|
|
MS.CELLANEOUS
-What?
-Just the Facts
-Word: Bi
-Women to Watch |
Diary
of a Slam Poet
National Poetry Slam champion and outspoken feminist shares
a year of her life on the road. By Alix Olson |
AD
SAVVY
In these two articles, we explore some of the ways ads
affect us.
Hooked on
Advertising
Cultural critic Jean Kilbourne takes on ads offers new
insight into the not-so-obvious messages lurking behind
the luster. By Clea Simon
Consuming Passions
Today's advertising execs and their big- business clients
are betting that consumers will buy products made by companies
that support social causes. Are the ads just talk, or
is there substance behind the slogans? By Dan Bischoff
|
| Book Reviews
On the Ms.
bookshelf
Saturday's
Child by Robin Morgan
The
Crimson Edge: Older Women Writing (Volume Two)
by Sondra Zeidenstein
Gun
Women by Mary Zeiss Stange and Carol K. Oyster
Her
Way by Paula Kamen
Feminism
is for Everybody by bell hooks
Black,
White and Jewish by Rebecca Walker
Prodigal
Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
EDITOR'S
PAGE
by Marcia Ann Gillespie
YOUR
HEALTH:
-The Latest on Tamoxifen
-Healthnotes
|
|
NEWS:
-In Poland, Feminism Is the News
-The Right's Stealth Tactics
-Gloria Steinem's Wedding Day
- Newsmaker: Aloisea Inyumba
- What Will Mexico's New Government Mean for Women?
- Opinion: Blaming the Messenger
- Clippings
|
UPPITY
WOMEN:
Elouise Cobell Takes on the Feds
FIRST
PERSON:
Aunt Jemima in the Mirror
TECHNO.FEM:
What's a Hacktivist?
SHE
SAYS:
The Body Shop's Anita Roddick
ARTS:
Shirin Neshat Sees Beyond the Veil
COLUMNS
by Daisy Hernandez, Patricia Smith, and Gloria Steinem
NO
COMMENT
|
|
SEX
AND POWER:
Is
the feminist movement stuck in mid-revolution? According
to this well-known lawyer and activist the answer is
yes. Now it's time to move on and harness our power.
|
| |
| |
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
-
3 -
|
| JUMP
TO PAGE: 1
2 3 4
|
|
In
some ways, Kilbourne's message seems simplistic. Haven't
we heard this before? Heard it so many times in so many
ways, in fact, that we're smart enough to see beyond
the Madison Avenue gloss? Yes, she agrees that we know
it all—but the ads keep on coming, and their influence
seems to be escalating. "Advertising is cumulative,
and it's mostly unconscious," says Kilbourne. Even when
we do not buy a product, she insists, at some level
we buy into the consumer mind-set, and that makes us
vulnerable to the $200 billion-a-year ad industry. We
are the biggest consumer society on the face of the
earth, and advertisers often apply tremendous pressure
to the media to adapt content. "I'm not saying that
people are brainwashed," says Kilbourne. "I'm not saying
that advertisers have absolute control or anything like
that. I'm just saying it is a powerful influence and
we need to take it seriously. It's a powerful influence
that's increasing in the culture."
|
|
|
SELLING
SEX
Sex
in advertising and the media is often criticized
from a puritanical perspective—there's too
much of it, it's too blatant, it will encourage
kids to be promiscuous, etc. But sex in advertising
has far more to do with trivializing sex than with
promoting it. The problem is not that it is sinful,
but that it is synthetic and cynical. This ad may
say that "you have the right to remain sexy," but
the subtext is "only if you look like this." The
woman in this ad is an object-available, exposed,
essentially passive. She has the right to remain
sexy, but not the right to be actively sexual. Just
as women and girls are offered a kind of ersatz
defiance through drinking and smoking that interferes
with true rebellion, so we are offered a pseudo-sexuality
that makes it far more difficult to discover our
own unique and authentic sexuality. How sexy can
a woman be if she hates her body? She can act sexy,
but can she feel sexy? How fully can she surrender
to passion if she is worried that her thighs are
too heavy or her stomach too round, if she can't
bear to be seen in the light, or if she doesn't
like the fragrance of her own genitals? -J.K.
|
|
| |
|
Kilbourne's
conviction springs from her own life experience. "I
had done some modeling after I graduated from college—those
were the days when it was very hard for women to get
work," she says. "I really hated modeling. At that time,
there were no words like objectification and sexual
harassment, but I knew that was what was happening to
me. That left me with a real interest in the power of
beauty." So Kilbourne began collecting ads and talking
to people about the effect such images were having on
women, on all of us. After recovering from alcohol and
tobacco addiction, she began to focus on the way those
drugs were marketed, targeted to men, to women, to children.
From the 1951 Marlboro ad that advised an overworked
mother to light up in order to calm down to Virginia
Slim's now-infamous co-opting of feminist imagery ("You've
come a long way, baby"), ads, she noticed, promised
a better self, a happier and more attractive self, if
only you bought the product. CONTINUE>>
|
| JUMP
TO PAGE: 1
2 3 4
|
| |
|
