Misogyny and Sexism in Advertising

[Gráinne]

Now, granted, I like Weight Watchers and I believe it's one of the best programs out there for eating healthy, not just "losing weight".

But this is in my craw. Jessica Simpson's voice intoning "Remember when life was simple and your job was to have fun?" I guess I feel that I'm not allowed to have fun until I lose weight to some magical number, and that as a female, I'm automatically supposed to diet. I feel badly for the little girl who will hit some age and boom-time to diet! And eating healthy is a drudge. (so it seems to imply).

Ever notice that all weight-loss commercials are focused on and star only girls/women? Men's commercials are about building muscle, losing fat and getting stronger, with no reference to weight. Weight is just a number, but as a woman in this country, you'd better be the "right" number.

[Kobi]

Beautiful women posed as dead bodies are an advertising campaign staple, including the new Marc Jacobs shoot starring Miley Cyrus. Why does fashion fetishise the female corpse?

For once it's not the image of Miley Cyrus herself that is controversial. It's the woman lying next to her. In a new advertising campaign for Marc Jacobs, Miley and two female models pose on a moonlit beach, Miley sitting up, staring moodily into the middle distance, a woman standing behind her, while another lies on the sand. This model isn't reclining happily, or curled up asleep; she is flat on her back, hair partially covering her face, with the stiff, sightless demeanour of a body in the morgue. A beautifully dressed one, of course.

This ad campaign was released a day after the latest cover of US magazine Entertainment Weekly, which shows the two stars of upcoming film Gone Girl lying on a gurney. Ben Affleck is fully dressed and alert, curled awkwardly around Rosamund Pike, who is in a bra and slip, pale, wide-eyed with surprise, very much dead. A tag is tied carefully around her toe.

This isn't the first time dead women have been used in fashion or entertainment, of course. Over the years female corpses, especially beautiful female corpses, have become a staple of fashion shoots, advertising campaigns and TV shows – with sexual and fatal violence against women a favourite of TV programmes looking to boost a waning audience or build a new one.

Last year Vice magazine decided to illustrate their Women in Fiction issue with a fashion shoot depicting a range of well-known writers in the throes of killing themselves, or trying to: Sylvia Plath kneeling in front of an oven; Virginia Woolf standing in a stream, clutching a large stone; Dorothy Parker bleeding heavily into a sink. The fashion credits were included in full, down to the pair of tights used as a noose.

A 2006 Jimmy Choo ad showed a woman apparently passed out in a car boot, a man in dark glasses sitting beside her, brandishing a spade. In 2007 W magazine ran a fashion story featuring model Doutzen Kroes that ticked every box of objectification – multiple images of her seemingly passed out, semi-naked; one in which her lifeless hand held a teddy bear.

That same year, America's Next Top Model illustrated this trend with an episode in which the contestants had to pose as if they'd just been killed. This prompted surreal comments from the judges. One woman, posed as if she'd just been brutally stabbed, was criticised for not looking dead enough. Another, posed as if she had fallen from a tall building, was told "death becomes you, young lady". Still another, covered in deep bruises at the bottom of a flight of stairs, was told: "the look on your face is just extraordinary. Very beautiful and dead." The show could hardly have gone further in illustrating fashion's fetishisation of the female corpse.

This obsession with death isn't so surprising, when you consider it as the obvious and ultimate end point of a spectrum in which women's passivity and silence is sexualised, stylised and highly saleable. Over the past few years, there have been a number of brilliant projects that have shown the eye-popping strangeness of how women are posed for the camera, contorted into positions which make them look simultaneously ridiculous, weak, sexually available and highly vulnerable.

In 2011, for instance, Spanish artist Yolanda Domínguez created Poses, a project in which ordinary women reproduced model poses in everyday settings. One reclined awkwardly in a flower bed; another stood on the street, legs apart, bent forward, sucking her fingers; another posed, hip cocked, a clutch bag held dramatically to her forehead. People all around them gawped and did double takes.

Last year, a Swedish project showed the difference between the way men and women are posed in the notoriously creepy American Apparel ads, with a man gamely copying some of the female poses favoured by the company. Suddenly the incredible weirdness of a woman crouched on all fours, naked from the waist down, back arched to show off a denim shirt was completely clear.

A similarly effective gender swap was carried out by cartoonist Kevin Bolk, who decided to transform an Avengers poster so that all the men were posed as the one female character, played by Scarlett Johansson, had been on the genuine poster. The male characters immediately went from looking active, engaged and ready to defend themselves to being little more than display vehicles for their own buttocks.

Do people actually want these images? Do they want violence against women to be sexualised? There are some strong signs that they don't, from all the women who speak out against these images (Vice magazine ended up apologising and removing their fashion spread from the web as a result), to the news item, published last week, which showed that films that pass the Bechdel test – which offer at least two female characters, who have a conversation, about something other than a man –outperform their counterparts at the box office. Last year, of the 50 highest-grossing films in the US, those that passed the Bechdel test earned $176m at the box office, while those that didn't averaged $116m.

Still, there's a reason these images proliferate. If the sexualised stereotype of a woman in our culture is passive and vulnerable, the advertising industry has worked out that, taken to its logical conclusion, there is nothing more alluring than a dead girl.

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The TOS prohibit pictures of dead bodies. The full article and picture links can be found here.

[Kobi]

[Happy_Go_Lucky]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/ar...#ixzz2qebOWIbD

"The company has also come under fire several times in the past for featuring half-naked models who appear to be under-aged on its website".

The wienie-bag perv who runs this company has a long and sordid history of fuck-nuttery, all geared against women.

Please do not view the entire article if you have a queasy tummy. After all....one can not UNSEE something.

[Kobi]

A leading advocate for spotlighting how the mainstream media contributes to the underrepresentation of women in positions of power and influence in America, Caroline Heldman offers straight talk and an often-startling look at the objectification of women in our society. She illustrates how it has escalated, how we have become inured to its damaging effects and what we can do individually and collectively to demolish the paradigms that keep us from a better world.

New objectification culture has emerged in the past 10 years, and it’s marked by two things. One is an increase in the number of sexually objectifying ads in television, movies, videogames, music videos, magazines, and other mediums. The second advertising component is that the images have become more extreme, more hyper sexualized.

Why are we experiencing this now? It can really be boiled down to technology. New technology has increased the sheer number of images that you are exposed to everyday. In the 70’s, we saw about 500 ads a day. Now, we see about 5,000 ads a day.

Children, those ages 8 to 18, are spending an average of eight hours a day hooked up to devices where advertisers can reach them. What do advertisers do? They cut through the clutter with increased emphasis on violence, hyper violence, and hyper sexualized.

[Kobi]

[Kobi]

Noir -- a weekly program aired by the National Rifle Association as part of its efforts to reach a younger audience -- has run two segments that fetishize an assault weapon as an attractive woman.

Over the past year the NRA has launched a number of initiatives to engage with women, minorities, and younger Americans. Noir, a Sunday web series hosted by popular gun blogger turned NRA News commentator Colion Noir, is packaged for a Millennial audience, although the show has been widely mocked by critics as a phony and out-of-touch attempt at messaging.

A segment during the June 15 edition of Noir opened with a black-and-white scene of a stylishly-dressed woman standing in an alley. Doing voice-over work, Noir appeared to describe the woman, ranging from her clothing ("Her Jimmy Choo's can't be comfortable, but you'd never know it"), to her intellect ("Chess, yeah it's a men's game, but when she plays, men pay"), to her actions ("Flirts more than you can handle too. She's the kind to tell the bartender how to make her drink").

In the final shot, the woman is seen holding a Heckler & Koch MR556 assault weapon and Noir reveals he was talking about the firearm the whole time.

NOIR: Why is she alone on this dark street? On this cold night? You care, but she doesn't. Her Jimmy Choo's can't be comfortable, but you'd never know it. Unaffected elegance. Too cool elegance. Not for you elegance, you say. There's got to be something wrong with her; that attitude, high maintenance, hiding something. She's taller than you can handle. Flirts more than you can handle too. She's the kind to tell the bartender how to make her drink. And Chess, yeah it's a men's game, but when she plays, men pay. Say you don't like her, until she looks your way. She's not easy and she's not flawless. But she's never wasted her time thinking about it. She is the HK MR556.

As Noir explained in the following segment, "It's like the words really do mean what I'm saying in the video. The HK MR556 is that gun that if -- it's like that girl who's unbelievably attractive, she has this presence about her that seems untouchable and she's not apologetic about her beauty. But because of that it's easy to -- and she's largely out of a lot of people's leagues." One of his guests took the comparison further, responding to Noir's description of the "heavy" and "expensive as hell" gun by saying, "sounds like some of my recent experiences in Vegas like this past weekend ... you still want to have fun with them and they're a little dangerous." Noir's co-host Amy Robbins laughed, saying "Oh my god."

Earlier this season Noir used a similar format of objectifying women by reducing them to descriptions of assault weapons in an advertisement for manufacturer Daniel Defense. Gun manufacturer Mossberg and Daniel Defense are the two primary sponsors of NRA Freestyle, which airs Noir and other NRA web series and is the home of the NRA's lifestyle blog NRA Sharp.

The Daniel Defense advertisement, which aired during Noir earlier this season, also features a voice-over of Noir as he seems to describe a woman. At the end of the ad, however, it is revealed that Noir was instead describing the M4-A1 assault weapon:



This ad was panned by Wonkette, which pointed out it aired days after a California man went on a killing spree reportedly motivated by the killer's hatred of women:

Hey, hip cool millennial hipsters! Noir, the NRA's hip cool new web series for the Youngs, is going all Lifestyles of the Sleek and Carefully Waxed in this exciting ad touting the merits of a Perfect Companion:

She knows that she's made it... comfortable alone, steady among others... she leaves you sad for all of the moments you missed, but grateful for the thrills ahead ... because hidden underneath, is an adventure. She is: the Daniel Defense M4-A1

Hahaha, you think he is talking about a LADY, but he is actually talking about a GUN! Seems pretty classy, just a few days after a guy used a gun to get revenge on women who he treated as objects.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/06...to-guns/199743