Unilever’s Dove girls, the full-bodied women of its “real beauty” campaign, have met their nemesis in the daydreams of American teenage boys clutching bottles of deodorant.

The company has been targeted by an internet guerrilla attack, in which raunchy images from a commercial for its Axe body spray, sold as Lynx in the UK, were spliced into a Dove video that urges parents to protect girls from negative images of women.

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Hoisted by its own strategy of using the internet to infiltrate a market with positive messages about the brand, Unilever is now facing allegations of hypocrisy and double standards in its treatment of women.

Onslaught, a video Unilever made for release over the internet, features a pre-teenage girl on her way to school. Her innocent face gives way to a cascade of ghoulish images from the beauty industry - cosmetic surgery, obsessive dieting and anorexic models plastered with make-up. The final clip says: “Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.”

The refashioned version uses material from other Unilever advertisements to highlight what its maker, Rye Clifton, says is the company’s conflicting message. It includes the Axe slogan – “Spray more. Get more – the Axe Effect”. The edited video’s message is: “Talk to your daughter before Unilever does.”

Dove’s campaign, which was launched in Britain in 2004 using non-professional models with ample figures, was successful in America and attracted wide support, including an appearance by the girls on The Oprah Winfrey Show. But critics, such as Susan Linn, founder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, complain that “real beauty” is undermined by Unilever promoting other products with what they claim are sexist and exploitative images.

In commercials for Axe, skinny girls shimmy, pout and pole-dance for the boys, who are the target market. One popular video, Boom Chicka Wah Wah, features three scantily clad sirens who crawl into the brain of a bespectacled girl enslaved to domesticity and transform her into a ravenous sex monster.

Axe, according to its product website “has been known to turn nice girls naughty and excite crimes of passion”.

The site also features “the world’s dirtiest film”, a compilation of video clips contributed by young men that show girls who, after mud wrestling, wash in Axe shower gel. Ms Linn said: “[Unilever] is causing the problem it purports to address. Even as Unilever basks in praise for the real beauty campaign, it is profiting from degrading images of women elsewhere.”

According to Ms Linn, 2,500 letters of protest have been sent to Unilever’s chief Patrick Cescau, demanding that he “axe the Axe campaign”.

Simon Clift, Unilever’s chief marketing officer, says that the Axe commercials should be taken with a pinch of salt: “It’s a spoof on the mating game. The joke is on the boy. It’s just a few bloggers in the US who don’t get it.”

He said that Onslaughtwas not antibeauty industry, merely an attempt to tackle low self-esteem in girls. He defended Unilever’s right to use different imagery to attract teenage boys. “They are obsessed with sex. Nothing that we or anybody else says will change that,” he said.

Ms Linn argued that humour was being used to perpetuate negative stereotypes. “The fact that it is funny doesn’t diminish its power,” she said, adding that it was dangerous to accept messages about health and wellbeing from corporations.

“If it is profitable to sell Dove with an antibeauty industry message, they will do it,” she said.

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