Have you seen this?!

Feminisiting/Teenagerie article

Awesome exchange and analysis on blogsite Feministing regarding interpersonal dynamics and potential for consciousness raising within the discussion of rape and blame.

Go on to read the Jamie Keiles article "Today I had to leave class to cry" to which this one refers.

Project Proposal

For my project I would like to look at attitudes toward abortion in cultures that are predominant within the inner city. For the purpose of this project I will narrow the focus to African Americans and Hispanics. I am interested in the cultural perspectives of abortion within these nationalities and how they affect the actual rate of abortions in these groups. I am also interested in seeing how and if the media plays a role in the rate of abortions within these groups. Recently, anti-abortion campaigns have released a set of advertisements that are geared toward minorities. These advertisements have become extremely controversial and I would like to explore them further.

For this project I will be writing a research paper, because I feel that writing is one of my strong suits. However, I would like to use pictures that I find to help illustrate and cultural ideas that I find, as well as the advertisements that have been in circulation. As of yet, I have not narrowed down specific resources that I would like to use for the paper. I would like to use statistical resources, as well as personal accounts.

Here is an example of the advertisements that I wish to explore "The Most Dangerous Place for an African American Child is in the Womb"

NOTE: Professor Cacoilo, I tried emailing this to you but it never went through. I am unable to attend class today since the weather as limited the transportation options in my neighborhood. I will bring in the hard copy to the next class.

The Barbie Complex Presentation - October 15, 2011

Alternative Media Presentation 10-22-2011

Other alternative media resources not included in presentation:

Projects/Campaigns: 
AMNESTY International : Stop Violence Against Women 
Women of Color Against Violence : INCITE!
Help women survivors of war : WomenforWomen
Global end to violence against women : V-Day
Free, safe late night rides for women and LGBT members : RightRides
Movement to end street harassment : iHollaBack
Redefining Manhood : CallToMen
Love your belly!! : TheBellyProject

Communities:
Covering women's issues, changing women's lives : Womensenews
Awareness, education, and activism : Feminist
Feminists & allies : Feministing 
Food, Fat, and Feminism : The F-Word
Pro-choice student network : FeministCampus

Publications: 
Asian-American Women : Audrey Magazine
African-American Women : Heart & Soul 
Amplifying teen voices through media : Teen Voices
Fresh feminism for girls and trans youth : Shameless

             On a daily basis, as a society, we are subject to thousands of advertisements a day. Our upbringing is infused with the marketing tactics of tens of thousands corporations trying to convince us to buy something, regardless of the collateral damage to our morals or ideals. In the piece, “Beauty and the Beast of Advertising,” Kilbourne makes a similar assertion, stating that advertisements might be “the most powerful educational force in society.” They truly influence so much of our youth, from what the latest trend is, to how we begin to perceive the opposite sex when the time comes and the teenage years hit. It’s important to teach our children to look at things objectively, and to learn from what they take in, rather than have it dictate how they think.

            The portrayal of women in modern media has always been a problem, and while their role in society has evolved greatly over the past century, their image and way of being perceived has also taken a drastic turn in the past few decades. Many years ago women were considered housewives, and subservient, domesticated partners, without a voice. After much struggle and perseverance, women carved their way out of that stereotype.

                                   

Women gained the right to vote, and, after Vietnam, had more than suitably replaced men in much of the workplace across the country. Images portraying women began to evolve too, and advertisements became less bold in their assertions against the power or ability of a woman.

However, more recently, the portrayal of the opposite sex in modern media has become infused with similar stereotypes, if not worse ones. Women must keep battling these ways of thinking. Nearly every media outlet that exists today paints women in the same light, an object of sexual desire. This can take many forms and isn’t always derogatory, but always achieves the same effect. Regardless of the intention behind the advertisement, a beautiful object is still an object. Kilbourne writes on the ideal woman in our society, relating that she is  "a mannequin, a shell. Conventional beauty is her only attribute... she has no lines or wrinkles... no scars or blemishes." The effect this has on girls growing up is staggering. It’s beyond comprehension, from a male point of view, trying to understand the role that society has laid out for the opposite gender. Those that are easily influenced soon become a majority, and then group mentality sets in. It suddenly becomes ok for girls to look at themselves the same way everyone else does, without any thought as to how they would like to be seen instead. Their definition of success and happiness becomes dependent on others, instead of whatever their own definition of those vague ideas may be.

The Playstation ad I chose for this blog post is refreshing because, while it portrays a woman in a motherly role, it also put another in the role of a doctor. The two images seem almost interchangeable, and the focus of the ad is the child and his enjoyment of the device, not the appeal of the women in it. The ad is a step forward, and shows that while women may be portrayed badly sometimes, there's hope that things are generally changing for the better.

Too much smoke in the Mirror.

Through the readings, most of the authors made similar reference on how women are only view though the male’s gaze. Women and young girls seem to get effect the most by the world of advertisement, while men are portrayed in a positive reflection. Even though some of the articles depicted men as incompetent or as a muscle head, women are portrayed far much worst then men. Women in advertisement are constantly being misrepresented through media and print. If people (especially young girls) are caution and educated about the beauty myth, instead of obsession over the non existing product a.k.a “the perfect you” then maybe there would be more inequality amount all individuals.

The best advertisement strategy is to promote more education towards young girls, and depict women in a positive point of view through mass media. I think young girls are manipulated into believing the beauty myth because they are constantly exposed to enormous amount of negative ads. In the article “Beauty and the Beast of Advertising”, Jean Kilbourne quotes “We are each exposed to over 1500 ads a day, constituting perhaps the most powerful educational force in society” (pp 121, line 4). When you think about the wasteful ads people are exposed to in our everyday lifestyle, you start to wonder is adverting a form of brainwash. Young girls would benefit a formal female gender class because they could think more logical and idealistic view on women instead a Barbie like image. I think its disbursing to learn that young girls don’t have enough positive roles models to encourage them to be successful scholars instead of the tired sex-pop-tart idol. Advertisements don’t seem to really care about creating or changing their approach towards women because it still continues to degrade women and lower their self esteem. Advertisers do acknowledge that young teenagers are the easiest target to exploit and are a marketable product. Jean Kilbourne’s Beauty and the Beast of Advertising, carefully explained “Adolescents are particularly vulnerable, because they are new and inexperienced consumers and are the prime targets of many advertisements. They are in the process of learning their values and roles and developing their self concepts….. Mass Communication has made possible a kind of nationally distributed peer pressure that erodes private and individual values and standard.” This ratification further concludes why young girls of all race and sexuality have to struggle to be part of an acceptable social group, because they aren’t enough money showing women an alternative lifestyle. Women also seem to suffer too much trial and errors in advertising because slogans offend humiliate women and portrayed them in an unintelligent matter. For instance, Cigarettes Company like Virginian Slim and Lucky Strikes were probably one of the most offensive ads toward women because they associate a deadly product to promote independent and weight loss. Douglas Kellner explained (Reading Images Critically Toward a Postmodern Pedagogy pp. 129) “In fact, Lucky Strikes carried out a successful advertising campaign in the 1930s which associated smoking with weight reduction (“Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet”) It is astonishing how women were fool into accepting this type of sexist ads and are seem formidable in any representation. I sure we think now how cheesy the Lucky strike slogan was, but the fact of the matter it was a successful campaign that encourage women to smoke cigarette instead of eating. Eating has become the number one enemy for young girls and women, because the pressure to be skinny has not change, or improves. Ads aren’t providing positive healthy lifestyle or prominent career choices.

Through my experience with the class discussion and articles, I started to question why many girls are not expose to media or aren’t CEO for major advertising companies. I was excited to see a production like “Real Grrl” encourages young girls to make and produce media. I was shock how many of my fellow classmates (including myself) wished this type of opportunity was available to us during our adolescents years. But still, even providing MORE positive influence and female gender education could prevent women over obsession on lemon scented products, and the artificial beauty.

Diversify It!

Credits: Fanta Girls

The goal of advertisements is to get you interested in their products, to make you know their name, colors, tag line, representatives, logos, and other useless information. Advertisement agencies are always aiming for the newest and innovative trends to capture audiences and customers- why do the results tend to circle around the same old concepts? The same type of models (white upper-middle-class, size zero, blonde) representing everyone, using photoshop to make the rare to the even rarer representation of ourselves, and the ability to copy and paste this image/concept anywhere and everywhere so everyone and their mother’s mother would recognize it (Douglas 11, Wolf 83). It’s unethical to have these companies to spend billions upon billions of dollars placing images promoting negative images/fictional portrayals of beauty everywhere and therefore unconsciously disciplining audiences to recognize the advertisement's display as the norm (Kilbourne 121). –If they’re advertising clothing, or anything else for an average person’s use- why is an un-average person promoting it?

Credits: HuntsManProducts

We as a society need to change the way we use space and advertisement. There should be no need to eliminate a specific ad, there should just be more variation. The goal to diversifying ads, their models, and concepts is to allow all sorts of people to identify an idea of who is in society and who can make it on to an "exclusive" advertisement- it seems like those who are chosen to model have that honor of being seen by everyone, and only these people with these specific qualifications can do it, leaving everyone with different qualities feeling unwanted. We need to represent the elderly, the disabled, the colored, the chunky, the glasses wearing kids, and so much more in a positive light.

After coming with more variations of ads that actually promote positive images and values, it’s time to take it to the streets and do that brain washing-like advertising where this image is posted everywhere. One way or another this positive image/concept will get to you, just like how those horrible ones do. I don’t really need to know that Pepto Bismol can help you with “Nausea, heartburn, indigestion, upset stomach, diarrhea.” On the other hand, it’ll be a good idea to remember that pink represents Breast Cancer awareness, and always be conscious about it. There are many diseases that go unknown without the media's assistance. -Red represents AIDS, but on a huge billboard, you might go ahead and think it’s a CocaCola ad. Point being, advocacy advertising should be promoted on a equal or higher level than products (Cortese 45).

In addition to plaguing the media space from prints, to radio, to television, to films- values that stick to us the best are learned at a young age. Aside from the media output- another way to stream information and increase it’s value is through stressing the importance in school. Why don’t we have classes and programs that addresses the wrong doings of advertisements? We need to identify those that hurt society with it’s dishonest portrayals and messages. The contradicting messages of what a person should be truly conflicts all who are unsure of their identity (Kilbourne 134). As of late, body image has become such a dilemma with both females and males –it’s mandatory to set the truth straight through reliable sources instead of just relying on magazines and product campaigns such as Real Beauty by Dove, that although positive, just isn't enough.

Above all it must be recognized that advertisements hold tremendous power in society. With it’s widespread and invasive nature- these small messages become big parts of how we identify with society. There comes a point where we try to separate ads from reality, making it two separate entities- when the real goal should be to alter fantasy-like ads to become reality (Wolf 73). We need real people representing ourselves, not ideal computer generated figures. All companies who have that money to spend on advertisements should take on the initiative to promote positive messages through their ads. We consume advertisements by the hundreds- daily, that time is valuable and should consist of beneficial and positive messages instead of those that want to make us feel incompetent (Kilbourne 121). It’s not going to be an easy task, but we must start somewhere to reform the world of advertisement, and essentially society's perception of beauty/the norm.

References:

Cortese. Construced Bodies, Deconstructing Ads: Sexism in Advertising.

Douglas, Susan. Introduction Where the Girls Are.

Kilbourne, Jean. The More You Subtract, The More You Add.
Kilbourne, Jean. Beauty and the Beast of Advertising.

Wolf. Culture.
Images:
Pepto Bismol - thetruthaboutbeauty.co.uk
Pink Ribbon - carolsutton.net

Mass Meda Awareness

Advertising messages are essentially everywhere, from the minute we open the morning newspaper, turn on the TV, to the ads on busses and trains, even when we walk from street to street, we are culturally bombarded with mainstream advertising, whose sole purpose is to manipulate the consumer by any means possible. Advertising agencies spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year worldwide to encourage, provoke, influence and manipulate people into a consumer lifestyle that has overwhelming consequences for the social and physical environment, through its wasteful overindulgence. We learn throughout the readings that marketing campaigns target a consumer’s insecurity and hold it as a vessel to ferry ideas of fraudulent desires and phony solutions. Therefore it cultivates unhappiness towards oneself that in turn, leads to consumption. At the end of the day when you had spent over $700 on the latest Louis Vuitton belt buckle, one should ask why did I really want this? This is a problem that plagues our consumerist society, yet this is a problem that can be addressed more appropriately though basic knowledge and guidance so our minds are keen to properly decipher and interpret an ads message, thus making us think a little bit more critical then one would do so normally.

Mass media advertising is absolutely ingenious yet wreck less in their approach to exploit a targeted consumer. Many use the very raw yet simple ideas that we as humans innately value. Due to the constant bombardment of what is deemed “socially acceptable”, advertisers exploit these values through sexism, classism, racism, beauty, and so much more. Cortese writes in her article “media advertising sells more then just products it sells values and cultural representations”. These companies have developed many techniques over the years to incite and provoke shoppers into buying their product. These techniques involve but are not limited to institutional advertising, gender display representations, advocacy advertising, and subvertising methods to attract people.

The first method is Institutional advertising, according to Cortese it is similar to bureaucratic propaganda, just as national governments use psychological warfare to bring an audience around a particular viewpoint, [companies] use this method to remind consumers that they have been and integral part of the community for a long period of time, and that they intent to continue the tradition, and thus establishes them as reputable and trusted company.

Gender display is another approach this one a little more controversial then institutional advertising. It uses visual images of men and women to grab the attention and persuade. Cortese states that the ad puts the viewer in a mindset that depicts the ways in which we “think” men and women behave and look and not the ways they actually behave and look. I thought the pictures in the Cortese article, showing societies views one the things that men do and things that women do (Fig 3.19), were very entertaining but ever so true. The media exploits these concepts in many of their ads thus further incorporating men as active heads of the household and women as passive homemakers that rely on men. Falling under these gender roles we see that media also plays on the perfect provocateur exploitation, this promotes a young beautiful and seductive female as a hollow shell and her beauty is the only attribute is her beauty. Yet women are not the only ones subjected to this type of exploitation, men now-a-days, are also exploited for there physique, as Cortese writes “muscularity for masculinity” a concept that portrays the perfect man as physically better specimens then women. However it was the idea of the “New Woman” that played an integral role in the exploitation of men. The “New Woman” is an interpretation of a female as more then just homemakers and puts them in at new frontiers of business, education, and empowerment. Thus forcing men to rely on physical attractiveness as a counter weight to balance the “New Woman.”

Cortese then touches base on Alcohol use, Advertising and violence against women not only in ads but in television and movies, that show an intimidated and fearful women as victims of violence, potential violence, or threat of violence thus representing a clear extension of gender inequality. The real tragedy kilbourne states is that “women internalize these stereotypes, learn their “limitations” thus establishing a [reoccurring] and self full-filling prophecy.

Few solutions have been brought up most notably considering taxation of advertising (Kellner 131), although it is a very bold and new approach that can potentially be effective I believe the solution is more basic then that. It is evident that there are problems facing our society and it’s filtering of mass media messages along a broad spectrum. Yet many do not even realize that this is even a problem. Therefore my approach would be more grassroots oriented, I believe that media filtering and deciphering should begin at the home front. Children are particularly vulnerable to mainstream advertising manipulation. Young children are increasingly the target of advertising and marketing because of the amount of money they spend themselves, the influence they have on their parents spending and because of the money they will spend when they grow up. Though this child targeted marketing previously only concentrated on candy and toys, it now includes clothes, shoes, even fast foods, even adult products such as cars and credit cards. Parents should educate their children at an early age so they can understand these concepts, as they get older. I believe that it should be taught in schools, and that advertising corporations should pay funding for these programs and classes, as they are the reasons to why these classes or programs exist in the first place. Media Awareness should be brought up with the same intensity as bullying, drugs, and sexually transmitted diseases.

I am not an object!

Many do not realize the effects that media has on the viewers. It’s as if we are being conditioned by the media to look and behave in a certain way. Advertisers decide what should be the look of a women, how she should dress, how her body should look, and even what her profession should be. As if we are dolls without any brain and so we need to be fashioned and told how to do it, because we are dumb!

These advertisements not only tell us how we should look and dress, but also tell us the level we are at comparing to a man. From some of the ads in Reading Images Critically - Douglas Kellner, women are seen as an object that has to surrender to the will of men. When men feel sexually active he goes to the women near him and she is to serve him or else will be forced weather she likes it or not. This shows no form of professionalism, is this what the media want?

Personally I myself never paid attention to how women are being portrayed in the media. But secretly in my teens I did want that type of skin, and dress in a way to attract. Relating to the documentary The Merchant of Cool, the girls were young and to little to understand the place we are given in the media, they “badly” want what the media tells them to be, as one girl said “I need to look good.” Girls in their early teens ask themselves if they are approachable. This type of “education” is what they get from what they see in the media.

Talk to you daughter before the beauty industry does. - Dove

Do you think I am fat?


What is the meaning of beauty, and who decides what beauty is? Why should I go through surgery to look like the person I am not? What are we teaching our future generation, that looks are more important than education? Billions of dollar are wasted in advertisement, while on the other hand our children can’t get a better education because we don’t have enough money to pay for education. According to the board foundation education 1.2 million students drop out of high school ever year, do anyone heed to this?

We’ve come to a point where we don’t care for humanity anymore but only dollar signs. Knowing the danger effects of smoking, the cigar industries couldn’t resist but to advertise cigar smoking as a form of masculinity and which also shows the men as a attraction for women. What’s even more absurd is that we live in a country where we “think” that it is a country of equality, while we are the victims of these crimes ourselves, and we don’t only do it to our people we also influence people all around the world. As Susan Douglas defined the characteristics of an American and of a Women, though the American is a Women but she still has a different definition for herself. Which shows that the definition of the American is the definition for men only.