Before you go any further, please just stop for a second and contemplate the fact that these ads, like any ads, were produced after a series of meetings in between the ad agency and the client. These ads passed the normal stages of strategic planning (what to do), creative development (how to do it), production (casting call, photo/film shoot, editing), media planning (where to show the ads: street billboards, TV shows, magazines, newspapers, online), media buying (purchasing billboard space / TV commercial slots / pages in magazines). These ads didn’t simply come out of the blue. Everything was deliberate and at no stage did anyone raise an objection strong enough to stop the ads. Because sexism and objectification are fun, right? Had the ads discriminated against a racial minority, with racist stereotypes, the people at the ad agency would have likely been crucified. But women are a whole other target. Misogyny is so deeply ingrained in our culture that some of the most prestigious car manufacturers can get away with this:
Mercedes Benz… and you thought it was a classy brand. Think again.
And another class act by BMW – an underage girl in an overtly sexual pose, mouth open, sultry look, and the ad copy: “You know you’re not the first.” Bravo BMW!
BMW – “The Ultimate Attraction”:
Nissan:
(hilarious, right?)
WARNING: EXPLICIT AD ahead (sort of)
N.B. This ad is actually for an optometrist (it asks, “Do you need glasses”). But it still belongs to the Hall of Fame of offensive ads for so many reasons…
As for advertisements that portray men as bumbling idiots AND sexual objects? They simply do not exist. I dare you find an example…
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:
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.
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.
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 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.
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”:
