Men, if you saw a door marked "Big Dick" and a door marked "Average Dick," which would you walk through?
Two weeks ago, Dove released a new video in its long-running Real Beauty campaign where they put the words "Average" and "Beautiful" over doors and figured out which women lacked self-confidence and which were full of themselves. Just kidding, they tried to get women to see that they could choose to see themselves as beautiful.
The divisive video was greeted with booth cheers and jeers, caused a kerfuffle over at BuzzFeed, and like past Dove videos, was ripe for parody. And indeed, Funny or Die produced the little video below that suggests once again that men, at least compared to women, don't have a lot of self-confidence problems.
Of course, in reality, men also suffer from self-esteem issues, but the parody brings up some excellent points that many detractors have leveled at the original video. Namely, what's so bad about being average? And where in our culture do we draw the line between healthy self-esteem and being embarrassingly full of yourself?
The guys in this video run the gamut from full-of-yourself you're delusional ("It's a bit like Big Ben") to depressingly desperate ("Have sex with me, please!"). When our society values both confidence and modesty, it's hard for women or men to win the physical beauty game. The paradox is aptly put in the One Direction lyric: "You don't know you're beautiful, but that's what makes you beautiful." In other words, One Direction doesn't think any of the ladies who walked through the beautiful door are actually beautiful.
Which brings about larger questions: Who's the arbiter of beauty? Who gets to decide who's beautiful or who's dick is big? Are we talking length or width, inner beauty or outer? And of course, why does society prize physical beauty in women above so many other features—and big dicks for men above, say, the ability to actually please a woman?
But you don't have to think about all that to enjoy the parody. All you need to know is: Ha ha, dicks!
