This Just In! Ad Industry Exploits Women and Implies Sexual Violence is Funny!

(Warning: graphic images follow.)

Okay, just kidding, that’s old news. And yet it’s not.

Virgin Mobile USA thought better of a clearly inappropriate holiday ad that had gone up online after Richard Branson was like, “Um, no.”

When I think “Christmas Surprise” I think “Chloroform your partner”. In all seriousness, though… I get such a kick out of Mad Men because the absurdly misogynist caricatures of the advertising moguls of Madison Avenue seem exactly that: absurd. But then one realizes: they are still making ads. Only now some people have the good sense to get pissed off when those ads attempt to derive humor from the suggestion of sexual violence.

On the production side of things, however, seemingly little has changed. Take American Apparel ads, for example. I have despised AA ads since their store came to East Lansing while I was in undergrad there. This was how they debuted their new store to Michigan State University students back in 2005.

These ads were banned by the ASA in the UK, as they were considered exploitative and practically pornographic. Getting banned is nothing new for AA. A visit to the AA website reveals that this is not just the theme of their outdoor and print ads; virtually every single [female] item for sale on the site is model in the same pornographic fashion.

For whom are the commodities in these ads intended? Women: does this ad make you want to buy this t-shirt? Why or why not?

These ads scream: MALE GAZE.

American Apparel has long claimed that their ads are unique, progressive, and inventive, because they portray women who are not necessarily professional models, who are not airbrushed or digitally perfected. (Apparently they believe that this promotes self-esteem.) If anything, all that says is that any woman can be turned into a personality-less fuck object. Now that’s progressive.

What has always struck me about AA ads are their resemblance to pornography: vapid, inane expressions, sexually-laden yet childlike behaviors, suggestive postures, faces off an assembly line. How can these ads claim to be a celebration of the natural female body when a) all of these women are of a very particular look, shape, and size and b) their target audience is voyeuristic men and insecure women?

AA is telling us that fat or flat are both repulsive, even “natural” women require makeup, and the only hair you should have is on your head.

I suppose all of this is unsurprising given the kind of person AA’s founder is.

There is nothing unique, progressive, or inventive about what AA does. The “Mad Men” were doing it long before AA ever arrived, and they’ll be doing it long after it’s dead.

Make yourself heard with a survey.

Prometheus (review)

I’ve had a long hiatus, I realize. Several reasons for that, but in the meantime I have been doing something. Perhaps not much of merit, but anyways… Here’s a brief critique of Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s latest film.

Plot spoilers follow.

via Rotten Tomatoes

A deep-space vessel millions of light years from Earth stops on an uncharted satellite to search for something of imminent value to humankind. Our protagonist is the leader of a crew of scientists, a spunky, strong-willed brunette, attractive, with a dazzling IQ to boot. If this sounds like a new spin on Alien, I’d have to agree. Just the first of many gripes I have about this film.

Aside from the distracting scientific improbabilities of this Ridley Scott film, there are a myriad other reasons why Prometheus leaves one feeling dissatisfied at the end. It plays on an all-too-familiar sci-fi trope of old rich white dude wants something fantastic (in this case, eternal life), hires a team of scientists to take him beyond the unknown to get it, and disaster strikes in predictable fashion.

In that sense, Prometheus has done nothing new. But like basically every Coldplay album, Ridley Scott films abide by a simple principle: if it’s a good trope, keep reusing it. I can live with that, except that he doesn’t bother to shake up the ingredients. It’s as if this movie were made in the same era as Alien: predominantly white cast, stereotyped female characters (apparently to counterbalance the protagonist?), and a plot based in the mythos of Patriarchy.

The only non-white characters are three crew members who hardly leave the ship. Only the captain (Idris Elba) has any amount of lines, and lucky him, he’s given the ones that reveal Scott has not much advanced his thinking on female characters. Charlize Theron is wasted as an increasingly disinteresting overseer, hypercompetitive and determined in a way that is quickly undermined by the captain. After trying to pick her up, he says she must be a robot for refusing him– which apparently gets under her skin enough that she obliges him: “My room. Ten minutes.” I didn’t watch this in the theater, but I’m guessing that part was supposed to elicit a laugh.

That is what it is; the truly bothersome part of this film is that the alien beings from whom we are supposedly descended (they having been to Earth many times over the past millenia, disseminating their advanced DNA) are all Caucasian and all male. Whaaaaaat? I was following until that point. Sometimes it just jumps out at you, how in love with itself the Patriarchy is… Mankind was born of the DNA of a superior, male-dominated (perhaps exclusively male) alien race whose individuals look like giant Klan members. So much for modern anthropology’s out-of-Africa theory…

I love sci-fi, and I am more than willing to entertain far-flung absurdities for the sake of a good story. But you can’t have both a tired trope and a unrealistic plot that doesn’t even have imaginative appeal. Good-night…

Fresh Bites

Olympic archery is cool!

Kawanaka received a bronze model for her part on the women’s team in archery.

The commentators…not so much. One of them (a Brit whose name I haven’t been able to lay my hands on) kept referring to Kaori Kawanaka of Japan as “the Japanese girl”, while her Russian competitor was simply “the Russian”; yet all of the male archers were referred to by their, er, names (such as Marco Galiazzo, Michele Frangilli and Mauro Nespoli of the Italian team, whom he called by their last names).

I thought commentators received training about that sort of thing? Not that it’s needed; most people probably don’t notice it as it’s so taken for granted.

From ESPN, a great article on the hypercompetitiveness of kids’ sports. Since ESPN is kinda an authority on these things, I appreciate their position: kids should be having a least as much fun as they are focused on winning.

Also, people really really do not know what rape is. Really. Men who rape, women who rape, the people who are raped, and a large number of bystanders– people are very confused about how to define rape. (That’s why I’m glad I have such a simple, straightforward definition, though admittedly rape is much more than a physical phenomenon.)

Pussy Rioters get jailed in Russia for blaspheming god Putin and being feminist (which really are the same thing, in fact).

A fun post on English language idioms.

Michiganians compete in the London 2012 Games!

An interesting blogger with a knack for limericks.

The Guardian has this cool chart which shows LGBT equality/lack thereof in the States.

And queers are going Alice Paul on MI politics in metro-Detroit.

(I know nobody cares except CELTA trainees and applied linguistics nerds, but this phonemic chart “keyboard” is so neat! And it’s saving my life, since MS Word is stupid and doesn’t have all the necessary symbols for writing in phonemic script, unless you know all the magic key combinations.)

Get the Vote Out, Kampuchea

The first weekend in June, commune elections were held across the nation as the rallying, parading, badgering, bribing, and flag-waving came to a head, and finally to a close. I was not sorry to see it go. It was all a bit much: Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) paying for the most renown (and expensive) comedians to dance around in clown wigs while wearing CPP tees, and CPP supporters parading around the killing fields with their banners– a sad, ironic scene. (Remember, Hun Sen was Khmer Rouge, though he didn’t kill nobody, of course.)

Click the link below to see photos and the rest of the post.

I’m Not Commodity

For some unexplainable reason, I woke up at 5 this morning with R.E.M.’s “King of Comedy” (from the Monster album) stuck in my head. Obviously that means I need to write about the commodification and objectification of women.

Let’s start with objectification. Objectification is simply the process of recreating or using a person as a thing. We do this all the time. Some time ago, a friend told me that I was objectifying them by resting my head on them; I had turned them into a pillow. It is objectification to lean on someone when exhausted, as if they are a crutch. It quickly becomes apparent that some objectification is fairly mundane or benign, and other kinds of objectification are harmful. Sexual objectification is an obvious example of this.

Sexual objectification means turning a person into an object, accessory, or tool for sex. If you like sex in which either you or your partner is not an active participant, not giving and receiving pleasure mutually, then sexual objectification is probably gratifying to you. If sex is more than you using another person as a means to an end (your own sexual satisfaction), or being used to this end, then this kind of objectification is problematic.

The traditional view of heterosexual sex is deeply entrenched in objectification. The man is the pursuer, the initiator; he is necessarily aggressive, maybe even forceful. The woman is the pursued, the “end goal”, the object; she is passive, submissive, although in many ideal fantasies she also secretly wants to be pursued and caught. This view is reinforced in mass media the world over, in magazines, TV shows, movies, music videos, books, advertisements, video games. It is no wonder that lots of boys and young men are both confused and resolute about their understanding of a girl or woman who says no as just playing a role, and of girls and women who say yes as breaking that role (that is, as being sluttish).

Sexual objectification unavoidably sets the stage for the commodification of sex. Commodification is the process of recreating or portraying someone or something as a commodity– a good, an object for consumption. The ways in which sex is commodified still conform neatly to traditional views of heterosexual sex, which are also patriarchal. In this situation, men are the subjects and women are the objects. Patriarchy holds that sexual pleasure is naturally (or should be) centered around men; there is an emphasis on the uncontrollable nature of male sexual desire, whereas women are either passive recipients of this desire, or objects used to cater to it.

Women, specifically, have long been commodified as sexual objects (and men have, too, in a different fashion and to different ends). We aren’t just used to sell things, but we are things; we are figuratively “on sale” for consumption all the time. Although women are hypersexualized in this process of commodification, as individuals they are stripped of their own sexuality. If an object has a perspective on its own sexuality, its sexual identity or desires, it is in danger of becoming real, a subject. Commodification thus also means the smothering or eradication of female subjectivity.

I think a lot of men find all of this difficult to swallow. On the one hand, I guess I can see why it would be challenging to view things from such a different perspective– if you have always been the buyer, the consumer, there has probably never been much reason or incentive to view things from the perspective of the good/commodity. On the other hand, I think men can understand this perfectly; a large number of them are sexually objectifying and commodifying females all the time. I have a large number of very close guy friends who would adamantly deny this, but even if they truly see all human beings as, well, human beings, they surely experience their peers doing this much of the time.

What surprises me is when men have absolutely no qualms about doing this blatantly and shamelessly in front of women. I think this is because they feel either there is nothing wrong with it, or that there will be no consequences for doing it. For example, I was fundraising outside of a supermarket (for a project to end gender-based violence, no less) not too long ago, and I was observing a security guard as he was…observing a young woman coming out of the store. She was loading her groceries into a tuk tuk. She was wearing a dress, though by American standards I can’t say it was “too short” or what have you. The security guard was standing not far from her, staring at her– no, not staring at her, but staring at her behind. His stare was long and open, and at one point he even licked his lips. I had been talking to him earlier about the project I was helping fundraise for, so I felt it was not too out of place for me to ask, “What are you doing?” His answer was phrased completely innocently: “She’s a beautiful girl, why shouldn’t I look? Why is she wearing that dress if she doesn’t want me to look?”

This is an argument that I’ve heard time and again. Women secretly desire the male pornographic gaze on them. It’s what compels women and girls to wear make-up, to dress like the models on magazine covers, ultimately to sexualize themselves. Under the surface, all women really want to appeal to male sexual desire.

If that woman wanted that security guard to stare at her while licking his lips, I’ll eat my hat.

But that’s besides the point. This idea of women’s secret desire for men to visually consume them is based on a much more sinister myth: the idea that women secretly want men to fuck them. This sounds so absurdly egotistic and narcissistic as to be unbelievable, but when I look around myself I can see how it sort of…makes sense, in a sort of droll, male-centered way.

In high school I had a friend whose room was covered with large, glossy posters of Playboy Bunnies. There was one at the head of his bed that I can’t seem to forget; whenever I think about this person, I inevitably think of this poster. In it, a typical white, blonde “Bunny” is positioned on the floor with her butt high in the air, her knees bent, and she is propped up on her elbows. She is looking at the camera with an ecstatic, childish expression, and she is wearing nothing but bubbles. Yes, only soap bubbles, on her breasts and her crotch. I remember feeling horribly uncomfortable when I would go to this friend’s house to play video games with him and our other friends– all of whom were Good Christian Boys who regularly attended church and youth group. And stuff. Only one of my guy friends had the nerve to ask him if it wasn’t such a great idea to put up posters of mostly naked women on your walls– wouldn’t God be offended? (God definitely would be offended, since the Christian God hates women, after all. Ho ho ho, surely I’m just kidding…)

When I look around myself right at this moment, I am in an internet cafe in which every computer besides this one is occupied by a young man or boy. I am tempted to check each screen to see how many of them are watching porn, but I don’t want to get kicked out. Don’t worry, most of the younger guys are just playing WoW… Well, I guess that’s sort of the same as watching porn, isn’t it? Anyway, on the walls are posters advertising various Khmer and other Asian websites, mostly for games. Almost all of them feature partially-naked women, even the cartoon ones. The one behind me features two realistic-looking cartoon women with guns posed between two bulky men in armor; both women have huge breasts and long, skinny bodies. One is wearing a low-cut top with her midriff showing, and the other is wearing shiny black leather (she sorta looks like a dominatrix with that nazi hat on).

I could describe the other posters in here, but I won’t bother. You get the idea. Anyway, from your own experience, you already have an idea, I’m sure. Just looking around us at other people, at billboards and posters, at book covers and album covers, at music videos… We are constantly being inundated by this shit, all the time. Taking all this in, it isn’t hard to see why girls and women are so easily recreated as personality-less, consumable objects devoid of agency.

Perhaps the absolute worst part is that it is not only men who recreate and consume women as sex objects, but women recreate and consume women as sex objects, as well. Actually I think that’s why it is such an immense challenge to confront and negate these processes of commodification and objectification. Women and girls commodify themselves, early on and often for their entire lives. We hypersexualize and objectify our bodies, our sexual identities, but to what end? Ultimately it seems entirely dissatisfying, time-consuming, and hurtful. The results are a preoccupation with unattainable “beauty” standards, self-loathing of our own persons, and jealousy and contempt for other women whom we perceive as surpassing our own efforts. If you fail, all you get is some really low self-esteem; if you succeed, you get to be a sexually-consumable object for male-centered pleasure, which really only holds if you are available for consumption 24/7. Congratulations.

What I would like for us to do, then, is to reject our own commodification. Question yourself, question others, question culture, when you feel compelled to do something, go somewhere, dress some way, say something. I don’t believe this is easy, but I have learned multitudes about myself through such self-reflection and critical thinking of my surroundings. But it is as they say: once you’ve seen, you can’t un-see. Maybe ignorance is bliss, but transcendence is better.

I’m not king of comedy,
I’m not your magazine,
I’m not your television,
I’m not your movie screen
I’m not commodity
I’m not commodity

[R.E.M., "King of Comedy]

p.s. This is a really aesthetically-shit but highly informative website on some particulars of how women are portrayed as sex objects in certain media.

p.s.s Post on the sexual commodification of men forthcoming.