Nike, a company named after the Greek goddess of victory, has a strong advertising history with women. Remember the 1995 campaign about athletic girls? "If you let me play sports/ I will like myself more/ I will have more self-confidence/ I'll be 50 percent less likely to get breast cancer/ I will suffer less depression/ I will be more likely to leave a man who beats me/ I'll be less likely to be pregnant before I want to/ I will learn to be strong." These ads tap the same vein -- perhaps even some of the same girls who 10 years ago were itching to get on the soccer team.

But there's something less earnest about the "What story does your body tell?" campaign, something intoxicatingly bizarre, like reality television, or that "Saturday Night Live" chestnut, "Deep Thoughts With Jack Handey." Like Handey's musings, they're hilarious in a way that feels casually haphazard, but which has clearly been meticulously planned by the brains over at Nike and its longtime "Just Do It" advertising agency, Wieden & Kennedy.

The free-associative giddiness continues on Nike's Web site, which, like the Dove "Real Beauty" site, runs videos of the models talking about their bodies. The big-shouldered woman talks about how swimming has made her broad, but that she likes her shoulders anyway: "Who knows," she says, "one day maybe I'll fall in love with a bad swimmer and he'll be flailing around in the deep end calling my name and I'll swim over and I'll save him and I'll fling his wet body over my shoulders and I'll carry him home to bed." She pauses. "I've said too much." Uh-huh. The leg model speaks derisively about a "size 2 ... maybe she was a size 4" woman at her gym whose "cat could have worn her workout bra as a collar." Oooh-kay.

There's something almost spooky about the frankness of the campaign, its willingness to attack the stereotypes -- and body types -- on which fashion and beauty merchandising is built. I'm enjoying these ads more than the Dove campaign, but both projects' outward denunciations of the perfection we've been programmed to strive for feel almost too healthy to be true. I've already written about the Dove contradictions, and I can't find a major problem with the Nike ads. Though I do have a vague fear that the media -- from Salon to "The View" to the Associated Press and the New York Times and everyone else who has showered this mini-movement with attention -- and all the women who are embracing these new advertising models are being laughed at.

Is this some sort of "Candid Camera" prank where advertisers trick consumers into believing that they really care about regular-size women? Will Allen Funt eventually emerge and cackle uproariously at how we fell for it, actually wrote about the possibility that this might herald a shift in the attitude toward what kinds of female shapes sell products? And will everyone then just go back to photographing underfed and over-coked Eastern European tweens?

Because if it's not a trick, then it feels like a sort of momentous, if carefully manipulated, moment: I'm watching a brief return to media health.

Not that it's perfect, far from it. For one thing, Nike's talking-model Web site makes clear what the print ads don't. That while these may be big, healthy women built like mighty brick houses, they all look to be under 25, if not under 22. It's a "real beauty" catch shared by the Dove campaign, in which the models, while cheerfully curvaceous, are also relative cubs compared to the free-spending mama tigers to whom they are pitching products. But Nike's sin in this regard is somehow less damaging. The company is, after all, selling athletic gear, not cellulite fixatives that women in their 20s would rarely need.

Then there's the fact that every woman celebrated in Nike's six ads sounds like one hell of an athlete. That's fine, and the company's prerogative as an athletic-wear manufacturer; it's certainly not damaging. But if, as Bell pointed out, the campaign is not about the ideal, but about what's real, it doesn't hurt to remember that for many American women, what's real is being out of shape. The idea of being physically fit, let alone being able to get beefy thighs from running a marathon, is a seemingly impossible ideal for many.

These butts and thunder thighs are mostly rock-hard muscle; there are no saddlebags. And while featuring them is surely a step in the right direction, real progress will be made when fashion plates share ad pages with women whose creases and folds and blemishes may be the product of triathlons ... or nightly bags of Doritos. (Salon's staff have already tried their hands at this, and hope that you will too.)

In the meantime, there's nothing to do but enjoy the end of this particular summer, when those who get their back-to-school fashion tips from glossy tomes may do so with a modicum of self-worth, a smidgen less self-loathing about their un-wraithlike physiques. This year, they'll get to feast their eyes on some very big butts, spiritual space heaters, warming them with the reminder that not everyone can collar her cat with her sports bra.

Whatever that means.

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