find your own door

From my Annoying Things file: Dove's #ChooseBeautiful campaign.

I haven't watched the video. I'm not gonna, and I'm not gonna link it either.

It's easy enough to search out, if you're interested.

The constantly repeating post in my Twitter feed irks me enough. The whole "which door would you walk through" thing is somehow supposed to demonstrate that most women don't feel beautiful, because so many of them choose to go through the door labelled "average" rather than the one labelled "beautiful". And that this is tragic, in an obviously self-evident kind of way.

First - you can't know WHY the women chose the door they did.

Unless you posed well-worded questions

in a controlled environment,

identical for each participant.

And accounted for the possibility

that the women may or may not tell you the truth,

since you kinda manipulated them into the whole situation

in the first place.

Second - you can't know that you sampled a group of women that actually represents the general population. At best, you got a representative sample of women who went to the mall that day, in that city.

Unless you went to the effort of ensuring

a statistically-correct representative sample.

And I doubt that very much.

That's right.
I learned something in that statistics class.

Third - in this effort to somehow empower women, build them up, blah, blah, blah, it's STILL based on their physical looks.

And as someone else pointed out,

the intent is to get women to #ChooseDove,

not #ChooseBeautiful.

Sigh.

How about a door marked "curious"?

Or ... "ambitious"?

Or ... "happily content with who I am"?

Or ... "authentic"?

Or ... here's a crazy one ... "not defined by a beauty product"??!!!

Last night my mom asked me which door I would walk through. I thought about it for a minute, and then said, "Neither. I think I'd walk away. They don't get to force me to pick one of their two definitions of me, and then analyze my self-esteem from it."

Hey.

You know what door I'd walk through in a heartbeat?




The one attached to an old wardrobe, labelled "Narnia".

#findyourowndoor