{"id":26135,"date":"2010-07-30T12:04:52","date_gmt":"2010-07-30T17:04:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=26135"},"modified":"2017-09-16T23:50:00","modified_gmt":"2017-09-17T04:50:00","slug":"depicting-women-in-the-israeli-defense-force-potentially-nsfw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2010\/07\/30\/depicting-women-in-the-israeli-defense-force-potentially-nsfw\/","title":{"rendered":"Depicting Women in the Israeli Defense Force (Potentially NSFW)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve written previously about the portrayal of women in the military — in particular, the U.S. Navy’s attempts to redefine femininity<\/a> to make the Navy more appealing to women by assuring them they can be strong, smart, and still go shopping and stuff. In another example, a\u00a0number of former female Israeli Defense Force soldiers posed for Maxim<\/em> magazine<\/a> back in 2007. The first line of the article:<\/p>\n

They’re drop-dead gorgeous and can take apart an Uzi in seconds. Are the women of the Israeli Defense Forces the world’s sexiest soldiers?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m putting the images after the jump because they’re potentially not safe for some workplaces — the women aren’t nude, but they are quite scantily clad.<\/p>\n

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Lest you think this was simply a bunch of individual women who are no longer in the IDF choosing to pose, the Jewish Post<\/em><\/a> reveals that “the strategy was in fact, a government sponsored push to evoke a sexier depiction of Israel to American males in New York.” While the above video was created to attract women to the IDF, the Israeli government conceived of the Maxim<\/em> spread as a way to use IDF women to appeal to men:<\/p>\n

David Saranga, Consul for Media and Public Affairs at the Israeli Consulate General in New York, explained that they were just seeking good demographics. \u201cIsrael\u2019s image among New York men aged 18-38 is lacking.\u201d Saranga figured the spread in the popular men\u2019s magazine would offer \u201can image they\u2019d find appealing.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And apparently this series was an attempt to make Israel seem less<\/em> masculinized:<\/p>\n

\u201cIsrael is viewed as a very macho society. We want to show that we are a normal society like others,\u201d said Saranga.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How depressing that showing pictures of nearly-naked women in an attempt to appeal to men is the essence of being “normal.”<\/p>\n

It’s a good example of segmented marketing — presenting different audiences very different images of a product (in this case the IDF) that may even seem contradictory. In this case we have the IDF as a place for women to prove themselves and escape unwanted male attention…and the IDF as a source of hot chicks for men to ogle.<\/p>\nGwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve written previously about the portrayal of women in the military — in particular, the U.S. Navy’s attempts to redefine femininity to make the Navy more appealing to women by assuring them they can be strong, smart, and still go shopping and stuff. In another example, a\u00a0number of former female Israeli Defense Force soldiers posed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[279,55,2096,2093,1818,309],"class_list":["post-26135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-objectification","tag-gender","tag-gender-femininity","tag-gender-objectification","tag-nation-israel","tag-warmilitary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26135"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71299,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26135\/revisions\/71299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}