(no subject)

[sebastienne]

Because what's at stake for all of us, men and women, boys and girls, is our ability to have authentic and freely chosen lives. Nothing less.

This. Is. Real. I forget it in the Oxford Bubble, hiding from TV, cinema, and magazines. But it's real.

Comments

[charmaestro.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of scared by the stat 'the average American will spend three years of their life watching TV commercials. That's just the commercials'. How much time do they spend watching the programmes? Sorry I don't really have the time to watch the whole video, that just stood out of the couple of minutes I did see.

[chains-of-irony.livejournal.com]

Sat through the whole half hour and I'm just as angry as you.

The most annoying thing is that you can't do anything about it because that would be censorship and censorship is bad. (I believe that wholeheartedly.) So it's just THERE. PERSISTANTLY. As if passive images of women, and violence against them are just a vital part of appealing to the male mind and we've just got to accept it.

[frightful-elk.livejournal.com]

Those adverts are appealing to female minds as well, they are selling things uniquely to women sometimes.

[chains-of-irony.livejournal.com]

Yep. Mostly selling them hair and beauty products and the like, selling us the ideal woman* who, the sickeningly hetero-normative adverts will tell us, is ultimate in appealing to the male mind. In a sense, they're asking us to turn ourselves into adverts.

*who, as the video says, DOES NOT EXIST in real life without interference from these companies. The huge tits and tall skinny body type doesn't generally exist without cosmetic surgery as breasts are mainly body fat. The women in make-up adverts have no pores! Women cannot remain eternally young; they get wrinkles. We all have hair on our legs and elsewhere but must buy products to get rid of this. Women didn't shave under their arms until an advert for tights in the 1920s showed a woman with shaved pits and NOW if you go out with hairy pits men will heckle you. Bloody adverts.

[frightful-elk.livejournal.com]

They may be telling us that, but most men actually have their own preferences. I don't think those adverts exist for the purpose of selling to a male mind. They obviously appeal to both sets of minds or they wouldn't be there.

I suppose the 'as if' is the key word, because i really don't think those images are genuine representations of what is desirable to the male mind. Human minds seem pretty plastic, if you look at art history and see what sort of women have been the height of sexyness. I can't argue with the passivity thing though that does always seem to of been around.

I do have to say though that women police each other more than men ever do, my friends who don't shave are heckled much more by their mothers and friends than by random men, at least from what i've heard.

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

They obviously appeal to both sets of minds or they wouldn't be there.
But the appeal is in the promise to make one attractive to the opposite sex (yays, heteronormativity). okay, men have pressure there too, but in ad-land what a man has to do to be attractive is splash on aftershave, wear a clean shirt, maybe buy the latest car - not shave about 1/4 his surface area, have silicone pumped into his body, have fat pumped out of other areas of his body, restrict his food intake to less than half the healthy amount...

and when women pull up other women for not shaving, it's with horror that she could have the temerity to think she can attract people without following these diktats, or (shock) not care about who looks at her at all. Though believe me, as many men as women have balked at my unshaven legs/pits in summer (though to be fair, in Oxford it's more horrified-fascination than aggression, I suppose that's a step up). 's a handy device for filtering out the twats, much like my past closely cropped hair.

disclaimer: am in computer rooms and have hence not watched video in question!

[9headeddragon.livejournal.com]

What defines the "male mind"? I refuse to believe that nature has much to do with the way men think (if one can generalise like that) and thus it must be nurture that gives them such ideas; therefore if men and women learned to think in different ways, advertisers wouldn't have to use such abhorrent images in order to appeal.

[chains-of-irony.livejournal.com]

Heey, don't point those quotation marks at me, sweetie. I said 'as if.'

I don't have a generalised concept of the 'male mind' at all, but the advertisers do and that in itself, considering how many adverts we see, is a form of nurture. I agree with what you said and the only solution IS that we all learn to think in a different way.

*throws some quotation marks at you and runs away* ^_^

[stronglight.livejournal.com]

Good talk. Very good talk. Upsetting, but very well presented. I didn't mean to watch the whole thing when I saw how long it was, but I couldn't look away.

*Shivers*

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

Should be fucking compulsory viewing, that.

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

where is that icon text from?

it's beautiful.

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

I got it from someone on the ladies' loos...

I just found this out today

[andustar.livejournal.com]

You may both want to know that it's from a poem from the 70s called 'For Every Woman' by Nancy R. Smith.

It's a very loose adaptation - originally on a poster (http://www.crimethinc.com/a/gender/poster.pdf) by CrimethInc, and now found all over the internets.

[lizziwig.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting the link. Didn't mean to watch the whole thing but I couldn't look away. The comments are fucking disgusting, though.

[andustar.livejournal.com]

Experience has taught me to never look at Google/Youtube comments. The vast majority of the time they are trolling, and the rest of the time they are simply idiots.

[lizziwig.livejournal.com]

I really, really hope they're trolls.

[andustar.livejournal.com]

I expect many of them are. Just hold that thought and you might not go on a mad killing spree :)

[deathbyshinies.livejournal.com]

The juxtaposition of this and stronglight's latest post (http://stronglight.livejournal.com/29139.html) on my flist is rather beautiful.

In the oh-god-I-am-going-to-kill-someone kind of way.

[steerpikelet.livejournal.com]

thank you. I am showing this to all of my friends.
Have you read Ariel Levy's 'female chauvinist pigs'? liminereid definitely has a copy...

[slasheuse.livejournal.com]

So do I, so do I!

[chains-of-irony.livejournal.com]

Is it any good? I read a synopsis and thought she sounded a bit like the crazies in The Handmaid's Tale, but if you say it's good then it's bound to be. I am quite willing to take you, Miss Laurie, as an authority when it comes to feminism! Got any other recommendations? I've read a lot of Greer but that's about it...

[andustar.livejournal.com]

Oh, you may also want to see http://www.iwanexstudio.com/ - click portfolio. Apparently they're all celebs but I'm too out of touch to recognise them.