'Thighs that big belong in a bucket' [View All]

[T_i_B]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/08/28/wass28.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/08/28/ixportal.html

Fully clothed, they are a group of ordinary young women whom you might see on their way to work or play in any American city. Stripped down to their knickers and bras and magnified on huge advertising hoardings, they are the Amazonian symbols of an ever-widening gulf between Madison Avenue's traditional fantasy of the female form and the way most women actually look.

The Dove skincare company's "campaign for real beauty" featuring "real women", launched in Britain last year, has finally made it to the United States to a decidedly mixed reception.

Richard Roeper, a film critic who perhaps believes that most women look like Hollywood stars, muttered that showing "plump gals baring too much skin" was "unsettling." "When we're talking women in their underwear on billboards outside my living room windows, give me the fantasy babes, please," he wrote. "If that makes me sound superficial, shallow and sexist - well yes, I'm a man."

Much of the campaign's shock value stems from the fact that most Americans have rarely seen ordinary women portrayed as attractive on television dramas or in Hollywood.