Girl, You are Beautiful! – Just Dance & Beauty

This is an age where you have Bratz, Barbies and photo edited models ruling the beauty market.  These dominant images are all sporting looks and proportions that are humanly impossible.  Therefore, the unreal and unattainable is dictating to real women what is is needed to be attractive.  Unreachable expectations have been placed on women, and especially young girls, to look like these artificial images.  In the name of being beautiful, some women have given up on beauty all together, because, despite how attractive they may be, they do not fit a post-production image.  In the name of being beautiful, women, who have been trained to not see their natural beauty, are paying exorbitant amounts of money for unnatural ‘enhancements’.  In the name of being beautiful, many girls have denied themselves basic human needs and were then told it wasn’t enough.   Simply put, the pop culture world is a hostile one for a woman’s self-image.  In light of this, I would like to throw out a kudos to the team responsible for Ubisoft’s Just Dance series.

I love Just Dance 2. It has a great song selection and great choreography.  It is an all around fun game.  The graphics are fantastic.  They are 2D and color stylized which has a great effect.  I would say that a move to 3D or more ‘realistic’ colouring would detract from the great aesthetics of this game.  It is very easy to feel good about the game and it’s visuals.  I am especially impressed with they’re portrayal of women.

I earlier mentioned Bratz and Barbies.  One may commend them for having different toned skins to represent the diversity of the human race.  I would argue, however, that they do a great injustice to the diverse beauty of women from different ethnic groups.  Each doll has the exact same body type and face composition.  This sends a message, “this is what it takes to be beautiful: big eyes, big lips, and being skinnier than what’s healthy”.  This type of message is what women are bombarded with from all sides, and not just from the doll companies.   I could spend gads of paragraphs on talking about these negative messages, but instead let’s accentuate the positive and look at Just Dance. 

Something you may notice about the models in Just Dance is that they all have white skin — not Caucasian, white.  It’s part of the art style.  Even so, you can tell that there are women of various ethnicities represented in the songs because *gasp* they look different.  They even have women that have different body types but you would guess share around the same skin tone.  There’s women models that would shop petite section, others the plus section, and others the sizes in between.  It’s almost as if they were modeled after real women!  Best of all, they are all beautiful.  Each girl is attractive.  Each one of them is sexy.  I’m not talking immodest — I mean sexy.  They are wearing clothing that suits their body type and they exude confidence in their beauty and who they were made to be.  That’s a kind of sexy I would want young ladies to understand.

It is my sincere hope that this becomes the trend.  At the very least it’ll make shopping easier as girls will see different styles that look good for different body-shapes, instead of only knowing what looks good on a shape they probably don’t have.   God willing, which I believe He is, women will start to be able to look at themselves and not think that He made a mistake.