Using Women in Ads: Making It Harder for Women (and Men) for Years

So, I was procrastinating earlier this evening (I guess I still am!) and came across a post at BlogOfHilarity.com entitled: "The 9 most disturbingly misogynistic old print ads" It was linked to by HumanFolly on Twitter and knowing her status as a women's issues blogger, I knew I would want to check it out.  The post features nine really pretty messed up ads featuring women in less than equal positions to the men who probably created the ads.  My favorite (and, in my opinion, the most demented of the bunch) is the pic in this post.  Holeee crap--could that little girl be more depressed looking?


It's like she knows the years of oppression and self-denial that are ahead of her.  Or perhaps she's just stressed about the economy?

Either way, the little girl in this ad is just wrong.  Kids are supposed to be happy, not looking like the latest model in the "childbot" line from Stepford Industries.  What's worse is that the little tyke is not the most disturbing thing about this ad--as the original blog post mentions: 

There are so many things wrong with this ad…the emotionally disturbed
girl, the lifelessly colored tricks and, of course, the fact that the
ad is saying 5 year-old "women" need love.

Yeah, pretty messed up.  I think it's also a little creepy how Mom is right behind her daughter, making sure she eats the sugar-and-chemical-laden corporate foodstuff and it's not like the little girl is given any options in the matter.


Ugh...

Is it any surprise we haven't had a woman president yet?  With decades of programming through pop-culture (including ads like these) it would take a woman of extraordinary strength, confidence, persuasiveness and diplomacy to surmount the Kilamanjaro-sized pile of negative propaganda we've all been forced to consume as a culture since the dawn of media.


Maybe if we spliced together DNA from Oprah and Obama we could create a female clone capable of winning everyone over.

Anyone know a genetic scientist?  Get them on this now!

Even more irony pops up when you see the ads that appear next to the blog post on BlogOfHilarity.com--the ads for CollegeHumor and Snorg Tees are the ones I saw.  CollegeHumor advertized "Cute College Girl of the Week" with pictures of women in bikinis. Meanwhile, the Snorg ad featured a cute-as-hell young women looking like she was about to take her shirt off.  On the shirt is the message "We're going streaking."


Don't get me wrong--I love women.  I love looking at attractive women--but I respect them, too.  In fact, the smarter a woman is the more attracted I am to her.  I can talk politics and philosophy with TheWife, which is great.  My current movie crush is Naomi Klein who writes about the negative aspects of the free market in her book "The Shock Doctrine."  Most porn alternatively bores or repulses me, so I tend to just troll Flickr for pictures that don't make me hate humanity (aka porn I actually find hot).  So, it baffles me as to why advertisers need to cater to the lowest common denominator all the time.  That cute chick in the Snorg ad didn't make me want to buy a T-shirt.  Neither did the bikini girls in the CollegeHumor ad make me want to visit that site for a cute college girl of the week. 


But I guess it works since sex keeps being used to sell. 

I guess I'm a total freak, huh? o_O

Ah well. 

Hm... I wonder Naomi Klein would ever do a bikini calendar with excerpts from her books in the margins...O_O

Posted by email from thepete's posterous

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Orignal From: Using Women in Ads: Making It Harder for Women (and Men) for Years