According to Melissa, the dialogue/voice-over in this Czech commercial roughly goes like this:
…basically the woman complaining about stuff, followed by the deflation, then a voiceover with a play on words about blowing off your wife to have a beer with the lads.
Enjoy this clip from Fox’s Battle of the Bods where women try to guess in what order men will rank them according to their face, their body, and both. As I suggest in my title, I think it’s a wonderful example of how being objectified places women in competition with each other and, thus, creates conflict and antagonism. Thus, women are “catty” because of gender inequality, NOT because of those two pesky X chromosomes or something to do with hormones.
See this post for a breast implant ad suggesting that bigger boobs make you look smarter. And see this post for ads capitalizing on the stereotype that women are naturally bitchy to each other.
Via Feministe and The Feminist Underground.
We’ve been so busy with PETA, we’ve forgotten about American Apparel. What does one have to do with the other? They both sacrifice one social justice issue in pursuit of another. I find this leftist balkanization–where lefty groups choose one and only one social justice issue and ignore the rest, or even exacerbate them–fascinating. It leads to, if you will allow me to mix metaphors, a leftist cannibalization. We are eating ourselves.
So anyway, American Apparel is American Apparel because they are supposed to care about fair wages. You know, made in America according to fair labor laws. Anti-sweatship and all that good stuff. What a lovely thing. Except… their ads (stolen from Copyranter). They make me want to wash my eyes out with soap.
Um… not safe for work.
Emily sent me pictures of Hip Parade toys. They are figurines shaped like women’s bodies from the waist to just above the knees. There are various types and colors. They’re only $8!
This one is called “Active Girls” and for some reason says “cat” and has a picture of a cat on the butt. I don’t know what the connection between a cat and being active is.
Found here.
Found here.
This one is the “trading torso.” You can trade with others to collect all four!
Found here.
Thanks, Em! Sort of.
This “Onslaught” ad by Dove has garnered a lot of attention and positive press:
The idea, of course, is that we need to protect our daughters from the images that may harm their self-esteem or make them uncomfortable about their bodies. A great message, no doubt.
However, corporate activism usually has limits and contradictions (as do most things in life, really). Miguel sent us this ad spoof that points out that many of the images the Dove ad says we should be protecting our daughters from are actually used in Axe ads–and Axe is owned by Unilever, the same company that owns Dove.
So Unilever manages to target both markets–those who respond to sexualized images and those who find them harmful–through different brands. This is a common tactic–because large multinational companies own so many different brands, they can market to many different groups of consumers; when we reject one product because of its production process or advertising and buy another instead, there’s a very good chance we’re buying from the same corporate entity, just a different brand name.
As one blogger nicely put it:
It’s a parent’s responsibility to make sure the damaging messages they themselves produce don’t reach your kids.
That is, Dove is telling parents to protect their kids, as if Dove CARES, but Dove’s parent company is producing those very same messages. (It’s kind of like a single corporation owning a beer company and running Alcoholics Anonymous. How very convenient for both.)
A commenter pointed out that Greenpeace made an ad based on Dove’s “Onslaught” commercial that brings up the effects of palm oil production in the destruction of forests in Indonesia:
Thanks, Dangger!
NEW: There is a terrific post at Moment of Choice about one woman’s experience auditioning for a Dove Real Woman commercial. From the post:
Under the guise of looking for women who felt truly comfortable in their own skin, no matter what they looked like, they asked us to bare all or most of it, to prove just how comfortable we really were…A young peppy assistant demonstrated how they wanted us to shake our hands in the air like we just didn’t care and do a full 360 for the camera and male judging panel.
It’s a fascinating inside look at a process most of us never take part in, and reinforces the fact that corporate activism often covers an awful lot of business-as-usual behind the scenes.
This old CoverGirl lipstick ad, found here, illustrates the infantilization of women we often see in ads-women (provocatively) licking ice cream cones, eating fruit, and so on. Thanks to Krystal-lynn M. for sending it in!
These Kenzie ads (available at the University of Michigan’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center’s website) also have women in childlike poses, with their mary-jane shoes and ruffled socks. Thanks for sending them in, Laura L.!
These images illustrate two common trends in advertising: on the one hand, women are portrayed as little girls, as coyly innocent, as lacking in power and maturing. On the other hand, child-likeness is sexy, and girls are portrayed as Lolitas whose innocence is questionable.
NEW (Mar. ’10)! Jeff H. sent along this photo from a GQ spread in which Reille Hunter is posed with Kermit the Frog, Barney the Dinosaur, and Dora the Explorer:
Disclosure: My dissertation, called “Female Genital Mutilation” in the American Imagination, is about how different U.S. constituencies (mainly doctors, activists, journalists, and academics) have framed female genital cutting over the past 30 years. I offer this context for the images below (submitted by Craig C. and Breck and found via boingboing and adsoftheworld):
There is great conflict among feminist activists over how to go about decreasing the prevalence of “female genital cutting,” better known to most as “female genital mutilation.” One of the reasons for this conflict is the tendency of “Western” feminists to impose their own worldview onto communities where we find cutting (mostly among some ethnic groups in Africa, but also found in the Middle East and Asia). For example, the importance of sexual pleasure derived from the clitoris, and the relationship between orgasm and women’s liberation, is a central tenent of post-second wave feminism in the West. From this perspective, reduction of the external clitoris (clitorectomy) appears particularly horrendous and an obvious sign of women’s oppression. However, many women who are part of communities where cutting occurs find this logic to be irrelevant to their lives. Sexual pleasure takes a backseat to the benefits that come with cutting for the women themselves (group membership, attainment of adult female status, marriageability, becoming fully feminine — it varies tremendously, but be sure that the practices are important and meaningful in their own contexts). In any case, if “Western” feminists are going to try to “help” women in other parts of the world, many women say they’d much rather have clean drinking water and freedom from penalizing economic policies imposed by the U.S., than sexual pleasure. (I should point out, by the way, that whether and which and how much genital cutting practices actually do eliminate sexual pleasure and orgasm is hotly debated.)
These images are part of a campaign to raise awareness about and opposition to female genital cutting in Spain (I editorialize below):
I try not to get too emotional on this blog, but this hits me right where it hurts, and I find these images utterly appalling. The idea, of course, is that when women’s sexual pleasure has been excised (and remember, this is a controversial assumption) they feel nothing, but the implication is that they ARE nothing. These ads suggest that women who have experienced genital cutting are equivalent to fuck toys. Everything else about them disappears in these ads. They are completely defined by the status of their genitals, and the status of their genitals is the status of their souls. Even if it is true that these women no longer experience clitoral orgasm, or even experience pain during intercourse, they are still multidimensional human beings who love others and are loved by those around them for their uniqueness and individuality… yes, even the men they sleep with.
What a horribly offensive ad campaign. The fact that it is likely made for people in Spain and may never be seen by women who are genitally cut makes it no less offensive. Instead, it is an excellent example of the kind of ethnocentric, arrogant transnational activism that makes people in the West look like total assholes.
I should clarify: I am making these observations as a sociologist, not as an activist. I do have opinions about various sorts of male and female genital cuttings, but that’s not my point here. My point is not whether or not FGCs are oppressive to women or whether individuals in the West should be involved in eradication efforts. My point is to interrogate how we go about expressing opposition and intervention. There are many ways in which to go about this. As you can tell, I do not particularly like this one.
UPDATE: Racialicious made my day when they asked to repost this post on their own blog. It is well worth taking a look at how different the comments are here versus there and thinking about what that means.
I thought these two images were interesting because they are using sexualized images of men in a magazine called Metropolitan Home. It struck me at first because it’s pretty unusual to find sexualized male bodies used in ads targeting a general audience that might include straight men. Then I started thinking–maybe the fact that it’s in an interior design magazine means advertisers assume the readership is mostly female or, if male, gay, so there is little fear of offending straight men with these types of ads.
.
