Wikileaks: Revolutionizing Investigative Journalism

I came upon wikileaks about a month ago through the social bookmarking site called reddit.com. I chose wikileaks because they represent a true break from traditional and mainstream media. In the first sense, they break away from even traditional news form in that there is pure user driven. In the latter that they are not affiliated with any major news conglomerate.

Wikileaks is a Swedish based site that allows users to anonymously post incendiary, encrypted information. Now while there have been sites that have done just that (ie. Cryptome, The Drudge Report etc.) none have gone the legal, moral and journalistic lengths to protect whistle-blowers. Wikileaks' hosting service, PRQ, provides extremely secure hosting. Additionally, Wikileaks servers are in undisclosed locations and utilize military grade encryption. They vigorously protect the anonymity of the whistle-blowers, making them a haven for Chinese dissidents, employees of corporate conglomerates, military personnel and U.S. government employees. Wikileaks is now working in conjunction with the Icelandic government to draft and pass legislation that will fully protect whistle-blowers.



Very little is known how the site operates internally. The names of staff persons or board members have never been revealed. Only one person continues to speak on behalf on the organization, Julian Assange. Julian Assange has been the face of wikileaks when many a leak has garnered media attention and scrutiny. A few of the leaks include: Climategate, Palin hacked email, Guantanamo Bay Procedures, toxic dumping in Africa, and the collapse of Kaupthing Bank (pdf warning for last link). Finally, one their most shocking leaks is the just released 39-minute long video of an Apache helicopter shooting down what appeared to be unarmed civilians and two Reuters journalists.

The work that Wikileaks has done is extraordinary. However, it is not the shocking content that makes them so extraordinary. I do not want to downplay the importance of the work their doing in saying that the content is not what is at the heart of this website. What makes this site extraordinary in the world of media and alternative media is that they have become a clearing house of information. As a result of their leaks citizens, journalists and governments have tuned in and are doing things about it. Thanks to their leaks further investigation into climatologists reports were questions (and subsequently cleared), what would've been our Vice President was discredited, legislation was passed to severely regulate the banks like Kaupthing of Iceland, and further investigation was conducted into the dumping of toxic chemicals off the coast of Africa.

Now as wonderful as this organization is, they are a non-profit who's only revenue stream is donations. At the moment their site is managed by volunteers, their equipment was donated and their legal fees (which dear god in heaven are expensive!) are paid by a surprising mix of old media (IE. AP and The LA Times). To keep the site running they must collect €600,000 if the volunteers were paid. Some believe that the latest leak (especially the way in which the leak was exposed) show that Wikileaks is so strapped for cash they are resorting to the same sensationalistic tricks performed by the main stream media. I suggest everyone take a look at the video.

Watching this video is something I'd like to not repeat again. For obvious reasons, but also for something deeper. With new media forms taking shape like wikileaks, have we become so accustomed to the filtered, spinned and packaged media that we can't make an opinion of our own. I'm not talking about that immediate gut level reaction to something, I'm talking of an informed, well-thought out opinion of a piece of news. No matter how clever Jon Stewart or Rachel Maddow is, no matter how much I can agree with them I find myself seeing them as baby food. Easy to chew, easy to digest, it agrees with your just fine but does it sustain you? Does it challenge your heart and your mind? Or does it just reaffirm and repackage what you always thought? I thought the news was suppose to be new.

Old Person's Guide to "No Homo"

Old Person's Guide to "No Homo"

Laughing at Beauty

Group Presentation by: Johanna Rodriguez, Katherine Pysher, and Kelvin Pichardo

ADS

In the film Kate and Leopold (2001) starring Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman, Meg Ryan’s character sums up advertising by saying “When he says the lines you think that if you eat his margarine, maybe your hips will shrink.” In advertising you are not just selling a product, you are selling a lifestyle. The issue I find in the images we looked at in class is that the lifestyle they are selling is one that perpetrates the idea that “real men” follow their primal instincts and need to dominant by force. Personally, I believe this sentiment to be insulting to both men and women, but at the same time I understand why it works. In our capitalistic society we spend half the day sleeping and a third or more of the day forced to play a cog in someone else wheel. There is little to no outlet for individuality when the assembly line is the most effective form of business. Then these downtrodden see ads and films where a man is getting respect and envy from his peers and obsessive attention from his conquests. It natural to then attempt to emulate the qualities that made that man stand out. What the advertising communities need to do is show the man who is at the center of attention as considerate.

A new way of seeing

I am not an advertising professional but I think that the way to change things would be to create a new advertising language. Stop to sell perfection because it is not real. Life is not perfect, we aren´t perfect, we are just human. Here is the solution : we have to sell that you can be fat, slim, tall, short, ugly, pretty, whatever,it doesn´t matter, with your strengths and weaknesses you are special, just because it is you. Sell individuality not as something selfish but as something to reinforce our personality against the idea of becoming a mass of false perfection.
One week ago I was speaking with a friend, who is intelligent, charismatic,talented and has wonderful grades, I always though and still think he is going to have a really nice future so he was telling me that he had known someone by the internet and now this person was coming to visit him. He was concerned because when he saw pictures of this person, he realized that the other was more handsome than him, so he figured that the person would be disappointed and decided not to meet him. It is incredible for someone who is cute, he may not be a top model but this isn't important if you really connect with someone. It is sad that my friend lost a wonderful opportunity to meet a person because he doesn't look like aesthetics canons that this society sells. We have to stop this, give a new way of seeing things, reeducate our society in the thinking that we are persons, not bodies.

They advertise, You buy!

The media has always found ways to captivate their audiences; by narrowing down to their ideal target they then attack the weakness. Why is it so hard for the public eye avoid feeling some kind of reaction to the multitude of material objects which is constantly promoted every which way one looks. The answer to this question is simple, the consumer is forced to feel like they should become the ideal in the scope of the media which is truly unrealistic when compared to what woman are in "the real world". The media finds a ways to make the women in the public eye to force a sense of dependency over the viewer which will essencially lead to the consumption of their product or artist or idea and so forth. If something is promoted in the media, no matter how random, no matter how unneccisary, no matter how ridiculas someone will be interested. Why? Because they come in a varitey of different sizes, shapes, designs, textures, scents and all that other jazz. It's whats in! It's what the rest of the class is wearing! It's the upgrade of the phone I had a month ago, but this one loads 2 seconds faster! Oh my goodness! Do we not see what's taking place all around us?
It seems that some women has lost some sense of being an indivisual because she is trying to be someone she is not. It typical for a man to say that a woman takes hours to get ready, and I never believed this until I meet a girl who literally was a different person after an hour in front of the mirror. If one strand of hair was out of place, it was not acceptable. "Are you serious! We're just going to the corner store! It's not important!"
I call this putting on the mask. The mask is what you wear when your in a social setting when one is all dolled up and the rest of the world admires. The is nothing wrong with looking good but there are extremes. A woman should be able to dress herself up but for themselves rather than others. Here is where the representations of gender come into play. Advertisment has found a methods to grab your attention and make you stare. Goffman in 1976 said that "Advertising has a great deal to say about gender identity. Ads use visual images of men and woman to grab out attention and persuade. They are really projectiong gender display-- the ways in which we THINK men and women behave-- NOT the way they ACTUALLY do behave." The notion is that woman are labeled as objects and they sell for major companies, by exploiting the womans body and completley making them seem like nothing more, they become dependent of the extrenal beauty which is superfical and could even become extreme.
How do we change what is out in the media and make the message not one of downfall but one of insperation and uplifment? We promote what woman really are. The normal woman walking down the street does not have the measurements of one in a magazine. Lets get some woman with curves in the media and have show them eatting with a smile on their face. If I'm sitting on the train after a long stressful day, why do I have to see the whole left side of the train car covered with alchoal ads, so that I turn to a bottle and drink the pain away? Why is it that on the Lexington line I see ads with poems and on the Brooklyn line its nothing but ads promoting vices. The media knows who they want to target and they find where the money is; this is where they push their product.
There are problems in this world which are completly neglected. Survey woman worldwide and see what is really important to them. We live in a day and age where woman are very liberated and their interest have changed, there should not be a representation of passivity when instead we have the power to tell the media what they can do for us!

The advertising culture of today: what's the alternative?

Today’s cultural landscape is shaped by the Internet, focused on pleasing me-first-me-second-me-third, and defined by the I-want-it-now attitude. That means that information and media are easy to access, and its main purpose is usually to boost or protect our own egos constantly. Thus advertisements today must attack consumers on every possible front and often, because the consumers don’t stay still and there are many more opportunities. The economics and the medium evolve but like newspapers, radio and TV before, the point remains to sell you something in exchange of “free” media content. That’s why Google, a company that significantly relies on Internet ad revenue to be successful, is invested in making sure everybody has access to the web. So what’s the benefit for all of us? More choices. However, even within all these different messages, the basic strategy for advertising companies remains the same: study the consumer’s weakness (what their product can improve) and exploit it by making it more glaring (convincing the customer they need to be better) and providing a solution. As we saw in our readings, this starts early in consumers’ life, with ads created to draw a clear line between boys and girls, as Danae Clark explains in Commodity Lesbianism to be able to properly identify and eventually profit from these groups. As young consumers grow up, the message becomes more specific and profitable: for boys it evolves from playing with toy cars and buff action figures to eventually equating power with owning sport cars or having a chiseled body. For young girls the progression is from cooking toys and pretty skinny dolls, to becoming dutiful housewives and equating the skinny-white-blonde look with pretty and desirable. Other messages are mixed in with these stereotypes, like maintaining a patriarchal society where the male dominates and acts, and the female is dominated and passive. These ideas have become ingrained in our culture, conditioning consumers to expect certain images in ads, and of course, companies have invested interests in maintaining the status quo. We don’t expect to see an overweight woman in a bikini attracting a man, or for a group of females to be in a dominant position with a defenseless male in a powerless position. We are more likely to see a tall skinny woman selling any product to the full range of women that are all shapes and sizes, and the interaction with men in ads are usually of seduction, objectification or submissiveness.

I think a good place to start changing the messages we see out there is to poke fun at the unattainable physiques that are deemed desirable, like in this picture of a too skinny to be alive model. This makes the point that too skinny is unhealthy and potentially life-threatening, and while it’s humorous it’s also a dark humor that conveys that this is something serious.



Another way to turn these strategies around is to focus on unconventional role models that have proven that they can be talented and embraced by the mainstream media without the attributes that are deemed desirable. We’ve gotten great recent examples in the movie industry with both Jennifer Hudson and Mo’Nique winning recent Best Supporting Actress Oscars for roles portrayed with their natural bigger physiques. Specifically Mo’Nique has made it a point throughout her career to be the voice for females that are plus sized and can also be sexy, culminating with a successful show called “Mo’nique’s F.A.T. Chance” which stands (both figuratively and literally) for being both Fabulous and Thick (more on http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/arts/television/05lee.html).











Another example is how Jennifer Lopez brought interest from the mainstream to women with curves, almost single handlely turning the mainstream stereotype of the “big butt” around and making it acceptable and desirable for all demographics. Maybe Kim Kardashian wouldn’t be as relevant and famous if Jennifer Lopez didn’t change the attitude towards that figure for the mainstream. This still objectifies women, making one part of their body the focus, but at least it broadens the perception of what body types are acceptable, and we are not talking about skinny white blonde females representing the ideal sexy look.

What’s important about these examples is that we are taking people that are not necessarily what the media is portraying every day, and making them relevant enough that the advertisers eventually will have to try their hands marketing around their image in some way. I believe that more role models that normal women can relate to will go a long ways towards decreasing the power and reach of the pervasive dominant messages that are featured in today’s ads.

POST 3

For many centuries women have been regarded as nothing more than house laborers. Despite our many accomplishments proving that we can perform any task our male counterparts can, it has been an ongoing struggle for women to prove themselves. The advertising industry is one such that illustrates women as inferior to males. In Susan Bordo's essay on "Hunger as Ideology"depicts the food advertising industry as hunters preying on the weakness and insecurities of women eating habits, self images and their social roles. She shows where the roles of male figures supports the exploitation of women. Bordo states that advertisements can use biased and outdated gender roles to market their products. These advertisements end up "stabilizing" or reinforcing old fashioned views of the role that women play in society. Many of the messages contained in these advertisements are nearly subliminal in that the viewer on a subconscious level with just a casual glance can understand them. Bordo suggests these advertisements, which "stabilize", not only strengthens but also may cause a long lasting effect based on the themes that are presented. In the "Men Eat and Woman Prepare" section of Bordo’s essay examples are given of advertisements which stabilize the role of women as the food preparers who are meant to provide and serve food to a male whose role is to consume it.

From food preparers to sex symbols. Now adays commericals and advertisements view women as sex symbols, which is very sad. Naomi Wolf’s “Culture” from The Beauty Myth, examines beauty as a demand and as a judgement upon women. in her book Wolf examines how modern conception of women's beauty impact the shepherds of employment, culture, sexuality, religion, eating disorders and cosmetic surgery, according to wikipedia. I strongly agree with Wolfe argument that women in Western culture are damaged by the pressure to conform to an idealized concept of female beauty—the Iron Maiden throughout modern society, from Victorian Times to today. She argues that the beauty myth is political, a way of maintaining the patriarchal system. It allows women to enter the labour force, but under controlled conditions. She also claims that this system keeps women under control by the weight of their own insecurities. The beauty myth is sometimes viewed as succeeding The Feminine Mystique, which relegated women to the position of housewife, as the social guard over women. In this sense, Wolf claims that public interest in a woman's virginity has been replaced by public interest in the shape of her body, (wikipedia).

A prime example of Wolf's Beauty Myth is Victoria Secrets. Please see link below:

http://sexinadvertising.blogspot.com/2008/04/victorias-secret-meets-brand-gap.

Women in Politics and Leadership

A New Woman

A majority of commercials and advertisements today depict women as a sexual object in order to persuade the audience to buy their products. They more so appeal to the audience’s emotion rather than giving out actual information on how the product being sold would be a benefit. By doing this, advertisements do not only sell their products to show how a woman should be, but also the idea of how a woman should look like: very thin, poreless, and flawless. According to Naomi Wolf’s “Culture” from The Beauty Myth, advertisements feed on women’s insecurities of how they look and how they behave in order to get them to buy what advertisers are intending to sell. This is such a selfish, heartless way to make money.

Nowadays, media are exposed to kids at a younger and younger age. Advertisements, movies, television, magazines, and such media expose the images in which how an “ideal” woman should look like, and little girls learn at a young, immature age to modify themselves in order to conform and be more like those “ideal” women they see being displayed virtually everywhere. “There is relentless pressure on women to be small,” Jean Kilbourne says in “The More You Subtract, The More You Add,” and while being beautiful, “there is also pressure on us [women] to succeed, to achieve, to ‘have it all.’” While women are expected to look beautiful all the time, we are also expected to be intelligent. It is anticipated now more than ever before, and media such as films are beginning to show more of that. Then, women were only expected to be housewives and care for their children and home, but after working “man” jobs while the men were out fighting for America’s freedom in World War I, “61 to 85 percent of women...‘certainly did not want to go back to housework after the war.’” (Wolf 63) Women found that they are smart enough and capable of doing “men” work, so they fought to obtain their right to work in the “men's” field.

Sandra Day O’Connor was one of these women. She finished law school successfully, yet “no law firm in California was willing to hire her as a lawyer due to her sex,” Wikipedia says. However, she continued to be an attorney in other places around the United States, and soon enough, President Ronald Reagan nominated O’Connor to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in July 1981. Two months later, in the September of 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor became the first female Supreme Court Justice.

Another example of intelligent women in the media is the movie Legally Blonde. Elle Woods had just graduated out of one of the top law schools, Harvard University, and is striving to become one of the top lawyers in Washington D.C. However, because of her blond hair and her fashionable sense of colorful style, as opposed to the traditional formal (and not-as-colorful) lawyer style, others in the law community assume that she is just another "dumb blond" who "worked" her way up to become a lawyer by using her looks to get what she wants, when in fact Elle actually studied and worked hard to be on top, and she proved this when she won a court case...by using her knowledge of fashion, of course. Elle Woods was portrayed as a beautiful and "ideal" woman who also has brains, but still like the old ways of viewing women, she's seen as knowledgeable in the areas of fashion instead of having her solving a more realistic case that includes some real brain power.


In addition to illustrating more women as both beautiful and intelligent in the media, more women (and men) are now being shown as we really are: we all come in different shapes, sizes, colors, and are all somewhat flawed in our own unique way. The false sense of perfection that is predominantly being shown poses a huge problem. It sets a goal for the audience that is nearly impossible to achieve. And for those who did accomplish, for example, being as thin as the media illustrate their characters to be, it also greatly damaged their health. Fortunately, this problem is now slowly but surely decreasing because more people are speaking out against these fake realities. For example, Tyra Banks speaks out against many problems that young women face today in society on her Tyra Banks Show. In one of her episodes, she addressed the complications of the media constantly negatively criticizing women that being "fat" is not "pretty" and the hurtful feelings that are inflicted upon them by doing so. People are so used to seeing women (and men) all glamored up and perfect-looking in movies and magazines that when real images of people are shown, it is seen as unacceptable. How can it be unacceptable when it is the real reality and not the made up reality we are so used to seeing? In Tyra's emotional speech, she gives haters a piece of her mind. See her short speech here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mOQh3evqsI

New Roles for Gender Roles

Media is a function of advertising; media serves the interest of adverting but whose interest does advertising serve? Does advertising serve the nefarious and ubiquitous “They”? Are They at the helm of this powerful social apparatuses which defines the relationships and interactions of everyone within a society? If this is so then who are They and how can they be stopped?

It turns out that “They” is really more like “It” and It is Capitalism. Capitalism is a highly adaptable system and has no loyalties other than to itself and its continued existence. Our current social racial and gender assignments and representations are a construct of an archaic Victorian perspective that is no longer representative of our heterogeneous composition. These puritanical views of heteronormative social assignments have gone through so many revisions in its attempt to remain relevant that they are becoming threadbare and transparent. Its time for a new dialogue on gender, race and sexuality in our society, our current paradigm no longer suffices in our borderless age of globalization. Once Capitalism realizes this it will, by its very nature, have to shift its current allegiance with the current patriarchal ruling class to the next iteration of our evolving social composition.

I found a few advertisements that are starting this reexamining of race, sexuality and gender. Marc Jocobs has a series of print advertisements for women’s clothing and accessories that are intended for his female customers but are modeled by a man. This blurring of the heteronomative prescribed roles of male and female models and male and female consumer goods serves as a wonderful catalyst in a new evolution of gender roles. While some may view this as Danae Clark would, as a commodification of the agency that is beginning to become present in the homosexual and intersexual world, I believe that it is an important step forward. We will always be working within the framework of Capitalism and it only works if there is a perpetuation of this system, which lies in its continued growth through profit.

Gloria Steinem faced this problem of working within this framework of capitalism and found how difficult it was unless her primary motivation was profit. We must make this new conversation on sexuality profitable and the current views must be made unprofitable. We are beginning to see this shift in not only the fashion industry, which tends to quickly commodify marginality, but in industries that have a more glacial approach to change. I found a link to a commercial which speaks about changing old views towards sexuality, presented through the exchange between a transgender female and an older gentle man. I was shocked to see that the commercial was for a bank. This is clearly an example of advocacy advertising, I can’t believe that a bank really cares about the transsexual movement. Regardless the agenda behind media the message it is still a strong impetus for new discourse on sexuality.

Spot with transgender woman.

Lucille Ball Links

Link to power point on google docs:

http://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AQ2sy311YB7_ZGZqc3c4NmtfMGZrem54ZnJo&hl=en

Link to Lucille Ball video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyvG92Ff2NQ

New Beginnings

I think like everything, change will eventually come. It is very promising because although we do still see many of the advertisements that are negative portrayals of women, there are companies that are moving towards a better portrayal. For example, Dove which has been recently noted for being one of the few companies who are striving to empower women. Dove strives to embrace women and all of their beauty in different colors and sizes. As a woman seeing ads with women in their underwear posing for an ad, beauty radiating from their pores is such a beautiful sight. I can associate with these women. I showed my boyfriend these ads of the "Dove Women" and he said wow finally women who look normal. He said these looked beautiful and real. It was great hearing a man appreciate women who don't look like sticks. After all many of those women models are airbrushed to look slimmer. They are made to look "ideal." What is the female body shape? I have high hopes that we can move from a place of degrading women in all forms of media to a better tomorrow. I was beyond disturbed and disgusted when I came across this ad of a pregnant women trying to sell non-alcoholic beer. I mean seriously??? It doesn't really matter if its non-alcoholic or alcohol. Regardless it bothers me. Dove's campaign is called, "Campaign for Real Beauty" everyone should take a minute to read through their mission and what they stand for and their hopes for the future of our women. Kilbourne says, "The aspect of advertising most in need of analysis and change is the portrayal of women. Scientific studies and the most casual viewing yield the same conclusion: Women are shown almost exclusively as housewives or sex objects." "All beautiful women in advertisements, regardless of product or audience, conform to this norm." I like how Kilbourne states that even the natural looks requires work. The first steps come from within each one of us. This ad from "Saucony" by far has to be the best ad I have come across recently. I went to the extent of printing it out and hanging it on my wall!!!!! Change will come!

Post #3: Advertisements

According to Vertical Thought, the problem with the media today lies in their ultimate goal. Instead of providing good entertainment, the media aims to “influence what we value and how we spend our money,” says author of “Media, Marketing and Cool,” Keri Sanders. Besides persuading the public with sex and lies, advertisements can focus on the simplicity of their product alone. Essentially, they should put emphasis on just the product and its uses, excluding any animate influence.

To reform present advertisements, imagery must not depend on any other factor other than the product itself. The ad should solely display the product alone along with its specifics, which are detailed description of its features. This way, anyone who comes across a type of advertisement can judge the product for themselves. In “Sex, Lies and Advertising,” Gloria Steinem reveals a company that makes toy trains. Although they published boxes with both boys and girls, “they fear that, if trains are associated with girls, they will be devalued in the minds of boys.” By simplifying the imagery of its box, assumptions such as that can cease to exist. No girl or boy should show in the packaging; only the train itself; and the train will not be pink or blue, it will be the same colors as they are on real trains. This method can eliminate segregation and appeal to a more general consumer market.

Jean Kilbourne, on her essay “Beauty and Beat of Advertising,” reveals a concern regarding the representation of women on household products: that they are “pathologically obsessed by cleanliness and lemon-fresh scents, debates cleaning products and worries about their husband’s ring around the collar.” Again, the solution to this is to delete any animate influence. Instead of displaying a housewife or mentioning that the husband has a ring on his collar, simply talk about how the product has the ability to remove rings on collars. This excludes the word husband and emphasizes on the ring around the collar. It is not as if women do not wear collared apparel; they do. A great example would be tennis clothes; both men and women who play tennis casually usually wear clothing that bears collars.

To further address Kilbourne’s concern about beauty ads making it seem that “the image is artificial and can only be achieved artificially,” it is imperative to keep in mind that any animate influence on advertisements are only there to deceive the consumer and to hide or hinder the product’s features. An ad that shows women excessively photoshoped along with a product that may reduce wrinkles, should not compel buyers to purchase that product. Instead they should feel that, by adding this unrealistic image, it is hindering the products ability. If it is realized that the advertisements rely on the animate, then the product is weak and should not be purchased at all. Companies should build credibility through what their product can do and how successfully they can do it. Consumers need to realize that by doing otherwise, these companies are merely committing a theft from their pockets.

This 1974 ad fits some of the criteria for the simple with specs method. It does not rely only anything but the product itself. Hence, the product is confident, it is strong; and that is attractive. We also see the word perfume which is a great example of showing specs because it tells consumers what it is. (Found in Mom's Basement is the title of the blog this image came from and is not part of the ad.)

The simple with specifics method is different because its ultimate goal is to gain a universal interest while at the same time preserving an undamaged consumer. Universal interest is gain through solely displaying the product along with its specifications; targeted audiences are completely eliminated; slogans and persuasive text are replaced with specifications and product ability. For example, by applying this method to the Clorox commercial we saw in class, it is obvious that the simple with specifics method can reform it. By not showing women at all, nor mentioning mothers, grandmothers and any other type of women title, Clorox puts an emphasis on their credibility; which are: a trusted brand that has been around for a long time and one that is very effective on white clothes, “keeping whites pure white.” Consumers, no matter what sex, will notice the specifications of Clorox and will be attracted to it. More importantly, they would not end up thinking that laundry is for the female sex; they would not think men doing laundry is taboo nor can men use it as an excuse to not help women with laundry.

The 21^st century, as I have observed, has actually dispelled a fraction of advertisement effects on consumers. Since money is handled in a more careful fashion and not on impulse, people like me tend to research the product online intensely to see if it is your money’s worth. By reading consumer reviews and product ratings, one is able to make a better judgment based on past consumer experiences instead of the feelings generated by an ad full of psychological strategies.

What needs to Change in Advertisement

The first step for advertisement to change would be to get rid or redefine the psychical expectations of women and to have a higher regard for the intelligence of women as well. Another aspect that needs to change would be how sexuality is expressed in the gender binary that is set up by advertisers as well.

As we all know advertisements do not only sell us a product but also sell us norms “They sell values, images and concepts of success and worth, love and sexuality, popularity and normalcy.” (Jean Kilbourne) Since we all know how influential advertisements are in our everyday lives we need to change the messages that are being sent to us and more importantly to our children.

First there must be a change of the beauty expectation of women. “You can never be too rich or too thin, girls are told. The mass media delusion sells a lot of products. It also causes enormous suffering, involving girls in false quests for power and control, while deflecting attention and energy from that which might really empower them” (Jean Kilbourne) everyone knows that girls and women are held up to an impossible standard that hurts millions of women. In many ways this unattainable expectation causes women to have a double consciousness in public. The double consciousness is caused when women know that in public women are constantly being surveyed. “Men look at women; Women watch themselves being looked at.” (Berger, page 47). The fact that women are conscious to the fact that they are being watch here is when women create double consciousness because they are always aware of the male gaze. Advertisers know how women are viewed and are well aware of the double consciousness of women and use it to their advantage. An advertiser sells us the audience a reinforcement of harmful norms in order to stay in business because god forbids they actually start creating positive and new messages. We now need to have ad’s that have real women empowered even though they are not a size zero or white.

Advertisements need to stop this portrayal that women are of a lower intelligence and if they are valued for being smart she is not popular. The mass media has caused intelligences in women to have a negative connotation because they are not the desired ones. This is disgusting and it’s one of the reasons women to not go into the hard sciences verses their make counterparts. Advertisements must have portals of women being part of the hard sciences. Once ads illustrate women not only as sexual beings but able to be engineers as well as mothers that would be an ideal world. Advertisers exploit women and for me they are raping her over and over whenever sex is sold to sell a product. I have no problem with women expressing their sexuality but it shouldn’t be for the pleasure of men. This is where advertisers gain most of their revenue is selling sex. It isn’t only women it is men as well advertisers are selling me muscularity for masculinity. ”The male provocateur is the image of the perfect athletic physique.” (page 43) The exploitation of sex brings me to my next criticisms of advertisements which are this norm of gender expression that is always being sold to us in one way another.

Advertisements need to change is the stark gender binary of pink and blue. Everyone knows that gender is never that clear cut of pink and blue and the social enforcement of people conforming to this binary is harmful for the part of the populace that does not fit this binary. The advertisers are part of the tool of having the masses conform to the stark binary definition of gender. When in all reality gender expressions are much more complicated then that and I think that in the mass media has to create conditions for an acceptance of different gender expressions.

I think the way to change this is to have the major advertisement companies to realize that they will actually gain more clientele if their portrayals of women were more positive or representative of the female population. The only real way to have the advertisements to change is to show a case that women portrayed in a negative or misleading manner is bad business.

The only way for advertisement to change is to have more subversive advertisement to infiltrate the main stream media. These subversive advertisements give counter message of the norm and if there are more of these types advertisements they eventually transcended into the psyche of the populace.

She is beautiful as she is

What does the “ideal” body mean?
For most of women especially for young women, one of the most important criteria for “ideal” body is thinness. Today, they are always under the pressure to be thin. In this country, women are embedded in their brain by advertisers and media that they cannot be accepted by the society unless they are thin. They see advertisements featuring super-skinny models in magazines and TV commercials everyday and compare them with their own bodies, and then feel depressed. As a result, they become obsessed with their weight, size, and self-hurting diets even though their size and weight are average.

Their insecurities, frustration, anxiety, and body-hatred, all of these negative emotions turn into the huge benefits for advertisers. Advertisers carefully observe what women are afraid of, and create ads which efficiently appeal to the vulnerabilities. They deliberately widen the gap between the real women and “something that is not only trivial but also completely unattainable” (The More You Subtract, The More You Add by Jean Kilbourne) in ads (imaginary world), so the sense of insecurity let the vulnerable women spend their money on the products which insists they can help those desperate women to look better. Kilbourne states, in her article Beauty and the Beast of Advertising, “She is made to feel dissatisfied and ashamed of herself, whether she tries to achieve ‘the look’ or not.”

However, the thinness has become a controversial topic among media, advertising, and the fashion industry. Because such advertisements encourage dangerous and self-hurting diets, as a result, anorexia, bulima, and any eating-disorder can be caused. Fortunately, some people have begun to realize that ultra-skinny models in ads are creatures in the imaginary worlds and reconsider the idea of what the real and healthy women are.

So how much longer do we have to be exposed to those super-skinny models and be compelled to feel shame on our own bodies?
Now, we need some healthy looking women who look more like us instead of women who don’t exist in the real world.

The alternative to thinness on ads and media seems to be one: Non-thinness.

I hope you remember a woman called Lizzi Miller. If not, let me introduce her. In 2009 summer, she shocked the magazine and fashion industry and women in the U.S. with her nude appeared in the September issue of Glamour magazine. At the time the photo was taken, she weighted 180lbs and her size was 12 to 14, but she didn’t hide anything. The photo showed her shining smile, beautiful blond hair, and curvy body with belly roll spilling over. Immediately after the issue coming out, Glamour magazine received a flood of positive comments on the photo by the readers. Some of them said that it was the first time to see such a beautiful woman who has a stomach that looks like theirs in magazines and feel good about their own bodies, looking at the photo. The feedback from the readers about the “real” looking woman was overwhelming and it made the media and advertisers reconsider what their female targets really want.

I think that it is the time to reconstruct not only the society which have been filled with the ideas and normality which media and advertisers have constructed for their benefits but also our minds concreted with the “unusual” normality.

Lizzi Miller is a good example of the alternative to thinness. She proved how much women wanted to see female figures who look like them and feel they are not the “unacceptable”. While super-skinny models give us anxieties, depression and self-hatred, Lizzi Miller gave us a sense of security, hope and self-esteem. We women have begun to realize that images are images, models are models, and we are we. Advertisers and media should realize that women are cleaver and beautiful as they are.

TIME FOR NEW ADVERTISEMENT!

Image found at http://theboomerbeat.blogspot.com/2007/10/harley-davidson-women-and-wrinkles.html

In order for advertisements to be different towards women, the women being portrayed can no longer be looking or fulfilling the male gaze. Women can still be sexy, but they have to be sexy because they want to be, not because they have to be sexy for someone else. Women can still be portrayed as feminine, however femininity should not be the only way to perceive or attempt to target women. The advertisement industry must acknowledge that women are consumers also and that their offensive ads have a lot of impact on the identity of teenage girls and women. When the advertisement industry is held accountable for the impact and effects of their ads, then perhaps they will be obligated to redirect their advertisements. Jean Kilbourne expresses these same ideas in “Beauty and the Beast of Advertising” in her critique of the advertisement industry:”Advertising images do not cause these problems, but they contribute to them by creating a climate in which the marketing of women’s bodies- the sexual sell and dismemberment, distorted body image ideal and children as sex objects-is seen acceptable” (Kilbourne 125). The media is guilty of normalizing sexist, racist, and ageist attitudes through their ridiculous and “shocking” ads. Take for example the Dolce & Gabbana ad of the model being held down by one man, while three other men look on- this ad clearly imitates a rape scene, and simultaneously insinuates violence towards women, by reducing the model to an object and dehumanizing her. Nonetheless, the ad would have had a different affect if the model was perhaps on top of the man, and if she actually looked like she was enjoying herself. This would imply aggressive sex, in a way that suggests that women can participate in such sexual acts too-which is perfectly fine.

A second issue that should be addresses is the types of products targeted to women (Steinem 112). Advertisement industries can still sell make-up and traditional women products, but they should be more inclusive in the advertisements of products brought by both men and women, such as cars, credit cards, insurance and so on. Finally the advertisement industry should be more original; sometimes shocking does not mean being more sexist than the ad before.

I'd Die For These Shoes

Through all the advertisements that I have searched on the Internet none of them seemed to have an obvious change than these ads for shoes. Before I start to talk about these two pictures I want to leave you with an image in your head of an ad for men’s shoes. Imagine a women lying on the ground with a white sheet covering her whole body with just half of her face showing. Now picture a stream of blood on her face that is shown. Also, a pair of men’s shoes on top of the sheet on the woman’s body with a winning slogan to finish this picture, “I’d Kill For These Shoes”. This advertisement is one of many that show violence against women that Jean Kilbourne uses in her Killing Me Softly film to show people how strong of an image the media can have on people. This ad in particular stuck with me for about a year now, and I have seen how advertisement commercials have changed, but I am not sure if it’s for the better.

If you look at the image of the woman crouching down to the ground, you can see her trying to pick up something. That something is a shoe. What makes the picture worse is that she is on a ledge of a very high building. To me this is very similar to the first image I tried to put into your heads, but this time the slogan should be, “I’d Die For These Shoes”. This is putting the idea in women’s minds that they must have these shoes even if it costs them their lives. So the violence has not changed, but now it’s voluntary and according to this ad, the danger is necessary. Now I thought to myself I would go barefoot in New York before I risk my life on a ledge for a pair of shoes. Someone must have thought the same thing and changed the ad even further.

I have an image with a pair of men’s shoes and a pair of women’s shoes at a table representing people on a date. Now people who watch this are suppose to use their imaginations as to how they think the people will look like in those shoes. People who see this as will also think that if they get these shoes they will be able to get a date. This ad appeals to men and women. There is no violence; neither men nor women’s bodies are being exploited. This ad shows me that people are thinking very carefully on how to sell their products to the public without offending anyone. This is a good example as to how the media can go about selling products, but I am not sure if they can keep up with this progress.

Anti-sexism and Anti-gender commercials

There is a lot of sexism in today’s commercials, more than ever before. One day I’ve tried to count the how much sex is in ads. I’ve got conclusion that only one for five maybe six commercials I’ve seen has something to do with sex or women beauty (read thinness). So, why it is such a big deal for us? It’s because we remember much better these ads. It’s been said that men think about sex once in every six minutes. Advertises simply use this nature of men and sex can be in commercials of everything (from food to cars). Jean Kilbourne says in “Beauty and the Beast of Advertising” that: “She is thin, generally tall and long-legged, and, above all, she is young. All beautiful women in advertisements (including minority women), regardless of product or audience, conform to this norm.” All this thinness and perfectionism have bad consequences on women, especially young women, who can pay every price to achieve that, even their health.

Can we change that? Can “normal” people sell clothes or perfumes? While I was reading some articles on the net, there was TV on in my back and I heard Jessica Simpson talking about fatness. I check it out and she gain some weight and is trying to sell it. She produces a TV show called “Price of Beauty”. I think she wasn’t being sell enough so she figure out something new, but I don’t want to judge her about her reasons of doing that. The important thing is that this is some alternative to the image of beautiful women. She will show us in the show, what are the criteria of beauty in different parts of the world.

One thing in advertisement is the whole sexism and beauty perfectionism, but there is something more. The most advertises use popular gender roles to sell their product. For example I have never seen commercial of detergent with man as person who does laundry. Right now in “modern” society gender roles are changing a little (shifting is too big word for this process). For example in usually young couples men cook. I found 1 commercial of Radio2, where men cook and woman is just drinking beer. Even though to see change of gender roles in advertisement, first we would have to see this change in society. Or this can work the other way? I don’t know – this is chicken and egg problem. For sure if we would see more commercials where men do cooking or cleaning, after some time it could help changing gender stereotypes.

Interesting are some Dodge Charger Commercials, where men and women talked about their duties and than about driving Dodge Charger as a reward for whole day. The commercial supposed to be funny, but wasn't for many people. I, after watching a few of them, think that they are trying to say that Dodge Charger, even though as sports car should be only for men, actually is also good reward for women, so it's not gendered product. See for yourself.

So commercials use stereotypes and sex to sell more. Can these be used to advertise “good” things? Yes. One example of that is PETA campaign. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) knows nudity is attractive, trendy. They use the popularity of celebrities to fight for better treatment of animals. We can see in magazines and billboards posters of their two most known campaigns. One is called “Save the Seals” and it’s series of posters of celebrities who wear T-shirts with a little seal on them. The second one is more important and known even better. It says “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur”.

True Form of NEW Media

In contemporary mass media the far-reaching effects of advertising can sometimes be overwhelming. Although the effects media have on American men and women are extensive, it is usually the female population that is targeted and told to compulsively consume what is being marketed to them. Whether holistically beneficial to them or not, women have mostly been conformed by society to hold personal appearance as more valuable to advancement than their personality. Identifying with this intense framing of cosmetic/beauty products as the key for being “viewed” appealing to others starts at a young age, through advertising, gender roles, and familial standards. The gender roles society assigns leaves an everlasting impression upon young children about how they are to operate for the majority of their lives. As the “Construction of the Body” article illustrates in the cartoons of figure 3.19, the social roles of gender are instilled in children at a very early age, and are as rigid as can be.
American culture is sometimes criticized for the excess and materialistic nature that undoubtedly makes it what it is. Much of these characteristics of society stem in large part from the methods which advertising agencies and corporations utilize to keep the population in consumer mode. Consumers are constantly bombarded with unrealistic images of what men and women are “ideally” supposed to look like. While eliminating gender roles or telling little girls not to be feminine would be as impossible as stopping perceptions of race in American society, there are other avenues which can be navigated in order to look at women through a new lens. Probably the most important one would be for advertising companies to show woman who are outside the mold of the typical runway model type. Recently Dove launched a new campaign ad depicting “real women” in all their natural beauty. However in doing so the company basically negated the progress they were making by showing all the women in their undergarments. Another aspect to changing the way women are perceived, as sexual objects of desire, should be to substantially limit or all together stop the hypersexual nature of advertisements. Dove should have just shown the ordinary women in their ad campaign with clothes on, because it would have sent an even stronger message to women who saw the ad.
In order to alter the way in which the advertisement industry type-casts women, there needs to be an increase in the refusal of women to buy media containing such ads. Gloria Steinman's essay, detailing her troubles as editor of Ms Magazine express the difficult position the magazine, and therefore many forms of media, find themselves in. However what Steinman’s essay also shows is the innovation and tenacity that more editors of media content should display in order to change the power hierarchies that are in place. Although Ms. Magazine struggled to stay in existence for quite some time, they eventually received some financial and advertisement help from an Australian company with less offensive advertisement methods towards women. Even though the magazine was eventually brought out by another company, the fact that it stayed in existence for so long utilizing such innovational practices outside the mainstream, should be deemed a success on its own. It shows that consumers and makers of media do not have to yield to the powers at be, the advertisement companies or corporations, they are the ones with the true power over what they want to be shown in mainstream mass mediated culture. If we chose not to buy products or services that use ads which are offensive or non-representative of the ordinary women, then once the sales of these advertisers and corporations start to decline they will seek out alternative measures to once again re-engage the consumers wants. Even if this boycott of products does work, people should still look to organize and join activist groups to fight this blatant objectification of women, the unhealthy nature of the toothpick thin physique promoted by advertisers, as well as the dissection of the female figure into singular body parts. This would keep the pressure on the billion dollar advertising companies and make sure they do not resort back to their old tactics. Those women who are already thin beyond feasibility, should not yearn to become more thin or stay the same size. It should be told to them by society as well as media outlets that being a healthy weight is more important than being seen as “typical” model material.

Post #3

When thinking of alternatives to the mainstream images we see in advertising ("the perfect provocateur", according to Corteste, "she is a form or hollow shell representing a female figure. Accepted attractiveness is her only attribute. She is slender, typically tall and long-legged"), I'm sure many of us thought of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty (which is good, but goes to show that Dove is one of the few reputable brands that actually have a campaign like this). Most of the images we are confronted with in advertising targets the consumer's insecurities and then offers the solution in the form of a product. The Dove Self-Esteem Fund and Campaign for Real Beauty features women who are opposite of the "perfect provocateur". They are real women with curves, not stick-thin models. They aren't perfect, but they are still happy in their own skin. In Jean Kilbourne's "Beauty and the Beast of Advertising", she says that the hidden message of ads are, "If a woman has great legs, who cares who she is?" But on the front page of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty website, it features women with their names, and their definition of beauty. They aren't hollow shells. They have thoughts and feelings. Dove doesn't feed on the consumer's insecurities.

I haven't followed Dove's advertisements before they came out with the Campaign for Real Beauty, but I'm sure there was a point where they weren't sending out such a positive message. Yet, with their power, they now use their distinguished brand name to promote high self-esteem. In Gloria Steinem's "Sex, Lies and Advertising", she explains that advertisers do want their products to be associated with a certain image. As with the toy train story she provides, "if trains are associated with girls, they will be devalued in the minds of boys." Perhaps this is true to some extend, which is why brands won't take the step to showcase something different, as they are afraid their products will be devalued if they don't associate themselves with the perfect and glamorous, but Dove's campaign gets positive responses, and is still selling their product. If Dolce & Gabanna tries a different, non-offensive to women approach, wouldn't their products still sell? They're already a huge, luxury brand. They could use their power for good!

Another prominent name in the media world, Glamour, has also gone the Dove route. Although they still show skinny models in their magazine, still sexualize women, give diet tips, etcetera, they have taken a step to promote healthy images of women. For example, on page 194 of their September 2009 issue, they featured this picture of a nude size-12 woman:



Editor-in-chief, Cindi Leive, wrote about this photo, "I'd loved this photo at first sight myself--we'd commissioned it for a story on feeling comfortable in your skin, and wanted a model who looked like she was. But even so, the letters blew me away: 'the most amazing photograph I've ever seen in any women's magazine,' wrote one reader in Pavo, Georgia." I think it's great, too! The model (20-year-old Lizzie Miller) is even showing her stretch marks! Something that no other advertiser dare show, even though I think they're so common and normal! A quote that I found pretty funny from "Constructed Bodies, Deconstructing Ads": "Where did such widespread afflictions as body odor, halitosis, iron poor blood, gray hair, water spots, vaginal odors, dish pan hands, various small glands, and muscles, and split ends come from?" I think it's so true. Most of these are perfectly normal? Who decided one day that these things were problems? Just as these ideas culminate though, positive ones can develop too! Big conglomerates need to use their power for change. They need to start up campaigns similar to Dove's. They need to use real women in their advertisements-- people who are more than their physical appearance. I suppose it's easier said than done, but it's not a hard feat, either.

The Crystal-Clear Answer

My answer to our readings and what advertising has done to our trains of thought is to poke fun at, and bring a sarcastic twist to, a lot of advertisements out there. It is bad enough the media and advertisers have psychological effects on some of us so much so that we want to starve ourselves thin or believe certain chores—cooking or laundry for example— are gender-specific. Why? and ... NO!

Why are commercials reinforcing traditional gender roles of the past—men cooking at campfires and barbecues; women making whole meals in the kitchen only (to point out some examples, care of Susan Bordo's Hunger as Ideology)—and not throwing a monkey wrench into the formula? Why are they making us believe that this or that is the look and then throw studies out there that tell us about anorexia and bulimia without doing something about it after putting two and two together? NO, the advertisers fail to do accurate studies and just harp on what the norm was 50 to 70 years ago. Today we have stay-at-home dads who work from home and are capable of cooking (why is it only suitable for a male chef on a cooking show or at a restaurant?) and women who go out to work. We even have newlyweds who only work and barely cook at home: What's that about??? And then we have another "NO" to advertisers who successfully impress norms and ideals of beauty in our heads. (I mean "no" as in grade school where when you did something really bad and you were scolded with that nasty school-teacher attitude to make you thing twice about doing something bad again; not "no" as in the answer to a yes or no question.)

No matter how you look at it, putting women in certain roles in commercials is not the answer. Virginia Slims then tries to associate women and freedom to make choices with cigarettes and that it is okay to choose to smoke since one is free to choose. Why would Virginia Slims tell women that it is fine to put their health in jeopardy? Why would anyone choose to put their health in jeopardy? In Gloria Steinem's article Sex, Lies and Advertising, she talks about Ms. magazine's choice to refuse cigarette ads, to which I'd like to add was a wise decision as well as a loss worth taking. Their decision to not place recipes next to food advertisements set Ms. apart while it also hurt relationships with food companies, but they stood by their morals—and these were good morals indeed: women should not have to associate food with work, work can be what you want it to be (a career, a part-time job, raising a family or all of the above). The bottom line is that choices should not be limited to what advertisers dictate (for capital purposes), but should, in fact, be fully-thought-out choices of the individual woman.

Advertising, in some aspects, seems to be moving to a more humorous approach in getting a pitch across. The answer, in my eyes, however, lies in poking fun at advertisements and being sarcastic in approaches to sexuality, using sex to sell, and not being specific in gender-oriented tasks or chores. I want to see regular people who are not starving to advertise jeans while having a piece cake without guilt. If I see a Virginia Slims advertisement with a woman smiling as she is smoking a cigarette, I want to see her friends in the background holding their noses with pinched faces in disgust or they could be walking away. I want to see a man baking something with his kids on the weekend while their mother is away on business trip with her overwhelming company that does not allow her time to spend with her family. Advertisements must break the norms of the past and catch viewers and readers by surprise to make viewers wow and laugh and say, "Oh man, that was a good one!"

These, though limited, changes or alternatives to advertising and other forms of advertising can help advertisers better pitch to consumers. Consumers are more willing remember a product introduced humorously to them. If advertising agencies changed up their decision makers and put students in their places, or people not being paid to create an advertisement, we would probably see good, fresh, and well-thought-out advertisements successfully pitching a product without ingraining an idea of wanting to look like a student or wanting to look like an unpaid intern. I believe if our class worked in an advertising agency, we would definitely find alternative ways to successfully pitch clothing, food or ideals of what gender roles should assume in society.

Do human beings even work in advertising agencies?

In Her Shoes

Translation: "No woman's body was exploited in this ad."

I spent a good chunk of my week attempting to find non-sexist advertisements that wasn't from Dove or from a not-for-profit that dealt exclusively with women. This is the closest I got.

I am amazed by the ads we see. Their colors, composition, complexity, creativity and reach are astounding. In the thousands of years of human creation I can safely state that we have never experienced a more visual world. A world rich in high contrasting color and clear sounds. Yet for all the technology and creative strides we have taken as a species, the image of a woman is still in the Stone Age.

Advertising sells things. Media creates and grants the space for those things to be sold to us. I have no problem with that. I accept it as a function of capitalist society in which we necessitate profit increases. What I don't accept is this curious phenomenon in that advertising ceases to be that thing that sustains the media, and becomes the subject of the media. Gloria Steinman's essay detailing her troubles as editor of Ms. express the difficult position the magazine, and therefore many forms of media, are placed in.

In order to maintain financial viability magazines and broadcasters must sell advertisements. Yet, due to the incendiary and controversial nature of the content of Ms. Magazine, Steinem found herself compromising with the advertisers and companies reluctant views. The company then pulled the advertisement. Does Ms. magazine forge through with the content, albeit in financial straits or do they modify their article? Thats dilemma one.

So lets say that company does in fact decide to stay with Ms. magazine. The ad agency produces an ad that doesn't sit well with Ms. readers. Steinem struggles with the company and now the ad agency. Does Ms. pull the ad and maintain their dignity or do they publish the ad and remain economically viable? That's dilemma two.

Ms magazine readers have been clamoring for more technology advertisements. The advertising out reach person at Ms. reaches out to companies who decline citing mythological disinterest to technology. Does Ms. magazine not heed the desires of their readers or do they find more conventional advertising to remain economically viable? That's dilemma three.

There are many more dilemmas Steinem faced in her tenure as editor of Ms. I paraphrase these point to outline the carefully engineered woman of the advertising world. The woman that was presented to the editors of Ms was conventional and limited. The woman the editors of Ms. sought (and continue to seek) in their choice of advertising is one who is diverse in her tastes, body and mind.

Notice a word in the above paragraph: choice. The editors of Ms. chose to abstain from advertisements with stereotypical images of women. They understood that theirs is a choice. The choice and content of advertisement in magazine is not only an economic one, but a political woman. The choice to say no to sexist, simplistic images. And if more of us make that choice to choose not engage with these ads and insist (by voice and by consumer choice!) on a more positive portrayal of women then maybe the companies can change.

It gives me a little hope, in my week of fruitless search, that perhaps by properly and constantly arguing the image of woman I am NOT, advertisers can show me a glimmer of the woman I am.