Dove, the soap and moisturizer brand name, has created a tempest in a teapot with their latest ad campaign: "Real women have real curves." It's a series of billboards, originally displayed only in England and just now reaching the USA. Here's the photograph behind the "offending" billboard image:

The advertising hook is that, to lightly paraphrase a couple of the ads that go with it, it doesn't take rocket science to make a woman who has a dress size of 2 look like a fashion model, but it takes Dove to make women in the dress size 10 to 14 range look this good. That's not exactly what they say at the Dove-sponsored "Campaign for Real Beauty" web page. Its message, of course, is that (nearly) all women are beautiful just the way that they are. But let's be honest, they're selling beauty products. However, self-esteem is not the controversial issue here.

The controversy here is that journalists have had only a little trouble scraping out from underneath various slime-covered rocks various people, both "experts" and supposedly randomly chosen public, who are offended by seeing these women in their underwear. No, not because of the tighty-whitey underwear, but because they claim to be grossed out by being made to see women "that fat" in their underwear. See, for example, this article by Chicago Sun-Times staff reporter Maureen Jenkins, "Dove ad campaign a real knockout," who wrote:

"One word comes to mind when I see those Dove ads -- disturbing. ... Really, the only time I want to see a thigh that big is in a bucket with bread crumbs on it (rim shot here). ... I just prefer that "real people" never pose in ads -- especially not in their underwear. ... See, ads should be about the beautiful people. They should include the unrealistic, the ideal or the unattainable look for which so many people strive. That's why models make so much money."

Let me see if I'm reading this right. Basically, 60 or 70 years of advertising have all been about a lie, one told so often it's now part of the culture: "Buy this product and you'll get (or be) this babe." So apparently, what's offensive about this ad, is that it lowers the standard to, "Buy (whatever product) and this is all the more babe you can hope to get (or be)"?

Let me make my own feelings clear on this subject. At least one of those women is actually too thin for me to find her automatically sexually (let alone romantically) attractive. The sexiest women on the planet, to me, are the women who look a lot like the other 5. Let me define my term, here. To me, when I describe a woman's appearance as sexually attractive, what I mean is that it is so attractive to me that she doesn't need any other virtues to be sexy. As the punchline to the famous joke goes, "I'd buy the crackers." You can go a long way out from that, oh, roughly dress size 10 to 14 range and still be sexy to me -- all you have to have is one more thing going for you, especially if it's at least one of the three traits I find sexiest in a woman: wit, style, and competence in at least one profession, field, or craft, or if she and I have at least one interest in common. The farther above or below that range a woman gets, the more things she has to have going for her for me to find her sexy on first impression.

What's wrong with being skinnier than that? Well, if you're an adult woman, someone say 20 or above, there aren't very many reasons why you would be really skinny. You might have a metabolic disorder, one that causes you to burn calories at a tremendous rate just sitting still. I wouldn't hold that against you. But I don't assume that's what's going on when I see a woman who is, to pick the example of the skinniest woman I've ever dated, a size 3. (I was young and stupid. But then, so was she.) Or you might be really obsessed with physical sports, a really active person ... in which case you and I probably have so little in common that my rule about "not dating outside my species" kicks in. But all of the rest of the reasons to be that thin are even worse. They mean that you are so obsessed with staying thin that you're willing to do whatever it takes: deny yourself all pleasure, take up anorexia and/or bulimia, and/or push yourself through constant grueling workouts because you think you have so little going for you that the only way you can get a desirable man is to be a size 5, or worse, a size 0. When I see a woman who's skinnier than a size 10 who stays that way by putting herself through all manner of unpleasantness, I assume she probably thinks she has nothing else to offer ... and I default to taking her word for it.

If these ads are controversial for any reason, it ought to be this one: that's not what real women look like, either. The web site very carefully doesn't give the models' heights, weights, measurements, body mass indices, or dress sizes. However, when Stacy Nadeau (far right) was being interviewed on Countdown with Keith Olbermann the other night, it was mentioned that she's a size 10. The average American woman, like Marilyn Monroe at the height of her career, is a size 12. If these six women are at (or worse, above) your upper limit for attractive women, and if we assume a bell curve for the statistical distribution of body shape, then you just ruled out somewhere around 2/3 of the women in your species. And if so, I'm very sad for you. And I'm even more sad for the women who get this attitude from you, for whom you're the straw that breaks the camel's back and persuades them. People like you are ruining the species.