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Normal Bodies: The dating show »Naked Attraction« shows us that all bodies are beautiful
Photo: Hope and Kurt / RTL
In Norway, from this Friday, influencers and other advertisers will have to label if the appearance of people in advertisements has been changed.
Retouched and otherwise manipulated appearances such as changes in face shape, broader shoulders, clearer complexion and narrower hips must be identified with a consistent logo.
The Norwegians can count themselves lucky.
Because this law offers the chance to learn to see anew.
First other people and bodies – and then your own.
It's no news that the idealized, retouched, beauty-normed bodies and faces sold to us as "normal" on social media, billboards, and magazine covers don't exactly make people feel more comfortable in their own bodies.
On the contrary: the body marketed by the media ensures that we compare ourselves to it – and all too often lose these everyday beauty contests.
Tummy instead of six-pack, orange peel skin instead of tight thighs, acne scars instead of silken cheeks and and and.
Vision School »Naked Attraction«
An advertising industry that has to label computer-beautified bodies will show us more normality - or just have to disclose that someone has been beautified afterwards.
That would also be a great law in Germany, because in the long term it could replace uniform perfection and harmful standardization of bodies with diversity and new understandings of beauty.
Perhaps even a joy in the diversity and uniqueness of each body - including our own.
This is not a flowery fairy tale of a better future.
In Germany we can already experience how our view changes through the completely natural showing of everyday objects.
This amazing vision school is not on the website of the Federal Ministry of Education, but on RTL2, or in the offer of the television app RTL +.
It's called "Naked Attraction" and is a dating show that premiered between 2017 and 2020.
It could get pretty cheesy
The rules: A person looking for a date stands in front of seven boxes with frosted glass panes, each containing a naked person.
Sometimes it's men, sometimes women, sometimes trans people, or all mixed - depending on what the person is looking for and prefers.
It could all get pretty cheesy.
Because the game works in such a way that the frosted glass pane rises up to the waistline for all seven, so you can see feet, legs, buttocks, penises, vulvas and testicles.
But now comes the wonderful surprise: it won't be a bit bad.
Because the respective guest looks at the body with so much friendliness, respect and joy in diversity that it is a pleasure.
There are knobby knees, soft and gym-hardened thighs, small tummies, surgical scars, labia of different sizes, curved penises, sometimes shaved, sometimes unshaven pubic areas.
A celebration of the universal body
Here, at the latest, viewers realize that »normal« not only doesn't exist, but that it's boring.
Because the show is a celebration of the body in all its vulnerability, peculiarity, non-normability.
Of course, an almost forgotten TV show is not enough to permanently change our relationship to our bodies.
Because many magazine titles, advertising images and Instagram influencers are still chasing after a meaningless ideal of beauty.
German politicians have also recognized this and reacted.
After a conference of equal opportunities ministers this Friday, Hamburg's equal opportunities senator Katharina Fegebank (Greens) called for the introduction of legal regulations on the mandatory labeling of retouched advertising images and the use of beauty filters.
The step to get there shouldn't be that big.
After all, tobacco packaging has been printed with terrifying images for years, which drastically show us the harmful effects of smoking.
The depiction of bodies is also about our health – namely mental health.
Because the pictures of unattainably beautiful people all too often influence the closest relationship we have: that to our own body.
With material from dpa