boobed" women, it obviously makes sense to feature women in their advertising who fall into this category (Briscoe-Peaple is a 36G) rather than using a standard-sized model who might only just about fill a C-cup with some judicious padding.
Still, the widening colloquial use of the phrase "real women" bothers me. It's been a staple of fashion-speak for years, but it also pops up regularly now in gossip magazines, whenever a writer wants to praise an actress or singer for not conforming to some emaciated stereotype of what a woman should be. And, while it's designed to be positive, to praise someone for being curvaceous or muscular, it also feels divisive - after all, it only has any meaning if other women are seen as somehow less authentic.
So much of our culture, particularly when it comes to looks, still pits women against women. The "real woman" description pulls rank on those women who are naturally young and/or naturally thin, and says: you may be more obviously socially accepted than us, but, in fact, you're just a simulacrum of what you should be. You're not fleshy, you don't look all that fertile, and you don't actually seem like a proper woman at all. While you might fit the supermodel stereotype, the rest of us are better than you. We are "real".
This opens up yet another fault line in female-female relationships. Another side of this, of course, is the turgidly ongoing "size zero debate", in which commentators rail against the hyper-thinness of today's catwalk models. This is often framed as somehow feminist - people speaking out against a female "ideal" that involves women starving themselves to the point of emaciation - but its hysterical aspect rarely seems sisterly or supportive at all.
Given the recent deaths of a number of young models, including Luisel Ramos and Ana Carolina Reston, there is clearly a case to be made that the fashion industry's favouring of super-thin women is seriously unhealthy. The solution often suggested though (that, before every fashion show, models should be frogmarched on to scales, their Body Mass Index calculated, and packed straight off to a doctor if it's too low) seems infantilising in the extreme. Can you imagine this happening if a noticeably thin woman walked into any other workplace?
There is also a trend for fairly thin male models at the moment, but I can't imagine the same thing being suggested for them. Male models are allowed some subjectivity and ownership of their body. Female models, like women in general, are not. Their bodies, all women's bodies, are still most often seen as public property (which is something that almost certainly contributes to disordered eating).
This last point is emphasised by the fact that the "size zero debate" is hardly a debate at all, so much as an excuse to publish photos of terrific ally thin models for us to pore over and criticise. While commentators bemoan just how thin these women are (yes, as I said, this is a genuine problem), they also create the perfect excuse for these women to be objectified more than ever.
These are small things, perhaps, but they're all part of a culture which says that women's looks are still the most important things about us, and that in order to win the race we must fight tooth and nail to be seen as the most gorgeous and womanly of all. If that involves denigrating our contemporaries - pointing the finger at them and calling them too thin or too fat - so be it.
I like the look of Bravissimo's new ads, and, if we're to live in a world that's full of advertising (and, yep, we sure are), I'd love to see more campaigns like this, that use a really wide range of women. However, I think we'll have turned a corner when all this is second nature: when it never needs to be explained by a phrase such as "real women", and when none of us feels tempted to undermine each other. Let's face it, fat, thin, old, young, gorgeous or not so gorgeous: all women are equally real.
Kira Cochrane is Guardian women's editor
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