Beauty and ads

                The statuesque supermodel  Erin O'Connor as a Modigliani beauty. Photo: Patrick Demarchelier/Harpers Bazaar Feb 2002.  reblogged from lovelyritablog

Beauty. It is something I have been mulling over ever since I went -twice in fact - to see the Defining Beauty exhibition which I discussed in an earlier post. In the intervening period, I travelled to Germany, celebrated another birthday, came back home and got some exciting news -all in good time. Then this morning the excellent post by Rosalind Jana on body image and my Facebook newsfeed with yet another comment by that tiresome woman that is Katie Hopkins on the Protein World ad, which is causing such a furore, acted as a prompt to write my post.

The controversial Protein World ad

Let's start with the ad. I am not bothered by it at all,  it is not worse than many others, it is just a stereotypical ad. The model is a young woman with a beautiful body, artfully made more beautiful by skilled photography, a so called 'beach body', meaning a fit body to exhibit with some pride at the beach, where most of us take our clothes off and often look at each other, judgmentally.  Yes, the ad is there to push products that help you lose weight, to achieve a 'beautiful body'. The petitioners for its removal claim that the ad is insulting to people who are not as fit as the model. So why do we all cry with delight  when we read 'inspirational' stories of people that have dropped several pounds of extra weight through engaging in healthy eating and exercise?  Just this morning I got another one of these stories in my Facebook news feed about a woman my age  who lost weight and got a style makeover and she was praised by a huge number of people, both men and women,  for having done so. Are we not being a tad hypocritical?
We all know that ads tend to present a stereotypical view of the world and one that has little to do with reality. It is good sometimes to step back and not take them seriously, we are giving far too much importance to them. Ads reify people.

The idealised body of a Neolithic goddess, Malta. Photo by me

When I see a beautiful body I am not insulted by it. I admire it. A beautiful body to me goes beyond  a two dimensional representation of it in a photograph, it is a real life body that  breathes, is coordinated, and moves with elegance.  I admire the body of athletes, both men and women, and I know that they treat their bodies as an instrument and tend to it, to get their maximum performance.

Dancers' bodies, Sleektechnique instructors Victoria Marr and Flik Swann, photo courtesy of Sleektechnique

I admire the body of dancers: tall or short, they are coordinated, sleek  and graceful and are able to make beautiful shapes with their bodies. When I look at my own body I am happy with it, it works well, but I always think of ways that can allow me to improve its performance: through the right nutrition, through exercising, through resting. I want my body to be healthy, well coordinated and I want to be able to move in a relaxed and graceful way. In this sense, my body to me is work in progress.

Gallery of the Parthenon, Acropolis Museum, Athens

Philosopher Roger Scruton has discussed beauty and highlighted the fact that the beauty of human beings is first and foremost embodied: 'the distinctive beauty of the human body derives from its nature as an embodiment. Its beauty is not the beauty of proportion. When we find human beauty represented in a statue such as the Apollo Belvedere or the Daphne of Bernini, what is represented is the beauty of a person- flesh animated by the individual soul and expressing individuality in all its parts' (p.62). He then goes on to say that despite the myriad of beauty fashions and diversity of 'embellishment', it is always 'the eyes, mouth and hands' that seem to have a 'universal appeal...for they are the features from which the soul of another shines on us and makes itself known" (p.62).
I am comfortable with this, it resonates with me. So if we take this position, the beautiful bodies we see in ads are soul-less - not the models themselves, but the way they are represented.
And maybe the art of the ancient Greeks still speaks to us - to me anyway -  because in the way they represented beauty, they did not just go by symmetry and proportion, which they invented and perfected, but also succeeded in injecting a sense of embodiment in their representation. It is an art with soul.

(The beautiful image of Erin O'Connor is not an ad, it is from an editorial inspired by the paintings of Amedeo Modigliani. I have always admired the intensity of O'Connor's expression and her great elegance)