The Media Education Foundation is one of my favorite organizations: they produce and distribute “documentary films and other educational resources to inspire critical reflection on the social, political, and cultural impact of American mass media.”
Generation M, a documentary about misogyny in media and culture, touches a lot of my film’s themes.
Check out the film’s trailer on the official Generation M page at MEF. Highly highly recommended.
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:
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!
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.
The Media Education Foundation is one of my favorite organizations: they produce and distribute “documentary films and other educational resources to inspire critical reflection on the social, political, and cultural impact of American mass media.”
