Annals of Offensive Advertising: Nando’s

From Newsweek: Generation Diva

From Newsweek:  “Generation Diva. How our obsession with beauty is changing our kids.” Written by Jessica Bennett.

Excerpt:

Girls today are salon vets before they enter elementary school. Forget having mom trim your bangs, fourth graders are in the market for lush $50 haircuts; by the time they hit high school, $150 highlights are standard. Five-year-olds have spa days and pedicure parties. And instead of shaving their legs the old-fashioned way—with a 99-cent drugstore razor—teens get laser hair removal, the most common cosmetic procedure of that age group. If these trends continue, by the time your tween hits the Botox years, she’ll have spent thousands on the beauty treatments once reserved for the “Beverly Hills, 90210″ set, not junior highs in Madison, Wis.

Reared on reality TV and celebrity makeovers, girls as young as Marleigh are using beauty products earlier, spending more and still feeling worse about themselves. Four years ago, a survey by the NPD Group showed that, on average, women began using beauty products at 17. Today, the average is 13—and that’s got to be an overstatement. According to market-research firm Experian, 43 percent of 6- to 9-year-olds are already using lipstick or lip gloss; 38 percent use hairstyling products; and 12 percent use other cosmetics. And the level of interest is making the girls of “Toddlers & Tiaras” look ordinary. “My daughter is 8, and she’s like, so into this stuff it’s unbelievable,” says Anna Solomon, a Brooklyn social worker. “From the clothes to the hair to the nails, school is like No. 10 on the list of priorities.“

(Emphasis mine.)

The article continues,

Why are this generation’s standards different? To start, this is a group that’s grown up on pop culture that screams, again and again, that everything, everything, is a candidate for upgrading. These girls are maturing in an age when older women are taking ever more extreme measures, from Botox to liposuction, to stay sexually competitive. They’ve watched bodies transformed on “Extreme Makeover”; faces taken apart and pieced back together on “I Want a Famous Face.” They compare themselves to the overly airbrushed models in celebrity and women’s magazines, and learn about makeup from the girls of “Toddlers & Tiaras,” or the show’s WEtv competitor, “Little Miss Perfect.”

Read the full article here – and check out the interactive chart about women’s beauty spending, from childhood into their 60s. Disturbing stuff.

The Evolution of Shampoo Commercials

As I write this, my cheeks are mildly blushing, as I feel a tinge of embarrassment about this realization. That is, despite the fact that I’ve been acutely aware of all of the optical trickeries that go into photography, film, and TV, I somehow never thought much of shampoo commercials. Until I discovered a “vintage” L’Oreal ad from 1990, starring Monica Bellucci.

But let’s take a step back. First, watch this contemporary commercial for Pantene shampoo:

Standard fare, right? Nothing stands out particularly.

Then watch the aforementioned commercial for L’Oreal shampoo, from 1990:

Notice something different?

The first thought that came to mind, for me, was how messy Monica Bellucci’s hair was. I could see actual strands of hair standing out from her head:

So, thinking about commercials of the mid- and late-2000s, I wonder: how much CGI / digital post-production work goes into the appearance of the models’ hair? Watch again the Pantene commercial above. Doesn’t it look completely fake by comparison? After all, Monica Bellucci’s hair looks thoroughly natural. And yet, we are so conditioned to see idealized, computer-generated hair in contemporary shampoo commercials, that real hair is put to shame. 

Commercials for shampoos are no different than commercials for anti-wrinkle creams. They are thoroughly manipulated and idealized. What’s wrong with natural looking hair? Why do we always have to aspire to an ideal that does not exist in nature?

Real Women Have Curves, Veins, a bit of Cellulite (but not Photoshop)

via Corriere della Sera

(According to Corriere della Sera, the website complex.com mistakenly published an unretouched photo of Kim Kardashian on its site. And consequently corrected the error.)

Kim Kardashian quickly responded on her site:

So what: I have a little cellulite. What curvy girl doesn’t!?

How many people do you think are photoshopped? It happens all the time!

At the same time as this Complex shoot, I was gearing up for my fitness DVD and you should see my thighs now!!! Haha!

This all motivates me to stay in the gym because my goal this year has been to get in better shape and tone up! Hard work pays off!

I’m proud of my body and my curves and this picture coming out is probably helpful for everyone to see that just because I am on the cover of a magazine doesn’t mean I’m perfect.

You can check out more behind-the-scenes pics from the shoot right here. And they’re not retouched!

Ms. Kardashian’s full post is here.

The Big Lie

From Molly Haskell’s wonderful book “From Reverence to Rape. The Treatment of Women in the Movies” (1974):

The big lie perpetrated on Western society is the idea of women’s inferiority, a lie so deeply ingrained in our social behavior that merely to recognize it is to risk unraveling the entire fabric of civilization.

[...]

In the movie business we have had an industry dedicated for the most part to reinforcing the lie. As the propaganda arm of the American Dream machine, Hollywood promoted a romantic fantasy of marital roles and conjugal euphoria and chronically ignored the facts and fears arising from an awareness of The End – the winding down of love, change, divorce, depression, mutation, death itself.

[...]

The anomaly that women are the majority of the human race, half of its brains, half of its procreative power, most of its nurturing power, and yet are its servants and romantic slaves was brought home with peculiar force in the Hollywood film. Through the myths of subjection and sacrifice that were its fictional currency and the machinations of its moguls in the front offices, the film industry maneuvered to keep women in their place; and yet these very myths and this machinery catapulted women into spheres of power beyond the wildest dreams of most of their sex.

“From Reverence to Rape” on Amazon.com

Molly Haskell’s official site.

Inspiring Photo of the Day: Osaka, 1952

From my Heroine (with a capital “H”): LIFE magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White.

Mrs. Shizue Kato, Japan’s leading feminists, birth control expert & disciple of her friend Margaret Sanger, holding a model of female sex organs, as she demonstrates how to insert a pessary to a group of women during birth control class.

Osaka, Japan – June 06, 1952

My Italian TV Hell

In January 2003, the Financial Times published an article by Tobias Jones about the state of Italian television. Jones, a British writer married to an Italian woman and living in Parma, documented his reactions to Italian TV shows in a way that was refreshing and throurougly enjoyable. Enjoyable for anyone who is NOT Italian. Because the picture he painted was clearly depressing:

The following evening, about 7pm, I flick to Channel 5 again. This is the prime-time quiz show, Passaparola. To understand this kind of show, there are more key words to learn. Letterine “the little letters”, Veline “quick news flash”, schedine “the little statistics”: all are diminutive “me” descriptions of the bikini-clad women who start dancing erotically at random intervals. Passaparola is a quiz show based on the alphabet, hence the “little letters”. As I’m watching, Gerry Scotti – the anodyne host – is flirting with one of them and winking at the 8m viewers. Italy, don’t be in any doubt, is the land that feminism forgot.

A clip from Striscia la Notizia – one of the most watched TV programs in Italy (satirical news on primetime TV, on weekdays). These are the “Veline” Tobias Jones talks about:

Passaparola & the Letterine:

From Buona Domenica – Italy’s most watched Sunday afternoon program:

(The male tv presenter jokingly says the two women should keep doing this “until one of them dies”)

The article made a big impression on me back then. As an Italian, who has studied mass communication and film in the United States, who has lived abroad for many years, an activist and a feminist, this subject was very close to me. While in college, every time I went to Italy to visit my parents, I was positively shocked by the representation of women in mass media. Especially when making a comparison with the U.S. or the U.K. I would protest, and tell friends and relatives that I found this overt objectification of women offensive. My blood would literally boil at the sight of young women, about the same age as me, dancing around in bikinis and smiling to creepy 60-something anchormen. Yet all my Italian friends and relatives were relatively non-plussed by this. They found it normal. And it is still the same now, years later. If anything, the number of women scantly clad, offering their bodies for visual consumption has multiplied. Now they are everywhere.

The Financial Times doesn’t carry the article anymore, but I found a blog that reproduced it in its entirety. You can read it at this link.

What fascinated me the most, re-reading it just yesterday, was media consolidation. Because we have all heard the arguments that sex sells and men love looking at pretty women. But very few people go below the surface, to discuss the system that permits this.

It often seems that, in Italy, there aren’t advertisement breaks; there are short programme breaks. Fifty seven per cent of all Italian advertising budgets is spent on television (compared with 23 per cent in Germany, and 33.5 per cent in the UK). Even RAI, the state-owned television network – to whom I pay an annual licence fee of euro 97 – runs adverts. All of which means that audience chasing is crucial, and programmes are designed for quantity not quality. “It’s become a kind of psychological dictatorship”, says Gad Lerner, the most intelligent anchorman on Italian TV.  “The figures from Auditel (which measures audience share) scare people into only producing these vulgar, crowd pulling programmes.” Berlusconi, of course, owns Publitalia, the company responsible for selling 60 per cent of advertising space on Italian television. Within a few days of starting my TV induction I can feel my brain turning to custard.

I had forgotten about this fact. Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, in addition to owning a media empire made up of 50% of the main TV channels, Mondadori – the largest Italian publishing house, countless magazines, newspapers, home video distribution firms, film production houses, a soccer club and insurance companies, also owns the “company responsible for selling 60 percent of advertising space on Italian television.”

When writing “Citizen Kane” Orson Welles would have thought this was too much for his character. And yet it is possible in Italy (watch Sabina Guzzanti’s awesome documentary ‘Viva Zapatero’ if you are insterested in the subject)

When having discussions with friends, I often compare Italy to Russia – it definitely feels like a media dictatorship. And, when asked where I’m originally from, I would jokingly reply “the Banana Republic” – because it feels so surreal. Women have a really hard time being taken seriously. My “golden ticket” is my international background: the fact I have lived for so long abroad and speak English and French fluently. So, my competence is not questioned when I am in Italy. But scores and scores of Italian women, who live and work there, have a difficult time in the corporate world. A few stats, culled from another article (“Naked Ambition”)

“In the largest Italian companies, women represent about two per cent of board directors.”

“In 1976, she says, 11 per cent of members of parliament were women, the same as today.”

Italian women need to break into the boys’ club – in academia, politics, the corporate world, and in mass media. But first they need to be aware of Italy’s pervasive mysoginy. And most of them aren’t.

Read “My Italian TV Hell” here.

Read “Naked Ambition” here.

Italian TV = PUTRID

No need to speak Italian to understand the I.Q. lowering, rotten quality of Italian TV. Here is a clip from Big Brother 9… A textbook case of Madonna-Whore complex. Italy’s prime minister – the disgraceful Mr. Berlusconi – owns this TV channel (and many more) and was a pioneer in the 1980s of this kind of trash TV.

Fast-forward to 5:30 for the crème de la crème:

[EDIT] I somehow forgot to mention that this is the “American Idol” of Italy – the TV show that draws the biggest audience. It is dissected by mainstream media – all major newspaper cover it on a daily basis. But there have been no feminist critiques of it. None at all. It is seen as normal and matter of fact. This is what Italy has become. So, so sad.

Women’s Magazines: Teddy Roosevelt Was a Cosmo Girl

From The Frisky:

Women’s magazines weren’t always a medium for recycled, superficial news, nor were their readers always in the market for it. They used to be (dare I say it?) thoughtful, provoking, political … something completely different from what we pick up today. So since when did scouring the literature in the checkout line become a guilty pleasure rather than an intellectual pursuit? When did the literature turn guilty?

Believe it or not, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Good Housekeeping were all once the epitome of social activism and sophistication. Teddy Roosevelt himself used to be a Cosmo Girl, so to speak, contributing lengthy stories to its pages before they were filled with frills and celebrity fanfare.

At the time of its incarnation, Good Housekeeping was about more than putting women back in the kitchen. It advocated for pure food at the turn of the twentieth century, leading to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. It started an anti-cigarette campaign twelve years before the Surgeon General’s warning was even printed on cigarette packs, and endorsed the Ludlow Amendment in the 1930s, which required that any declaration of war—with the exception of an invasion—be ratified by a direct vote of the citizenry. Today, however, its readership is used largely by businesses as their primary target for consumer studies. While it’s not fair to stereotype all Housekeeping subscribers as apron-clad homemakers, the magazine’s history of political activism does feel far from the headlines we see on its covers today—dominated by baking and how to entertain houseguests.

Full article here.

Amazing Orgs. Because we need action more than words.

In Media Control Noam Chomsky writes about the ultimate goal of the public relations industry: to help industries and the government control the public mind. What is big industry is most afraid of? Activism.

Chomsky writes,

People have to be atomized and segregated and alone. They’re not supposed to organize, because then they might be something beyond spectators of action. They might actually be participants if many people with limited resources could get together to enter the political arena. That’s really threatening.

When I first read this, I had a clear picture in my mind: scores of people, nowadays, sitting in front of their computers – reading Facebook, or political blogs – and feeling a synthetic sense of connectedness and activism. Myself included. Writing – or commenting – on a blog post about body image issues or creating a Facebook group to raise awareness on domestic violence does one thing: it raises awareness. But things stop there. You may have hundreds of members joining your FB group, thousands of visitors on your political blog, but the feeling of doing something, I will say this again, is synthetic. You’re sitting alone in a room in front of your computer, typing away. You are “segregated and alone.” And the real world, with all its rules, is often unaffected by that. That is why we need to reclaim the activism of the 20s, 60s and 70s. We need to regroup, to organize, to meet face to face and join groups of people who are actively working on improving issues dear to us.

So, here is a list of some of my favorite organizations, who are doing just that. Because a clever blog post on blog X will only get you this far. Think about joining their causes.

The Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood (U.S.). My heros. Thanks to their activism, Hasbro halted the production of Pussycat Dolls toys for little girls.

Girls Inc. (U.S.) “Picture the world through the eyes of a Girls Inc. girl. She belongs to a community that empowers her to pursue the biggest dreams she can dream. She is uplifted by the strength of a national organization that is committed to inspiring the leaders of tomorrow.”

Pink Stinks (U.K.) The campaign for real role models. “PinkStinks is a campaign and social enterprise that challenges the ‘culture of pink’ which invades every aspect of girls’ lives.” Their ultimate goal is to “influence marketeers and the media about the importance of promoting positive gender roles to girls.”

About-Face (U.S.) Their mission is to “equip women and girls with tools to understand and resist harmful media messages that affect self-esteem and body image.”

Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation (U.K.) “At WSFF, we believe in a society which encourages, enables and celebrates active women and girls.”

Women’s Forum Australia. A wonderful organization helping women on many issues – from health to body image and work. Their think tank created Faking It, a glossy magazine-style report that “explores issues around the objectification of women and girls in the media and popular culture, with a focus on women’s magazines.”

And the list could go on and on. Will certainly write about other organizations in the future.

Remember the old saying: actions speak louder than words.