Tag Archives: Women

We’ve come a long way, baby: 25 horribly sexist ads

26 May

25 horribly sexist ads is worth a look if you’re interested in making comparisons of how things used to be and how they are now in the depiction of women in the world of advertising.

Copy such as “Every husband wants his wife to be feminine” in an ad for Demure liquid douche, not to mention Lysol as a remedy for vaginal germs. If you don’t attend to them your husband will reject you and you’ve only got yourself to blame, smelly.

Then there’s the ad for the sturdy Volkswagon’s resistance to dents inevitably inflicted by the wife:  “Women are soft and gentle but they hit things.”

My personal favourite is the man with his foot on a woman’s head. Her body, BTW, has been transformed into a tiger skin rug. Wow.

So, are things better or worse for women in the world of advertising? Is it better to be portrayed as a vaginally stinky, germ-ridden bad tempered car smasher who wants a Hoover for Christmas, but on the bright side, knows how to open a sauce bottle by herself, or half naked in your underwear, spreading your legs, sucking on a lollypop and miming an insatiable desire for a penis in every orifice?

Danged if I know.

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Fundamentalist sexual propaganda dominates at the ABC’s Drum

1 Mar
Masturbation by Klimt, drawing 1913

Gustav Klimt 1913. Masturbation. via Wikimedia

Lately The Drum seems to have been co-opted as an advocate for right wing fundamentalist Christian propaganda about the “pornification” and “sexification” of women.

Commentator Melinda Tankard Reist, sometimes supported by observations from journalist and researcher Nina Funnell, has published three pieces in the last three weeks, peddling her views on the “proper” expression and representation of female sexuality in the media and popular culture.

Given that some of her opinions can only be read as extremist (her war on Victoria’s Secret underwear, for example; her unrelenting insistence that women are doomed to be the hapless victims of men) it is astonishing that the Drum hasn’t come up with anything that directly contests these views, and gives voice to the opinions and feelings of the millions of women who find Victoria’s Secret fun to wear, and consider ourselves anything but victims.

If this right wing agenda manifested in any other subject area on the Drum, we would all be astonished, and a challenge would immediately be published. But not when it’s about controlling how women express our sexuality, apparently.

Tankard Reist’s grim visions of the inevitable baseness of men, the fear of and contempt for female sexuality revealed in her propaganda, continue to dominate the Drum’s pages.

It’s left to a handful of determined commenters to take her on.

Perhaps the Drum doesn’t consider the representation and expression of female sexuality a topic worthy of defense, even on the eve of International Women’s Day.

This is not on, our  ABC. There’s no balance here. You should be putting up articles that celebrate female sexuality, and support a woman’s right to decide how she’ll express it. Centuries of patriarchy have tried to control our sexuality, and now we’ve got the Christians at it again. Enough, already.

Why are you assisting the fundamentalists in this project, Jonathan Green, and why aren’t you giving a voice to women who love their sexuality, don’t see any reason to hide it and have no quarrel with underwear companies and stupid songs?

Women who revel in taking responsibility for ourselves, and don’t need MTR and Nina Funnell to do it for us, thanks all the same.

For those of you dissatisfied with the Drum’s promotion (by omission) of a right wing sexual agenda, On Line Opinion will fight back on Friday.

At least there’s still someplace where a woman can say she doesn’t mind a lacy thong and cleavage.

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Do as we say, not as we do: the moral code of the censors

27 Feb

Talk about hypocrisy!

In the above link to a post titled ‘Surrounded by a culture in which girls are all body and only body’ Melinda Tankard Reist objects to Lea Michele, star of hit television show Glee, appearing on the cover of Cosmo showing cleavage. Michele is in her twenties, BTW, and the dress is unremarkable.

Such appearances, claims MTR, teach girls that the only thing that matters is what they look like, and that it’s of prime importance that they look “sexy.” Who they are and what they do is subjugated to the imperative to cultivate and flaunt their sexual power.

All well and good.

So how  does MTR feel about her fellow campaigner, (who also trains those recalcitrant footballers in how to respect women)and frequent contributor to her website Nina Funnell, appearing in Cosmo October 2010, wearing a sexy mask, and stilletos  with slave girl ankle bands? (About as “offensive” as the cleavage shot.)

The occasion was a competition to find the year’s most influential woman. But before Cosmo selected contestants for their career and personal achievements, they first had to pass the Cosmo “look” test.

Every woman in the competition is styled within an inch of her life. There are no mature aged women. Odd, if we’re looking for influential role models. They are all slim, have good hair, teeth, and legs, and some of them show a great deal of thigh. As much if not more than we see of Lea Michele’s breasts.

by Clee Villasor via flickr

The women’s faces are partially covered in glamorous masks, I really don’t know why. The glamourous mask usually implies the possibility of anonymous sexual encounter. So what does that sexual implication have to do with being influential, and a mentor to young women?

‘Surrounded by a culture in which girls are all body and only body’, you might say, seeing as how they look is the most important consideration in this competition, and if they don’t have the look, they don’t get to enter, no matter how much they’ve achieved in their lives.

Not a peep from the Tank about this travesty. Maybe because her fellow campaigner is one of the stars?

Bottom line, the Cosmo competition is way more destructive than the Michele cleavage shot. The competition pretends to be about a woman’s achievements. But it’s really only about the achievements of a handful of women who have the right look. If you don’t have the look, forget it. No matter what you achieve you’ll never be a Cosmo influential woman of the year.

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Women bagging women: the female politician.

27 Jan

Sisters forever sisters. By joanneteh_32 via flickr

Once again the media coverage of the appointment of a woman to a senior political position has brought forth angry criticism, and accusations of sexism from some of the body politic. The questions asked and the commentary published is sexist, and designed to undermine the authority of female politicians, it is alleged. Nobody, it’s claimed, asks these idiotic questions of male politicians, or demands that they explain themselves if they aren’t married.

I don’t think this is quite true, however, that’s an article in its own right, for another day.

Lara Giddings, the latest of several ALP women promoted to the top job in state and federal governments, was yesterday asked the usual questions about her marital status, her childfree status, and the current absence of a boyfriend in her life. As yet, we haven’t heard what people think about her appearance, her hairstyle and colour, and her earlobes, but I’m confident that will come.

Yet when it comes to making ad hominem comments about female politicians, some of the worse offenders are women. Nikki Savva in the Australian of November 23 2010, offered sarcastic sartorial and political advice to Julia Gillard, in a piece titled Smarten up, PM, and do not wear green

Also in the Australian, July 28 2010, Janet Albrechtson’s Let’s be honest about Julia’s free gender leg-up ,while not focusing on her appearance, attacks Gillard’s alleged inability to relate to the women who’ve chosen to marry and raise children, given her own choices to do neither.

Social commentator Bettina Arndt also criticized the de facto arrangements of Julia Gillard in the Sydney Morning Herald article of June 29, 2010 titled: Shacking up is hard to do: why Gillard may be leery of the Lodge. Arndt questioned Gillard’s value as a role model for young women who wanted marriage, children and career.

Hard-line feminists describe those who launch such ad hominem attacks as “anti feminist women.” A few years back they described such a woman as “having a pr*ck in her head.”

(Ad hominem arguments are those that attack the speaker in the hope of undermining her or him, rather than addressing the argument. They frequently take the form of comments on physical appearance. For example, one I’ve never forgotten that came from a short, chubby, ageing bald fellow who exclaimed when he was introduced to me: “But you can’t be a blonde and have a PhD, darling!”)

It’s unrealistic to expect that women will be kind to each other just because we’re women.  Nevertheless, there is an unspoken, unexamined and entirely unproven expectation that we are somehow bonded through our gender, and therefore less likely to betray one another.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Women deceive other women all the time, with their male lovers and partners, for example. And very many women, in the throes of shock and despair, will say that while they sort of expect men to behave like that, and they are desperately upset, it’s how the woman betrayed the woman that really cuts to the bone.

Many women survivors of childhood sexual abuse reveal that while the perpetrator did them untold damage, they have never and will never understand why their mothers didn’t help them, and this betrayal is impossible to grasp on a very deep emotional and spiritual level.

Women can be unbelievably hard on their daughters, begrudging them success, and an easier life than they’ve experienced.

And yet, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, women continue to believe in and yearn for the kindness of other women, and continue to be disappointed  when it’s not forthcoming.

Women might need to toughen up and let go of the hopeful fantasy that women are the greatest supporters of women, or that they should be. I sometimes wonder if allegations of sexism against men, while frequently entirely justified, might also work to conceal and deny the truly frightening hatred we women are capable of experiencing and enacting towards each other.

Everyone recognizes the woman who seeks approval from a man by denigrating other women, thus portraying herself as “different” and “better.”

Women who have a public life in any field, are targeted by both genders for ad hominem attacks. There are feminists who explain this phenomenon as a consequence of overwhelming patriarchal influences that have set us against one another in order to further the patriarchal agenda. This may well be one of the explanations for a learned rather than innate cruelty, if indeed that’s what it is. And there’s another argument.

However, the explanation doesn’t justify the hostilities, and after so many years of feminist analysis, we can no longer claim to be ignorant of what influences motivate us and how we perpetuate those influences in our lives.

Perhaps it’s time for women to take responsibility for our attitudes towards other women, especially those in public life. Perhaps one way of doing this is becoming aware of when we’re engaging in the ad hominem argument, and stopping it before it starts.

Everybody does it to some degree, it’s almost like breathing. The things I’ve said about Julia Gillard’s voice. 


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Flesh eating coffins and women in masks

28 Dec

by Rochus Wolff, flickr

Seeking respite from the Assange material last week, I opened an article in ABC’s The Drum irresistibly titled “Who says female corpses aren’t sexy?” written by Melinda Tankard Reist.

The article turned out to be the author’s objections to a 30 second video clip teaser of rapper Kanye West’s latest song. The author describes the video clip as “gendered violence”, and claims it is fetishizing “female pain, female passivity, female suffering and female silence.”

Tankard-Reist continues:

Expect to hear boys singing along to it soon. This is the message they are imbibing:

Women are slaves and bitches who can service a man’s sexual needs, even in death. Men are brutal and dominant, and have no empathy for women. Men enjoy dead women as sex and entertainment. The female body is to be devoured, reduced to the same status as meat. Female bodies should be displayed before men as a great feast for their consumption.

That was quite a lot to glean from a 30 second video clip, I thought admiringly.

But then it turned peculiar. I read: Then there’s these lines: “I put the p-ssy in the sarcophagus” (which, in case you’re wondering, is a flesh eating coffin) …”

What? I shouted, though I was alone except for the dog.  A flesh-eating coffin? How can that be?

And anyway, what about all those pharaohs buried in sarcophagi who when disinterred still had their flesh?

Dried, maybe, but certainly not eaten.

I then made my next mistake. I got onto the Comments. I used a pen name I’m not stupid enough to let these people know who I am. Quite quickly I became an embattled defender fighting off a full frontal feminist attack. (They said they were feminists but they aren’t like any feminists I know and love).

You’re pro male, they told me. Why aren’t you pro woman?

I’m actually pro human I replied. And there’s no such thing as flesh eating coffins, I added. You aren’t doing your credibility any good adding in rubbish stuff like that for effect, I told them.

You need to read Susan Faludi, they said.

I’d rather have needles in my eyes than RE-read Susan Faludi, I replied.

She writes about people like you, they said, she says you pro male collaborators in the gender wars are Uncle Toms.

Really, I replied. A few years back radical feminists used to say a “pro male” woman had a pr**k in her head. That was far more picturesque, I said. Dali-esque, in fact.

But the moderator didn’t publish that. They seem to have inconsistent moderating rules at The Drum. I can’t work them out. They let someone make nasty remarks about my “corrupted” children, and a few people got told they were sleazy pornographers who should crawl under stones and all that was published.

You people aren’t a feminist’s bootlace, I finally told the pro Melindas. Where are your manners?

(I refer to them as the pro Melindas because their posts included:

Melinda could be said to be awakening others to the suffering of women, and many have pilloried Melinda for her point of view, and Go Melinda! Many of us love and applaud you!)

Then someone posted the following:

What you need to know about this author:

1. She believes in god

2. She believes in flesh eating coffins

3. She’s up close with the Australian Christian Lobby.

 

Well. It was on then. Not a stone was left unturned. Derrida, Barthes, Picasso, Christians, lions, ethics, necrophilia, disclosure of religious affiliations, domestic violence, grandmothers, sex of all kinds, censorship, children, science, and the un dead; Madonna, archaic patriarchal religion, PhDs, Finns dancing, Finns singing, accusations of racism about Finns doing stuff; 70’s music, Tropic Thunder, Russian politics before the end of the cold war, corpses and raw meat. Oh, there was no stopping us. For four days and four nights we kept at it, we barely ate or slept. The ABC should award us with something.

The increasingly hostile exchanges between a pro Melinda poster and someone called Amazonia ended thus:

Pro Melinda Person: Those in favour of the video under discussion are getting fanatic. Now I’ll turn my thoughts to the homeless in our society and their extra plight with extreme temperatures about to begin.

Amazonia: I hope somebody warns them you’re coming.

The day before I succumbed to all that madness I had to go to the dentist. Uneasy in the waiting room, I picked up the October Cosmopolitan magazine as a distraction from what might be going to happen to me. I found that Cosmo are conducting a competition for the year’s most influential woman. The contestants were displayed in a three-page photo shoot. They were all young. Almost all of them wore killer stilettos, some with slave girl ankle bands. Most skirts were high on the thighs. The women wore masks, as if they were going to a masquerade ball or something much darker, and I think some of them were armed.

I studied these pages for a long time. It seemed to me that in order to be considered as eligible for this competition you first had to satisfy another set of criteria that has no obvious link to your ability to be influential and mentor young women.

I continued to think this through as the dentist apparently drilled into my brain. God moves in mysterious ways, and blessed distraction comes from the most unexpected places.

Now, I have nothing against killer heels, except when you watch someone trying to walk in them they inevitably lack grace, tilted as they are at an unmanageable degree from the earth. From behind, it’s not a good look. Wear them, darling, by all means. Just don’t try to walk in them. Maybe one of those nice men will carry you.

And I really am the last person on earth to tell anybody what she should or shouldn’t wear for any reason other than the aesthetic, and mostly not even then unless I know them very well.

But I do deeply object to the demand that before she can be considered to be influential, a woman must fit a certain physical profile.

This is the message sent to women who read Cosmopolitan. You can be as influential as you like. You can be an outstanding mentor to younger women. But if you don’t have the look, forget it. Whatever skills you’re offering, we aren’t buying.

I thought this was a pretty good example of mainstream objectification and denigration of women.

So, because I can be thick sometimes and not see what’s coming at me, I brought it up in the comments about the flesh eating coffin and the video clip.

Who are you to tell a woman what she can or can’t wear? The hostile forces howled back at me.

I suppose you want everybody to go round in a burka? They spat.

Stunned at how quickly I had become cast in the role of the clothes police, ousting the pro Melindas to whom it seemed quite naturally to belong, I didn’t reply for a few hours. I ate dinner, took the dog out, watched TV and thought that I really didn’t have to bother with these people any more. This last was encouraged by my household, which by now was heartily sick of me lurching obsessively from Assange to Melinda, and just wanted me to focus on buying their Christmas presents.

At bedtime, I couldn’t hold out any longer. I sat down and I wrote:

Well, I wasn’t saying what women should wear. I was just pointing out an example of sexism in a very popular women’s magazine. I thought it would be of interest to you as your goal is to eradicate sexism and the objectification of women. (Eradicate was their word, not mine. I objected to it on the grounds that it sounds like pest control).

You really need to stop lecturing people, replied one of the pro Melindas, and who wants to be in Cosmopolitan anyway?

What? I yelled at the dog, seeing as nobody else would talk to me about it.

Aren’t they supposed to be campaigning against sexism in the media?

Then I wrote: Well, if you’re going to be like that, who wants to be in a cruddy rap video, anyway either? Huh? And BTW does being pro male just mean you don’t want to kill them?

It’s been quite a year. Many of us are very tired.

P.S. It’s not over yet! Now a male poster has hit back: Just look at all the magazines in the supermarket talking about orgasms, he typed. Whose orgasms? Well, come on, whose orgasms? Women’s, he crowed triumphantly. Not men’s, oh no not men’s! All women’s!

Oooo-eeer!

This article first appeared in On Line Opinion, December 23 2010

 

 

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