More Truth. Less Tits & Ass Please.

“Ridiculous hey?”

Saskatchewan University students quip about two-thirds of the way through their going-viral video on sexist advertising (see below).

Well, yes. The fact that women continue to be objectified, sexualized (often violently), and unclothed (often appearing essentially naked) in mainstream advertising to sell everything from cars to cod IS ridiculous.

“Cod!?” You may well wonder. Uh huh. This ad for Hardees’ fish sandwiches blew my mind:

The fact that we women (and men), tolerate such advertising, even support it by buying the magazines, watching the programming, viewing the videos, etc. that run the ads, AND purchase the products advertised in them is beyond ridiculous.

It’s insane.

Worse, it’s not new. And even worse than that, IT’S GETTING WORSE! Not better!

I (and countless others) have been blogging about  sexist advertising for ages. Here are  examples of the “vintage” kind (some of which are also featured in the Saskatchewan University students going-viral video below): 23 Shockingly Sexist Vintage Ads and 8 More Vintage Sexist Ads.

Yep, they’re shocking alright. Shocking to look back at how sexist the world was 50 years ago…

But wait.

WTF was Pamela Anderson doing drawn, quartered and banned in her (and my) native Canada just two years ago, and did a butchered woman hanging from meat hooks make people want to shop in 2005?

What possessed La Senza to have “seven girls with bra sizes A to G make up the musical notes of the Cup Size Choir (“girls” is their word, not mine), and then invite viewers to “Have a look, have a play (a euphemism for masturbate) at http://www.cupsizechoir.com and have a Happy Christmas?”

Oh, I know! More than three million YouTube views since December 2010, when the video was posted.

And WTF was Kate Upton thinking when she agreed to make this ad for Mercedes this year:

MsMagazine featured the spot in Top Five Sexist Super Bowl Ads 2013,  in which they editorialized:

Kate Upton shows how women don’t have to lift a finger as long as they can use their bodies to get men to do their menial tasks for them. Just by standing around, posing suggestively and sweeping her blonde locks from side to side, she can make all the men in the vicinity turn into gaping baboons who will cater to her every whim. Makes total sense since a woman’s only as powerful as the double Ds she’s packing under that pushup bra, right? Wrong.

Damn right it’s wrong. Demeaning to women. And demeaning to men as well.

So is this one (banned in the UK just two days ago), also featuring Pamela Anderson in a soft-porn ad for an Australia-based domain name registrar:

It was uploaded five days ago (June 4, 2013) and so far has 750,000+ views. And what about these four sexist ads for which no one has issued an apology? *sigh*

Since I started blogging about gender parity five years ago (see 13 Provocative Posts On Gender Issues, Invisible Women: Where Is Half The World’s Population? and this guest post 20 Reasons Why We Still Need The “F” Word by author Lynn Harris), little has changed – except perhaps that there finally seems to be a much-needed groundswell of feminine voice, including the still-ongoing #FBRape campaign, calling for more feminine voice in all spheres of human endeavor, most notably in the media.

In addition to the other links in this post, I highly recommend Miss Representation and Get Real: Wise Women Speak, two films that speak to the issue.

And bravo to the Canadian University students who put together the video below which they describe as:

“a culture jam school project created for a Women and Gender Studies class at the University of Saskatchewan by Sarah Zelinski, Kayla Hatzel and Dylan Lambi-Raine,… who wanted to show how ridiculous media portrays gender roles and stereotypes in advertising through presenting gender role reversals.”

To date, the role reversal video has 1.5 million YouTube views, showing, perhaps, that there’s room for more truth in advertising rather than more tits and ass. Or at least there’s hope.

Related articles

• Pamela Anderson’s New Ad Is Banned for Being “Sexist and Degrading to Women” (eyeoncelebs.com)
• Some down. A long way to go. (Trigger warning) (amazingsusansblog.wordpress.com)
• The top 30 stats you need to know when marketing to women
• “Sexist and degrading” Pamela Anderson ad (tellygunge.wordpress.com)