If you have children — or even if you don’t have children, but you sense that something’s not quite right with the self-image and body-image messages the kids are being bombarded with these days — have a look at this powerful short video.

My web developer friend Guilherme (Zo’C) brought this video to our attention, and it’s really heartening to see the enlightened male viewpoint here and in his previous post, Dove Evolution, both about the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty.

Actually, you can be too thin

Meanwhile, in the news…

The Montreal Gazette just yesterday ran a story with that headline — Actually, you can be too thin — sparked by the organizers of this year’s Montreal Fashion Week who “have scored one small point for sanity in Canada’s fashion industry, by barring girls under 16 and overly skinny models from its catwalks.”

Organizers say knobby knees and protruding ribs and shoulder bones are out, which is sensible enough. The mystery is how they ever got to be in.

The title of the article comes from the famous Wallis Simpson quotation, words that women have (consciously or subconsciously) heard, absorbed, internalized, and abused themselves to live up to since the 1930s.

For the last 20 years or so, however, fashionistas have seemed determined to prove the second part of her aphorism is false. Even Simpson herself, who was seductive enough to coax a king off his throne, might be horrified at some of the wraith-like figures who sashay up and down today’s catwalks.

Does anyone else find it incredibly ironic? — we have girls literally starving themselves to death, trying to live up to a most peculiar ideal. And at the same time, obesity is epidemic! Whatever happened to just trying to be fit and healthy? Whatever happened to “Beauty is just skin deep”?

Thankfully, there are these small hopeful signs of change… and we’ll take what we can get, from whatever source, when the onslaught of advertising is so powerful.

As Guilherme says,

In face of models dying of anorexia and on the other hand, almost every woman that is not a model finding herself ugly, the Dove campaign for real beauty is not only a beautiful and brave advertising campaign, but is also an inspired humane one.