Let the bodies be!

Yes, somehow we have ended up speaking about the Dove campaigns again...

Stumbled across a post in BBC News called Five photos that sparked body image debates. Fair enough. The message? The usual one. Do what you want people will never like actual bodies. The bodies not being allowed to be what they actually are - vehicles. Very diverse vehicles if you look for differences. And very similar vehicles if you compare them to anything else. Facts of life.

They have to be about something else. Like, sexualization of the pregnant. Or being too fat, too thin, too short, too hairy... blah, blah, blah.

Mind that the only male among the 5 cases reviewed is a person with disability that took the Body for Life challenge and ended up with a body many people did not believed to be real.

All the women featured have suffered media-storms of not being perfect enough (as they say, "only decades earlier maternity dresses tended to sport large bows at the neck to direct attention away from the baby bump - and the mother's femininity"; no the naked pregnant famous lady photos were not normal before 1991).

It's about being too real. Too exposed. Too vulnerable.

And, yes, the story is about media and fashion industry as those are cases of outrages about people with public female bodies. As Demi Moore. As Lizzie Miller. As Isabelle Caro. And not yet touching the question how that spirit of body-watch, that constant scrutiny affects all of us.

While it's perfectly fine to take pictures while you are pregnant. While we are happy about every model that have some body fat (although it's unclear why they are specially marked as +models). And while anorexia might certainly be a dangerous and very painful thing to deal with.

...it is not OK to police bodies.