Last month, during a brief stay in Italy to visit my family, I noticed a disturbing new trend in advertising: creams designed to “lift” breasts and buttocks.
The last time I had seen a print ad for a similar product, I was in my early teens: in the back pages of all the popular teen magazines, I would see ads for X-ray glasses (destined for boys, to see through the clothes of women) and various “miracle” creams designed to accelerate puberty and turn a flat chested girl into a Pamela Anderson-like bombshell. My friends and I would dismiss this as utter rubbish (with the exception of a hopeful pimply faced boy in my class who once purchased X-ray glasses and brought them to school. Sadly, they didn’t work).
Fast-forward to today. Imagine my shock, when, while sitting in my dentist’s waiting room, I see that ads for creams to “increase breast size” are peppering the pages of virtually all the women’s magazines I pick up. Even more surprising? These creams belong to major (read: well respected) cosmetics companies.
Some examples (note: one of the photos below is a bit graphic, showing a nipple, so NSFW for those of you in the United States. Us Europeans are used to a lot worse)
The Title: “Dalla Ricerca COLLISTAR” (“from Collistar’s Research Team” – thus legit, no?)
“La rivoluzionaria novità che rassoda e solleva il seno” = “The revolutionary new product that firms and lifts breasts”
“più alto 2,7 cm” = “1,1 inch higher”
“più voluminoso +1cm” = “1/2 inch more volume”
“più sodo per il 90% delle donne testate” = “firmer breasts for 90% of women tested”
And now, let’s look at the pretty little asterisks that accompany each claim. Mind you, you may need eyeglasses to read those teeny tiny scribbles at the bottom of the page:
“Test clinico-strumentali” = gibberish? Well, let’s say clinical tests conducted on 20 women at an important Italian university. “An important Italian university”? WTF? Also: “maximum values reported after 60 days”. Whatever that means.
Let’s look at another ad, this one from Pupa, a cosmetics company that usually targets teenage girls and women in their 20s-early 30s:
This ad uses a similar language – as well as outrageous claims:
* Maximum value found in 3 subjects out of 35. Median value: 1 cm.
*** Tests are self-evaluations of 35 women during 8 weeks.
The self-evaluation part is what interests me. Because, whenever you see claims about anti-wrinkle creams, or anti-cellulite creams, or any other potion on the market (creams to increase breasts, buttocks, make your hair fuller, etc.) the percentages the ads refer to are not objective scientific findings. No. All beauty companies – big and small – use the results of self-evaluations in their marketing campaigns.
I once saw a documentary on TV that featured a French lab where they test 90% of cosmetics on the market. Women who participate in the study are given loads of free samples and usually return to the lab after 2 months to fill out a questionnaire about their satisfaction with a given product. A smiling lab attendant asks questions about one’s satisfaction (with yes/no answer) and then the results are compiled. In the documentary in question, a turtle-faced woman in her 60s say that the anti-wrinkle cream she had used had shown positive results. I couldn’t believe it. It’s ALL SUBJECTIVE: no scientific tests are carried out to confirm the claims. After all, if creams could actually reduce wrinkles, lift breasts, eliminate cellulite, why would women resort to expensive and intrusive procedures like Botox, breast implants and liposuction?
What these cosmetics companies are actually selling is HOPE.
After all, Charles Revson, founder of Revlon once said: “In the factory we make cosmetics; in the drugstore we sell hope.”
For an insightful article about the misleading marketing practices of cosmetics companies, click here.
It’s the same with the breast creams above. A few more examples:
What to do about this? Send your complaints to consumers’ associations.
Scarlett Johansson just wrote an article for the Huffington Post, speaking out about the media’s obsession over celebrities’ weight loss (and gain):
Every time I pass a newsstand, the bold yellow font of tabloid and lifestyle magazines scream out at me: “Look Who’s Lost It!” “They Were Fabby and Now They’re Flabby!” “They Were Flabby and Now They’re Flat!” We’re all aware of the sagas these glossies create: “Look Who’s Still A Sea Cow After Giving Birth to Twins!” Or the equally perverse: “Slammin’ Post Baby Beach Bodies Just Four Days After Crowning!”
According to the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA), as many as 10 million females and 1 million males living in the US are fighting a life and death battle with anorexia or bulimia. I’m someone who has always publicly advocated for a healthy body image and the idea that the media would maintain that I have lost an impossible amount of weight by some sort of “crash diet” or miracle workout is ludicrous. I believe it’s reckless and dangerous for these publications to sell the story that these are acceptable ways to looking like a “movie star.” It’s great to get tips on how to lead a healthier lifestyle, but I don’t want some imaginary account of “How She Did It!” I get into and stay in shape by eating a proper diet and maintaining a healthy amount of exercise. The press should be held accountable for the false ideals they sell to their readers regarding body image — that’s the real weight of the issue.
I just feel bad for the starry-eyed actresses/models in the ad – yearning for a career in TV/film, having to settle for a commercial like this. If I were one of them, I’d fire my agent, pronto.
Yesterday, the blog Jezebel discussed a recent segment that ran on ABC’s Good Morning America:
Good Morning America recreated the 1940s experiment in which 63% of African-American children given identical white and black dolls said they’d rather play with the white doll and 44% identified more with the white doll.
The original Jezebel post and the GMA video can be found here.
That made me remember a video that I had watched over a year ago, directed by a young African American girl, who ran the very same experiment and also filmed lots of interviews of fellow African American girls, discussing self image, body image, and discrimination. It was far, far more powerful and emotional than the GMA video. I highly recommmend watching it:
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.
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?
(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.)
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!
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.
According to this story on NPR, Mattel recently opened a six-story Barbie flagship store in Shanghai, China, called “House of Barbie”. In addition to building custom-made Barbie dolls, customers can also get beauty treatments like facials, and indulge in Barbie-inspired cocktail drinks with clever names such as Barbietini, Glamourpolitan, and Pink-Me-Up. (Older customers, one hopes).
Barbie is known for being yellow-haired and blue-eyed, and thus, unless you have severe myopia, she looks antithetical to every woman born in the world’s highest populated country (1.3 billion strong). So Mattel wisely created a special Barbie for the occasion, with “pan-Asian likeness.” (Never mind that 99% of the dolls and artwork in the store show the classic blonde Barbie look). We don’t care. We wanna shooooop!
Now, I truly hope there has been a mistake and this is not the close-up of the so-called “Pan Asian Barbie”:
Because her eyes don’t look the least bit Chinese. Well, unless Mattel was sneakily suggesting that Chinese women should get eyelid surgery to “open up” their eyes and look more like Caucasian women. But nooooooooo. That couldn’t be! You can just imagine Barbie saying, “Little Chinese girl: you look nothing like me! How come?”
At any rate, NPR reports:
The lure of the China market was one reason that Mattel chose Shanghai for its first House of Barbie. It’s aggressively pursuing developing markets, such as Eastern Europe, Russia and India, which aren’t already Barbie-saturated. But when deciding where to place the House of Barbie, Shanghai beat other contenders — including London, Paris, Milan, New York and Los Angeles — because of its strong cross-generation reaction to the doll and the brand.
“There was an amazing connection to Barbie’s values,”
What? Shopping? The love for the color pink? The pursuit of a size 00 with D cup breasts?
Dickson said. “Barbie in this culture represented a world of possibilities for girls and for women. She’s had amazing careers, she has the cars, she has the plane, she has the boyfriend — and she looks fantastic doing it.”
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Ok, ok. I understand. You need to work your butt off trying to become a president, an astronaut or a doctor, but you better look perfect doing it! Otherwise something’s missing.
As it is illustrated in this old Barbie ad:
Perfectionism (looks, career, personal life) = most potent weapon used against girls & women, as it sets them up for a life of dissatisfaction and craving.
Chinese girls – now, you can do it too! BDD and all! Yay!
Now, for the mommies out there, I highly recommend reading this report by Girls Inc., called the “Supergirl Dilemma.”
Girls say they are under a great deal of stress today. Three-quarters (74%) of girls in grades 9-12, over half of girls (56%) in grades 6-8, and just under half of girls (46%) in grades 3-5 say they often feel stressed (describes them “somewhat” or “a lot”).
When girls get caught up in the quest to be “supergirls,” they are less likely to feel confident in themselves and celebrate what truly makes them amazing. As adults who care about girls, it’s up to us to help girls confront the pressure they feel to be perfect.
Judd Apatow’s funny boys — Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, and Jonah Hill — “recreate” the sorta-famous Scarlett Johansson/Keira Knightley nude photo shoot for Vanity Fair this month, with Paul Rudd playing the role of the creepily lurking Tom Ford. Except, of course, they’re wearing nude body stockings. Because, of course, we wouldn’t really want to objectify them. It’s supposed to be funny, see.
The post’s author goes on to discuss the issue of female comedians and the debate on whether or not women can be funny. And the issue that some celebrated female comedians, who have recently become household names and received lots of acclaim (Tina Fey in primis) have actually been featured in Vanity Fair, wearing next to nothing and snapped in overtly sexy poses.
The post concludes:
So that leaves us with this: Men being objectified is so silly as to be hilarious, but it’s better if funny women are also hot. Or maybe it just leaves us to conclude that Vanity Fair has a lot of conflicted feelings to work out in magazine therapy. What do you think? Would you like to see the Apatow crew baring all? Would it be as funny a parody if female comedians did it?
I had yet to write about the issue of female comedians, so this is the perfect opportunity. Something that terribly saddened me was the recent Vanity Fair issue (yeah, again, same culprit) with Tina Fey on its cover.
What does a hardworking, funny, brilliant – yet average looking – woman have to do to be taken seriously, get better and better assignments, and eventually be openly embraced by the mainstream? But of course, she needs a makeover!
Before:
And then, after the makeover is complete, she needs to show off her Most Important Assets.
After:
Could the Tina Fey of the “before” photos ever been featured on the cover of Vanity Fair, just as she was?
Pregnant pause.
Think.
Did it take you more than a nanosecond to come up with the answer “of course not”?
Because that is the obvious truth.
Because a female comedian cannot be appreciated just for her brains.
On the other hand, these two beauties (first on the far left and the guy between Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd) got a golden ticket to a Vanity Fair cover:
Now, I truly hope there has been a mistake and this is not the close-up of the so-called “Pan Asian Barbie”:
