Tag: Advertising

Eff You, Dr. Pepper: An Open Letter

Dear Dr. Pepper,
I personally find your beverages delicious, and happen to make a majority of the purchasing decisions for my household. Thanks to your outrageous ad for Dr. Pepper 10, which I just saw last night, we will no longer drink any variety of Dr. Pepper. 
Please advise.
Sincerely,
Me
P.S. Here’s the ad referenced above, just in case you outsourced this campaign to some teenage boys (although the use of “woman” rather than “girl” suggests that adults did, in fact, create the ad) and you have no clue what I’m talking about (despite this and this and this and this, and this, etc.).

P.P.S. I’m really tired of sexism-as-humor in marketing campaigns. I’m not just talking about the “not for women” thing, though I’m certainly not a fan of that idea. This whole “man up and be a manly man” shit has to stop. You’re not the first to equate a beverage with masculinity, although you’re the most straightforwardly sexist, and probably the least funny. Here are a couple of other examples of unacceptable ad campaigns, so you know what not to do when you re-do this one.
Miller Lite:

Pepsi Max:

P.P.P.S. Yes, I’m aware that companies often create outrageous advertising for the buzz and free promotion it generates. I’m also aware that this open letter generates additional promotion for the products listed above. That said, companies that gamble with such sexist messages risk alienating customers (like me and probably a lot of others), and deserve public scorn.
Readers: Have you written or read elsewhere about the new campaign for Dr. Pepper 10, or other Manly Beverages? If so, please leave your link in the comments and we’ll include it above.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Flick Chicks: A guide to women in the movies by Mindy Kaling for The New Yorker

Kickstarter campaign for ‘The Punk Singer is Kathleen Hanna’ by Sini Anderson

Tomi-Ann Roberts on the sexualization of girls from SPARK Summit

CNN’s “Gender Identity: A Change in Childhood” from Bitch

Early Signs of a “Bridesmaids” Bump by Rebecca Traister for Salon

The Cost of a Non-Diverse Media by Ariel Dougherty for Ms.

Book Excerpt: Where Have All the Girl Bands Gone by Courtney E. Smith from Women and Hollywood

Man Up: The CEO of “Light Beer” Takes Issue with Miller Lite from The Good Men Project

Why Is TV Suddenly Overstuffed With Buxom Bunnies, Sexy Stewardesses, and Charlie’s Angels? by Sarah Seltzer & Julianne Escobedo Shepherd for AlterNet

Sex, Gender, and Dancing with Chaz Bono by Barbara J. King for NPR

Leave your links in the comments!

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Hermione Granger: The Heroine Women Have Been Waiting For from Huffington Post

Spotlight on the Samsung Women’s International Film Festival from Gender Across Borders

Best Ever Hindi Films by Women Directors from Rediff Movies

Mila Kunis Is SO HORRIBLE! (This, too, is sarcasm.) from Shakesville

2011 Kids’ Movie Titles Feature 11 Male Stars from Reel Girl

Violence Against Women in Peru, and the Films of Claudia Llosa from Bad Reputation

Murder, She Blogged: Mrs. Columbo from Bitch Magazine

Tell Got Milk to End Its Sexist “PMS” Ad Campaign from Change.org 

Leave your links in the comments!

YouTube Break: Jean Kilbourne’s "Killing Us Softly" Lecture

From her website:

Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D. is internationally recognized for her pioneering work on the image of women in advertising and her critical studies of alcohol and tobacco advertising. Her films, lectures, and television appearances have been seen by millions of people throughout the world. She was named by The New York Times Magazine as one of the three most popular speakers on college campuses. She is the author of the award-winning book Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel and co-author of So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids. The prize-winning films based on her lectures include Killing Us Softly, Spin the Bottle, and Slim Hopes.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Men outshouting women on radio from the f-word blog

Why we all need to see Bridesmaids from I Will Not Diet

Thelma and Louise Turns 20 from Women and Hollywood

Does Oprah’s Finale Herald the Rapture? from WIMN’s Voices Blog

Beyonce: Girls Run the World (Cue the Apocalypse!) from Ms. blog

Who Run the World? GIRLS! Who Wrote the Song? MEN! from Goddesses Rising

Dove: Visibly More White Beautiful Skin from Feministe

Short Skirts and Inappropriate Gender Messages in Tide Commercial from Marinagraphy

Leave your links in the comments!

Disembodied Women Take Five: Mouthing Off

According to the following posters, women have bright red mouths.  Wide open mouths with perfect white teeth.  That they can put things inside of.  See, women often have objects inside their bright red mouths, like golf balls or strawberries, that they’re usually biting.  And if they aren’t visibly biting anything, it’s implied that they’ve recently bitten something, what with them all sexy-licking the dripping blood off their–in case you forgot–bright red mouths.  Or maybe they’re just biting their own mouths.  Or maybe their mouths actually become food (bright red food, even). But if they aren’t biting anything, then the least those bright red mouths can do is stay silent.  In fact, looking at the posters in succession, one could even argue that all those bright red mouths (oh yeah, and the completely erased mouths) represent the silencing of women.  Who can talk while wearing an implied ball gag?  Or while eating?  Or when you don’t have a mouth?  Or when your mouth is, you know, really just a pair of red chili peppers?  Or if you’ve got a bloody knife pressed against it? Or if that shit is zipped shut?

 
As discussed in the other parts of this series, separating women from their body parts in media images subtly reinforces women’s status as commodities, or pleasure-objects, or victims, who aren’t valued as whole, and who are, as a result, denied their humanity.  And we all know, because we live in This Society and it’s 100% inescapable, that the representation of women’s mouths is all kinds of tied up in the mouth-as-vagina metaphor–with the accompanying requisite phallic cigarette and lipstick images apparently never getting old. (And I’d be thrilled to never have to hear the phrase “dick-sucking lips” ever. again.)  But if the mouth isn’t a vagina, then it’s a nonstop, life-ruining motormouth (ever hear someone call a man a motormouth?) that even Mr. Potato Head wants to slap the shit out of. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, have a look at the Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head commercial that ran during the Superbowl.)  
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.  Molly Ringwald putting her lipstick on with her cleavage in The Breakfast Club is one of the most famous scenes in all of 80s film.  We’ve come a long way, baby!

Disembodied Women Take Three: Leggy Perfection

In 1978, Hustler magazine depicted a headless woman shoved into a meat grinder on their June cover. Thirty two years later, Spike TV chose virtually the same image to promote their television show Blue Mountain State. Also, note the poster image for the film Choke, pictured below. This installment of “Disembodied Women” focuses on the continued use of dismemberment, in this case exposing women’s bare legs, to advertise films. The posters vary considerably, promoting horror films and romantic comedies, as well as foreign films and period pieces. The problem with such advertisements, as media activist Jean Kilbourne argues in her book Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, is that this perpetual sexual objectification of women encourages men to think of women as inferior. Additionally, women begin to view themselves as a collection of body parts, where a perceived flaw in only one area of the body leads to an obsessive desire to perfect the whole. For more disturbing evidence, check out our first and second installments, The Rear View and The Headless Woman, and feel free to add to our growing list of offending films in the comments section.

Disembodied Women Take Two: The Headless Woman

The Headless Woman is the second installment in our Disembodied Women series, where we illustrate how production companies continue to market films through the dismemberment and objectification of women’s bodies. For more, see our first post, The Rear View.

Disembodied Women Take One: The Rear View

You see it constantly in print advertising and commercials: advertisers show close-ups of women’s legs to sell razors; they show close-ups of women’s breasts to sell bras; they show close-ups of women’s backsides to sell underwear. And they show close-ups of a combination of women’s body parts to sell beer, fast food, cigarettes, cologne, cars, shampoo, and countless other products. By dismembering women in such a way, the women being objectified, and hence, all women who live in the society where the advertised products can be consumed, ultimately become the objects of consumption themselves, and as such, cease to exist as human beings with feelings, intellect, and identities.

In a society that treats women merely as a collection of body parts, airbrushed to perfection, it caters to the pleasure of men, who then reduce women to body parts in everyday life. It’s no wonder women can barely walk down the street without being cat-called or ogled by individual men or entire groups of them, which serves as yet another patriarchal power trip, further subjugating women and their existence as actual people.

Unfortunately, movie posters also fall into the all-too-easy and uncreative trap of exploiting womens’ bodies in order to sell their films. I find it most disturbing that even films such as Bend It Like Beckham and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants also fall into the stereotypical “advertise women’s asses” approach to promoting a film. Both movies can be (and have been) read and reviewed as feminist in that they promote sisterhood and also significantly pass The Bechdel Test (which we’ve established seems embarrassingly elusive to most mainstream films).

Here’s a selection of movie posters advertising different genres that all use a woman’s backside to sell a film. Leave your thoughts about the posters, or other films that use similar imagery, in the comments.

The Codes of Gender: Documentary Preview


From the Media Education Foundation (MEF):

Communication scholar Sut Jhally applies the late sociologist Erving Goffman’s groundbreaking analysis of advertising to the contemporary commercial landscape in this provocative new film about gender as a ritualized cultural performance. Uncovering a remarkable pattern of gender-specific poses, Jhally explores Goffman’s central claim that the way the body is displayed in advertising communicates normative ideas about masculinity and femininity. The film looks beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that focus on biological difference or issues of surface objectification and beauty, taking us into the two-tiered terrain of identity and power relations. With its sustained focus on the fundamental importance of gender, power, and how our perceptions of what it means to be a man or a woman get reproduced and reinforced on the level of culture in our everyday lives, The Codes of Gender is certain to inspire discussion and debate across a range of disciplines.

I haven’t yet watched The Codes of Gender, but I imagine it might provide some insight for our continued frustration with movie posters.

We previously highlighted Generation M, another documentary by the MEF, which focuses on the misogyny prevalent in contemporary culture.

As the MEF is a foundation focused on education, you can watch a low-resolution preview of any of their films online (for personal viewing only).

If you’ve seen The Codes of Gender, let us know what you think!