Critics and Builders

You Are Your Own Project

As promised in the previous post, the latest addition to the Critics and Builders blogroll is Project Girl, a Wisconsin-based initiative that aims to empower middle-school girls to "deconstruct media messages," "learn of the value of art," "create positive friendships," and "encourage activism for productive changes and reform":

Project Girl strengthens your skills in the fight against having your life controlled by people whose primary mission is to sell you a product, tell you how you should look, or act, or what your dreams and values should be.

The "girl-led" Project Girl website is a little rough around the edges, but it showcases several cool interactive features and many voices that we need to hear.

Their real focus these days, though, is their exhibition at a local college, which is the culmination of over two years of monthly workshops that have attempted to foster media literacy.  It places student art next to professional art, all of which addresses subjects such as body image and advertising.

They've been getting some great press from The Capital Times and the Wisconsin State Journal.  Both articles do a nice job of showing how much both young girls and their caretakers are yearning for this type of empowerment.

Whether you are part of the revolution or not, it's everyone's responsibility to start building the new world.

Bringing Sexy ... Back Where It Belongs

American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls issued a report Monday confirming what we all know: images of women and girls have become increasingly sexualized, and those images are virtually ubiquitous in American culture.

What is new, beyond the urgent tone and the remarkable thoroughness of the report, is the Association's focus on the dire consequences that exposure to those images has on young women -- "harming girls' self-image and development." We're talking everything from eating disorders to lower test scores.

Even if you consider yourself aware of the problem, you won't see purveyors of these images -- the media and the marketers -- quite the same way again. Sleazy would be an understatement.

Almost as noteworthy as the report itself is Stacy Weiner's article on it -- "Goodbye to Girlhood" -- in The Washington Post. She nicely highlights the key issues in the report -- but also provides some historical context, citing Diane Levin's argument that much of the problem can be traced back to the deregulation of the children's television in the 1980s -- when product placement really began.

Weiner's article also points to a way out: teaching media literacy. The article ends with Genevieve McGahey, a 16-year-old who has become empowered by her mother's and her school's commitment to educating her for the real world:

"It's a little scary being a young girl," McGahey says. "The image of sexuality has been a lot more trumpeted in this era. . . . If you're not interested in [sexuality] in middle school, it seems a little intimidating." And unrealistic body ideals pile on extra pressure, McGahey says. At a time when their bodies and their body images are still developing, "girls are not really seeing people [in the media] who are beautiful but aren't stick-thin," she notes. "That really has an effect."

Today, though, McGahey feels good about her body and her style.

For this, she credits her mom, who is "very secure with herself and with being smart and being a woman." She also points to a wellness course at school that made her conscious of how women were depicted. "Seeing a culture of degrading women really influenced me to look at things in a new way and to think how we as high school girls react to that," she says.

This entry is cross-posted at PopPolitics.com

Smells Like That Sexist Advertising Spirit

The image on the right is the promotional poster for a new film opening this week, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.  I haven't seen the movie or read Patrick Suskind's bestselling book on which it is based, but my point isn't to criticize the film itself.  It is to condemn, once again, marketing that, in order to titillate its audience, fetishizes both parts of the female body (as opposed to seeing the body as a whole -- with a head and mind attached to it) and the victimized, frequently bloodied and/or dismembered female body.

The story of the film and the book concerns a man who murders virgin young women to preserve their scent, which he believes is the perfect perfume.  The reviews of the film are somewhere between mixed and poor -- but, it should be noted, almost every critic praises both its visual artistry and its courage. 

Some might, in fact, argue that, far from endorsing the fetishization I condemn above, the film is actually about the danger of a man's out-of-control sexual appetite.  More than one critic, though, is disturbed by the lack of an internal check in the film -- and see the visual artistry at the service of something rather sinister. Violet Glaze of the Orlando Weekly writes: "As the body count of sexualized corpses increases (an indignity sharpened by the hypocrisy of staying above the navel to clear an R rating) Perfume starts to resemble an olfactory Peeping Tom minus the intellectual chops necessary to back up its atrocities. It's a shame the rancid, misogynist undertone of lowest-common-denominator slasher porn overwhelms all its redeeming qualities."

But, as I said, how the film ultimately deals with this issue is not really my concern here.  The marketing of a film -- or any narrative -- often overwhelms the story itself, since most people likely will see the marketing out of context that sit through the whole work. 

And the image the marketers use for Perfume (see it in live action on the film's official website) follows a long and increasingly intense sexist advertising tradition. 

First, seeing women as sex objects is nothing new, but in the last few decades advertising has increasingly dehumanized women by portraying them as animalistic or, as in this case, showing only an outline or just specific fetishized parts of the female body. 

Consider how many fast-paced trailers for films and TV shows have what seems to be an obligatory random shot of a woman, usually with her head not in the picture, taking a piece of clothing off.  To cite simply the example that flashed across my screen as I was writing this post, take a look at the last few moments of the TV spot for the upcoming Alpha Dog.

Sometimes this dehumanizing and fetishizing is "benign" -- portraying women as dolls, perhaps -- but it can also have a very creepy side, when violence against women becomes part of the appeal.  See Christine's earlier post on how this disturbing trend has infected television drama. 

In the Perfume image, the blood-as-rose-petals seduces the casual viewer in this subtle but devastating system.

Note: I must credit About-Face, an amazing website whose goal is to "to equip women and girls with tools to understand and resist the harmful stereotypes of women," with cataloging the most egregious advertising "offenders," as they call them, a few of which I link to above.  And it's great to see that About-Face just launched a blog -- so I'm sure they'll be scooping me on this stuff soon.

And, speaking of scooping, I was surprised Bag News Notes -- another remarkable website that analyzing popular visual imagery  -- hadn't picked up on this yet (although their focus is usually the news).  But, as you can see, they've been busy breaking down the visual imagery of a rich political week.

This entry is cross-posted at PopPolitics.com

Can't Beat Them ... Reconstruct Them

The links in the left column reflect a continually updated list of the best sites that empower critics and builders of culture.  This post is the first of many that will highlight one of those web resources.

My Pop Studio is a fascinating project by Renee Hobbs and the Media Education Lab at Temple University.  It allows young girls to construct their own "pop star" image in a variety of media.  Hobbs explains the rationale in a recent press release:

“My Pop Studio aims to re-frame popular culture in ways that can be powerful for girls .... Weaving an educational component into the pop entertainment culture they consume gives them the opportunity to feel the power of making creative choices and to recognize that those choices have consequences.

On a deeper level, they will be equipped with the tools of media literacy and an understanding that ‘stuff doesn’t just appear on the TV screen.’ There has been conscious, calculated construction of the media messages that are constantly delivered to them.”

Hobbs describes My Pop Studio as a “creative play experience in which girls can create, edit, share, analyze and comment upon the media in their lives — especially those incessant, and often subtly delivered, messages about body image and health that affect girls and young women.”

While Hobbs definitely is very conscious of what she has created, the site itself is so well-constructed that I wonder if the participants might get too lost in the game to evaluate all the steps they have taken.  But that line between engagement and critical thinking is an essential, if very challenging, line to walk.