Wall of the....?

I was mad at my sudoku app the other day; so I decided I would go and get myself one of those convenience store books of sudoku puzzles.  Why I would pay four bucks for one little book and insist on paying nothing for my phone app is a reasonable question but, alas, not what I'm talking about today.  So, one way or another, I found myself standing in front of a magazine rack for the first time in ages, looking at pictures of scantily clad women and cars.  Both the cars and the women were very sexy.

As you might guess, I'm not going to talk much about the cars.  They were sleek, colourful eye candy, and, probably, high performance machines.  You know what they look like.  Magazines have been promoting vehicles like this for some time.  Fine.  But funnily enough, so were the women.  Eye candy, I mean.  Regardless of the subject matter of the magazine, cover women stared back at me with vacant faces, partially or mostly exposed breasts, fully exposed midriffs with very low waistlines, and fully exposed legs.  Aroused and ready.  Always ready.  Photoshopped to death, these women bore nary a blemish, were too thin, often had unrealistically long legs, and far too many of them had blue eyes and very light skin.  I am sure, just like the cars, despite being eye candy, these women are also to be considered high performance. 

It's crazy bumping into a wall like that.  I simply cannot believe that any thinking man or woman really thinks that a constant state of arousal is a reasonable dominant depiction of women.  Depiction of women in advertising is an old issue that has, funnily enough, gotten worse as the women's movement has dragged, lurched, and at times, stumbled (back and) forward.  If you're interested,  Killing Us Softly, Jean Kilbourne's ongoing work on the depiction of women in advertising is available on youtube and clearly documents the trend.  One may agree or disagree with some of her analysis but one must admit that advertising has changed significantly in the last forty or so years.

Suffice to say that we now walk around in a world in which advertising is putting folks in a constant state of arousal.  And, just as in shock films or pornography, the subject matter must become increasingly more bloody or tittilating to get the same effect because, of course, it's human nature to become innured to ongoing sensory input.   So, now on these magazines and posters and billboards, we are long past any idea of real women and are completely lost in impossible fantasy, leaving half the population feeling insecure and scared that they can't measure up and the other half hopelessly unfufilled.  So both halves buy tons of stuff to make them feel better.  I understand that the trend to uberperfection is starting to affect images of men in advertising.  Yikes.  What will we do in a world in which none of us feel empowered without the right deodorant or face cream?

We scoff about, looking for something to blame.  Usually, we blame the patriarchy even though it takes two to tango.  I am more inclined to blame lack of reasonable laws and lazy advertisers.  We just need a few laws that require folks selling snake oil to (yikes!) sell the oil not sex, similar to broadcasting laws.   So for me, it was not the Wall of the Patriarchy I walked into, it was a wall of advertising.

Now, I know I am suggesting regulation and I know I am not blaming men.  So a few of you might not be happy out there.  That a lot of you might yell about free speech.  Or the rights of manufacturers or marketers or of capitalist interests.  Or what's the problem, don't women want to be portrayed this way? Or, how can you NOT blame the patriarchy?  Or, god, really?  You want to INCREASE the size of the government?  But I think that reasonable limitations are good.  Because right now the depiction of women is not reasonable.  And if men think they are immune, they should think again.  It won't be long until all of use are looking for a cream to keep their skin impossibly blemish free.  And paying through the nose.

So, faced with that magazine wall, I did what most of the advertisers probably did not want me to do.  I turned around and walked out of the store (despite the fact that I found - off the side and close to the ground - a little clutch of puzzle books).  I opted, instead to reconsider my initial stance on buying apps and, while doing that, I would just use the old one.  Cause I don't want any snake oil with that.