Dove’s new video targets that slippery issue of aging

It is at this age that you look in the mirror and recognize what you see.

You just don’t necessarily recognize it as yourself.

Aging means the face you’ve had for decades has become your mother’s face or thereabouts, it has settled and fallen and drifted such that in your lively, spirited, youthful place stands someone much older, much more grown up.

It takes some getting used to, to be sure. Middle age is like adolescence — the body and time take over despite your best efforts and, at this point, the best efforts of good doctors and dermatologists should they be called in to assist.

I have been contemplating this new old face lately, coming to terms as one does eventually, and it is in the context of this that I watched in spite of myself what is now famously called the Dove Sketches video which has gone viral on YouTube and has lit up Twitter and Facebook.

Let me confess up front, I loathed the original Dove “Real Beauty” campaign, begun in 2005, which attempted to show alternate forms of same, and involved pictures of makeup-free women with lines or freckles or imperfect noses. The inspiration for Dove’s brand positioning — that market research indicated only 4 per cent of women consider themselves beautiful. That’s the start of the problem. In fact, I’d suggest that the proportion of actually beautiful people on earth is about 4 per cent. The rest of us are interesting-looking, pretty, cute, plain, plainly attractive and about 4 per cent are actually irrefutably ugly on the outside.

We get our charm and attractiveness from the other things that go into personhood: character, in- terests, humour, sense of morality.

So by my reckoning, women in the market research were absolutely right, not tortured by selfdoubt. And who walks around thinking “I’m beautiful” anyway? How vain.

This new viral video is sonorous. A forensic artist asks women behind a screen to describe themselves, and then has others describe them, sketching both. Then each woman is shown the two sketches and lo and behold each woman has judged her face more harshly than others have.

Each woman’s wobbly self-esteem is laid bare in black charcoal and white paper. Tears are shed, admissions of having “more work to do on myself” are made. We all, viewers and subjects, are subliminally urged to vow to improve, if not our actual faces then certainly our confidence.

Seems very weighty for a bar of soap, but there you go.

I am reminded of the old Special KTV spots where men uttered words commonplace to women, such as “I have my mother’s thighs” or “do I look fat in this,” which showed us just how dumb that sounds, demonstrating I guess that not only does Special K cereal understand us but it has the answer — eat Special K and you can lose weight!

Never mind that the flakes are flakes like any other flakes and, actually, a bit more expensive than most. Wonderful that we women are asked to pay more for our breakfast cereal as we do our haircuts, with a side order of “important messaging.” How wonderful Special K is for pointing out just how silly we are!

The Dove campaign and the cereal one before it seem manipulative to me, and while women are said to lack self-esteem around their appearance I know few men who, upon close questioning, are thrilled with every bit about themselves. Women may be more insecure about just the one bit perhaps, but more broadly the men around me tend to fret over whether to have bread at lunch (carbs! Bad!), lift weights in the hopes of turning from Slim Jim to Arnie, and lament how life ripped them off by snatching six inches off what should have been their height. Men have dragged me into shops to judge whether the pants look good or the shirt is right or the jacket fits properly. All this would tend to indicate that they’re the teensiest bit insecure about their appearance, too. We all are. What men tend not to do is whine about it. Do I think I’m beautiful? No, not in the least. Do I mind much? Well, I suppose it might be fun to be gorgeous, but looking the way I do hasn’t stopped me from falling in love or being loved, befriended, hired or fired. Do I complain about the round face or lousy skin or droopy jowls? Sure do. So what? I don’t talk about baseball. It’s something to say and then, once said, doesn’t penetrate much deeper. Or, when it occasionally does, it stands for something else — he’d love me more if I were prettier, that’s what’s wrong, I’m not pretty! It’s so much easier an answer than accepting not everyone will love me. And guess what? Loads of men think only the good looking ones get the girl, too. What Dove is saying, and what the campaign is all about is that women are crippled by a flawed and negative self image. It’s point- ing out another “flaw.” It makes women sound pathetic, frankly, even if those were real tears about the different perceptions. It’s exploiting something big to sell something small and slippery. I would agree, as Sheryl Sandberg writes in her book Lean In, that women tend to underestimate their value in the workplace, tend not to be as gung-ho as they could be in taking a seat at the table. But this is about something much larger than looks. Looks, if that is what you are truly hung up on, are pretty shallow whether you are a man or a woman. My face is older and by my estimation uglier than it used to be. Big deal. I won’t be buying Dove to wash it with. Tracy Nesdoly’s column appears the first Saturday of each month. Tracy Nesdoly’s column appears the first Saturday of each month.