Perspectives on Beauty

I believe many people sharing the video on the left (EDIT: Dove have since taken this video down. You can view it on the wayback machine here) feel empowered by it. I can imagine thinking "I too can choose to be beautiful", and feeling good about that. But I didn't feel like I could share that video without worrying about it hurting people who feel more in tune with the video on the right. I believe those people would mourn the lack of a door marked "I reject your artificial binary categorisation of all women". Some folks may see no need for such a door. To those folks, I'd point to the woman at time index 1:43, who chose to not enter the building (which, presumably, she had some business being inside) rather than go through one of the prescribed doors¹.

But I can also imagine other folks thinking something like "Well, a third door would be nice, but I have to live in this world and every day I encounter these two choices. Given these choices, I want to feel like I'm allowed to choose to be beautiful".

So I thought I'd put both videos side-by-side.

Footnotes:

The music in the vid felt to me like it was intended to play this as a failure, but with the sound off², it looked to me more like a triumph. YMMV

It's also kinda interesting to play one vid with the sound off, while listening to the soundtrack of the other. You can try that here.