Last week, I was in Amsterdam for IDFA – the biggest film festival in the documentary world. In between film screenings and networking events, I would walk around town indulging in my favorite activity: street photography. What struck me the most was the ubiquity of ads that objectified both men and women: they were strikingly similar to those that I see every day around Paris. I somehow didn’t expect to find this in the Netherlands, a country that consistently ranks in the top 10 of gender equality nations and that is far more progressive and down to earth than France.

A couple of examples that were plastered all around town:

I’m thinking of starting a regular feature on this blog, posting offensive ads that I see around town (Paris, that is). Thoughts/suggestions?

"Snow Queen Palace" from the Early Learning Centre

The UK Telegraph recently ran an article about Pink Stinks, an organization founded by my friends Abi and Emma Moore, that “challenges the culture of pink which invades every aspect of girls’ lives.”

Pink Stinks just launched a campaign against Early Learning Centre, asking the toy retailer to stop pinkification and gender-stereotyping of children’s toys.

Some interesting quotes from the Telegraph article:

The campaign has been backed by Ed Mayo, the former government “consumer tsar” and author of Consumer Kids, How Big Business is Grooming our Children for Profit.

He said: “There may be worse things to worry about, but I feel this colour apartheid is one of the things that sets children on two separate railway tracks. One leads to higher pay, and higher status and one doesn’t.”

[...]

“Why on earth do girls need to have a globe in pink?” said Mr Mayo. “Does it ultimately lead to the 15 per cent pay gap suffered by women further down the line?. That’s far too simplistic, but I feel gender roles are becoming polarised far too early on.”

Some fascinating trivia about the color pink and child play:

[B]efore World War II pink was more usually associated with boys, while blue – traditionally the colour of the Virgin Mary – was linked with girls.

Links:

The Telegraph: “Pink toys ‘damaging’ for girls” (full article)

Pink Stinks : The Campaign for Real Role Models (official site)

Follow Pinks Stinks on Twitter

File under: Duh! Should we be surprised?

From today’s Telegraph (UK):

Babies’ eye colour, skin tone – and even the fat creases on their arms – are altered before the images are put on glossy magazine front covers.

Politicians and industry experts described the practice as “shocking” and said it would put further pressure on parents who wanted their babies to be perfect.

Full article here.

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.

“The Nikon S60. Detects up to 12 faces.”

The campaign was produced by the ad agency Euro RSCG/Singapore.

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:

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.

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.

Barbie may be turning 50 today, but the doll it was modeled on, its doppelganger, is actually a bit older than that: she’s almost 54. And everybody has forgotten her birthday. Poor Lilli!

Ruth Handler saw a Bild Lilli doll while vacationing in Switzerland with her kids, snatched up three of them, and brought them back to California, determined to copy the doll and sell it on the American market. Little did she know that Bild Lilli was actually a gag gift, a novelty item, sold in bars and tobacco shops and meant for an adult public. It was the sort of present men would give each other with a wink – a toy meant to titillate. Men would place Bild Lilli dolls in their cars – on their dashboard or hang them from their rearview mirrors, on a little swing.

Lilli’s history goes back a bit further. Before being manufactured as a gag gift, she had been a character in a comic strip created by Reinhard Beuthien for the German tabloid Bild-Zeitung. All her stories revolved around fashion & appearance, staying out late, and sleeping with old, rich men. In short, Lilli was an unabashedly sexual, proud gold-digger. 

Barbie kept the looks – down to a tee – but instead of flaunting her sexuality, she focused on looks and shopping – something far more “innocuous” for parents.

Now, watch these two videos:

Talking Barbie – 1968 (already discussed on this blog)

And a spot-on, biting parody of Barbie dolls from the Simpsons (via Jezebel.com):

Lisa, you rock

Another recent achievement by Barbie – which was not discussed by Mattel? This year, she won a prestigious TOADY award! Barbie Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader won the Worst Toy of the Year Award – handed to her by the CCFC, the Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood. Read more about it here.

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”).

There is an interesting article by the amazing Claire Mysko on the subject: “How to Help Girls Resist the Pressure to be “Supergirls”

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.

Take that, Mattel.