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Welcome back to another episode of Bitch Radio. I’m Kjerstin Johnson, the web
content manager at Bitch media. This podcast is part of Bitch Media’s Mad World
series: Gender and advertising in a mediated world. Coming up you’ll hear an
interview with Jean Kilbourne, creator of the Killing Us Softly films, a talk with the
women behind the blog Sociological Images, and voices from the Bitch
community about advertising.
From population maps to toy packaging, no cultural object or message is safe
from the critical eyes of Lisa Wade and Gwen Sharp, who run the blog
Sociological Images. Providing expert analysis in an accessible format, the blog
interprets a variety of images for their social significance. I spoke with Lisa, from
Occidental College and Gwen, from Nevada State College, on the phone about
the power of advertising.
Lisa Wade: Hi, hello, this is Lisa Wade.
Gwen Sharp: And this is Gwen Sharp.
LW: So we are Sociological Images.
KJ: So where did the idea for Sociological Images come from?
LW: I initially thought that I would put together a website where sociology
instructors all around the country could put up images that helped them get
across sociological ideas in class. And Gwen and I were really the only two that
enthusiastically did it. And as we were sharing these images with each other, it
became clear that more and more people were reading the site—people of
course that we didn’t know—and we were really surprised to see such huge
numbers of people participating. So as we kept writing we started doing a little
bit better at explaining what the images were, and what they illustrated, and that
has sort of blossomed into the blog that it is now…which is of course widely read,
by sociology professors but also by average Americans, some of whom have a
sociology background and some of whom don’t. So it’s been—so it sort of was
an accident, that we stumbled across this wonderful idea.
KJ: The tagline for your website is “Inspiring sociological imaginations
everywhere.” Can you explain what that means?
LW: C. Wright Mills is a famous sort of founding father of sociology, and he
coined that term, “sociological imagination”—so almost all sociologists are
familiar with that phrase, and what it means for me is, sociology is different than
other fields in the sense that sociology is designed to try to explain social
patterns by looking outside of the individual. So you might imagine that both
biology and psychology are trying to explain social patterns by, say for example,
how many people get pregnant when they’re not married, you know. Some sort
of social pattern like that—a biologist or a psychologist might try to explain it by
looking inside the body, or mind, or the sort of combination of the body/mind;
sociology tries to look at culture and institutions and the way that institutions link
up together to explain those social patterns. So we’re trying to get people to start
thinking more about how things in their own lives are shaped by things outside of
their control.
KJ: Well, that’s kind of a good segue to talk about advertising, because we don’t
really think about it as an institution, but it still shapes and is shaped by cultural
attitudes. For example, Gwen, I thought your recent post on how the beer Pabst
Blue Ribbon is now actually made by Miller, and how the authenticity that people
ascribe to PBR is actually kind of just a fallacy now; it’s just a label. Can you talk
about that a little bit?
GS: The story about Pabst Blue Ribbon I drew from Rob Walker’s book. And he
talks about what he calls “murketing”—you know, “marketing” with a U—and
what he’s talking about… if I watch a commercial on TV, I know it’s a
commercial, right? I’m aware of that. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect me.
But at least I know what it is. But he talks about how increasingly we don’t
necessarily even know we’re being marketed to, or what it is that we’re buying:
so, for instance, maybe you want to buy a beer that’s made locally, something of
that sort. You live in Milwaukee, you buy PBR. It says it’s made in Milwaukee,
you know, it’s got the P.O. box in Milwaukee…it no longer has anything to do
with Milwaukee! You know, how hard would you have to search to make sure
you were buying a product that really was local? And how much can you expect
a consumer to be able to track down that information?
You know, you have things now where you have people paid to pretend, just act
like normal people who happen to love a product, except they’re getting paid, or
they’re getting free product, or things of that sort. I think part of the thing about
the sociological imagination, part of it is that people can learn about it, but they
can also learn that it’s a useful way to look at their own lives. You know, why is it
that they and their friends like the same brands?
LW: One of the most insidious things about marketing is that most Americans will
say that they are not particularly influenced by commercials. So everyone seems
to think that they’re exempt; and that’s exactly why marketing is so effective.
Because we aren’t trying to fight it, we just assume that it’s not affecting us. And
so I think one of the advantages of our blog is, we’re able to try to pull back the
curtain a little bit, and start talking about what these ads are and aren’t doing,
and make people start thinking about them. And thinking about marketing in our
lives is the only way we are gonna have any sort of independence from the sort
of cultural assault that comes from marketing.
KJ: Do you see consumers using the internet to become more savvy to
advertisers?
LW: Yes, we are becoming more marketing-savvy, I think, as a culture. I think
that’s true. But marketers are coming back, and they are using that against us.
For example, there’s the recent hugely popular Old Spice guy campaign:
[Ad excerpt]
LW: …Many many commercials, and people who are copying them, and people
who are sending them to their friends cause it was so funny, to see this man
essentially mocking this hypermasculine or ideally … ideal manly man in these
commercials. But Old Spice, no matter how mocking they were, no matter how
ironically they put together these commercials—they were still selling something.
And I think people forgot that. Old Spice is using our savvy and turning it back
on top of us.
GS: Absolutely. There’s sort of a sense that the fact that you get the joke is how
you’re being marketed to. You also have situations where companies, you know,
kind of set up a shell-company or a little group and you produce viral videos—
what appear to be, you know, somebody made this cool video, but it’s really
produced by the company. You know, but it appears to be just like a really cool
thing that you would find on YouTube. And so they’re finding ways to also slip
into this apparent, you know, grassroots creation of fun things on the Internet, but
it’s still part of their marketing strategy.
LW: And another thing that all this media allows companies to do is target us in
more and more carefully crafted groups, where our demographics are more and
more predictable. So the same company will advertise a product in one venue—
say in a men’s magazine—and in another venue, say in a women’s magazine, or
in a gay men’s magazine. And they’re wildly different types of advertising,
sometimes advertising that the other groups, were they to ever see them, would
be offended by. But the creating of all these communities online—that’s all
money to advertisers, because they can very carefully craft messages that work,
and don’t risk pissing people off or turning people off their brand. There’s a very
very good example, very early on in SocImages, where we found the same ad for
vodka in a men’s magazine and a women’s magazine. It was the identical ad,
except for in the men’s magazine you could see her nipples … [laughter] and in
the women’s magazine they had been carefully airbrushed out. And it’s just a
really great example of exactly how carefully they are thinking about these ads.
KJ: You post a variety of images, not all of which are contemporary, and you post
ads from not just decades but centuries ago. Recently I was really blown away by
the connection you made to a colonial period advertisement for soap, and a
contemporary commercial for diapers. They were both basically playing off of the
idea of the white man’s burden. With that in mind, what other trends or changes
have you seen in advertising through your work?
LW: It’s certainly true that we see a lot of continuity; we put up a lot of things, for
example, where people of color are portrayed as primitive. There’s that same
sort of colonial message, still being—it’s still out there. But I think that
advertising, it will use whatever cultural resources are at hand to get us to buy a
product. We have a bunch of stuff on this site—we haven’t posted about this
recently, but we did for a while—a lot of examples of advertising co-opting
feminism.
KJ: Mm-hmm.
LW: So it would be, like, “Make your choice!” It would be all about choice, and
“choice” is tapping into this message of abortion rights and so on … but it would
be an ad about makeup, you know. Or it would be “Reach the glass ceiling”—
and “glass ceiling” is a metaphor for the boundary that keeps women out of the
top spots in companies—so the ad would be, “Break the glass ceiling” and it
would show a woman driving an SUV up a mountain. Or using Rosie the Riveter
but putting a cleaning product in her hand. “You have the power: to clean your
bathtub!”
GS: And I will say, you know, I try to steer away from “Oh, things are so much
worse today,” so on and so forth. But there definitely is an increase in very
blatant sexualization, particularly sexualization of women; it’s not that that never
happened before, but it’s gotten much more constant. I have to say, I’m shocked,
even though I’ve been doing SocImages for several years now—I am shocked by
how often we get submissions that are just these really blatant examples of
women being shown looking pained, looking dead, in situations that clearly look
uncomfortable, and which often hint at sexual violence. And I keep thinking one
of these days I’m gonna be used to it; and yet the fact that this is repeated so
often—especially in high fashion, how often women, there seems to be an
appetite for images of women in expensive clothing looking like they’ve been
hurt. And I find that trend fascinating in a very disturbing way.
KJ: You mention the sociological imagination, but what do you think are some
other ways that people can become more critical of advertising?
LW: Well, I think looking at how companies are related to one another, as in
Gwen’s example of PBR, is a really good example. Another great example of
that is the fact that Dove is owned by the same company as Axe. So Dove
marketing, for several years now, has been focused on trying to tell women that
Dove thinks that all women are wonderful and beautiful exactly as they are. So
we could take that apart if we wanted to; but on top of that, we have the fact that
Dove is owned by Unilever and so is Axe. So Axe, of course, is putting out all of
this advertising that is some of the most objectifying advertising that we see,
objectifying women. So I think a lot of people think, “Oh, look at what Dove is
doing! This is such a wonderful message!” And they forget that Dove is also
trying to sell something to us, and that it’s not just that companies do or don’t
have nice messages, but they don’t care what their messages are … so they’re
just doing this strategically, and that becomes extremely clear when we realize
that the same company is producing all of this Axe advertising, in which women
are trivialized, objectified, and men are seen as sort of basically just trying to
have sex with them all the time.
GS: I mean, you have to already have realized there’s an issue; but, for instance,
I posted recently on the pushback about the Pretzel Thins ads that said, you
know, “You can never be too thin” … and some people just took action, right? I
mean they basically used ridicule to get the company to change the ads. And I
think access to the online media—you’ve got Facebook, you’ve got YouTube—
you can distribute it pretty widely, and people can pretty quickly, you know,
respond. So we think of companies as these huge institutions, and they are. You
know, I can’t individually make Coca-Cola change its business practices. But
there are these moments where we can inject ourselves as a public, and actually
lead to some form of change. But we have to continually insert ourselves, and
then by doing that—by, for instance, Lisa and I having SocImages—we’ve drawn
more people into thinking about that.
KW: A sociology major myself, I totally geeked out talking to Lisa and Gwen.
Listen to our full conversation, which covers the blog, and the fascinating trope of
the so-called mediocre male, visit bitchmedia.org/audio! Visit sociological
images at contexts.org/socimages.
Kjerstin Johnson: So in this special Mad World Vox Populi, I asked folks what
they thought were the worst stereotypes found in commercials.
Aziza: Hi, my name’s Aziza. I guess “Men are the ones that are excited about
sex and sexuality, and women are not.” And that bigger women aren’t sexy
[laughs]. I guess everybody knows about it, but the Lane Bryant commercial,
and how they didn’t want to play it, blah blah blah … it was a pretty hot
commercial. [laughs] And I guess there’s the—the woman in a relationship, in a
heterosexual relationship, is the homemaker. And that men like sports [laughs]
… cause I know plenty of men that don’t like sports.
Alex: I’m Alex Berg! I think probably the most egregious ads for women are the
ones with housewives doing any sort of cleaning—like, dishes, laundry,
housecleaning, anything where they put a lot of, like, work into it, or at least a lot
of thought into it, and then their husbands come home and don’t notice. But then
it’s clean and the wives are really happy. That’s really sad to me.
Belin: My name is Belin. Yeah, I just think of American Apparel ads—the sort of,
like, prepubescent, semi-statutory ads—they’re all like hanging out there … I
mean I think it’s so misogynistic and gross, and I feel really dirty after seeing that.
And Dov Charney is like a total douchebag, too. So that doesn’t help anything.
But, yeah, especially American Apparel ads I think about. Liquor ads, too, where
they always have this half-naked or fully naked woman straddling a bottle—like
she’s having sex with the liquor bottle—it’s like, really? I highly doubt that these
women want to have, like, sexual intercourse with liquor bottles. It’s all that, you
know, “sex sells”-type bullshit that I hate.
One of the most prominent problems that I would say is that the advertising
focuses that women need to be really slim, and that women have to have the
specific body image that most of the U.S. population just doesn’t have. And it’s
just not a healthy weight. And just the fact that they airbrush the women to look a
specific way, and to act a certain way, and that they need to be a certain size,
and they need to be acting to impress the men, as if they don’t have any brains
at all. It’s focused on their looks. And it’s really interesting how that trickles into
a lot of the problems for women today, including eating disorders, and just
absolutely how devastating those diseases are. And being an eating-disorder
victim, so to speak—or survivor, however you want to put it—I know the firsthand
effects, and how the media does not create this disease but it certainly
contributes to the disease and helps contribute to high problems in American
society.
Joseph: My name is Joseph Bonnell, and I guess the advertisements I think
about most readily are advertisements that are marketed to men, that are—
especially the ones that are very, like, there will be a sissy/dude-man message.
And I guess one that really struck me was for something … that it was like, “Men
don’t bake.” And I can’t even remember what it was for, but it was all these guys
sitting around, and someone, like, brings in cookies, and they all look him … and
they don’t say, like, “Dude, you’re such a fag,” but [laughter] they might as well
have said, “Dude, you’re such a fag.” And then it was like, “Men don’t bake,” and
then it was like, “Carl’s Jr.” or some shit, I don’t remember. [laughter]
Hannah: OK, I’m Hannah, I’m 25, I’m from Portland. And my ad story is, a few
years ago I was watching Center Stage, which is a ballet movie, on the Oxygen
channel on a Saturday night with my friend. So we’re watching it on Saturday
night and we’re like, you know, didn’t go out, hanging out, it’s like 11 or 12 at
night. And the commercials, as we’re watching, we realize, like—there’s a
commercial about Slim-Fast, there’s a commercial about, maybe like Oxytrim or
something? I dunno, a bunch of weight-loss stuff. And then there’s commercials
for antidepressants. And about three quarters of the way through the movie,
we’re like, “These commercials are really weird!” And then there was a
commercial for a vibrator, on, like network TV. And then we realized we had
been pegged as, like, overweight single women who were home alone watching
a ballet movie on a Saturday night. Which is horrifying—we were horrified. It was
the worst.
“And I started to see a pattern in the pictures, a kind of statement about what it
means to be a woman in this culture. I became very interested in the whole
subject of beauty, and of the image; of how much power it gives young women,
but how short-lived and unfulfilling it ultimately is. And I kept collecting ads.”
You just heard an excerpt from Jean Kilbourne’s documentary, Killing Us Softly,
which has been dissecting advertising’s harmful messages toward women since
1979. Bitch Media is lucky to have her as a member of our National Advisory
Board, and Kelsey Wallace, Bitch Media’s web editor, spoke to Kilbourne about
Killing Us Softly 4, Photoshop, and if indeed, advertising has come a long way.
KW: So, Killing Us Softly 4 just came out, but Killing us Softly 3 and your book
Can’t Buy My Love are almost ten years old. Have you noticed any changes, or
are the messages that you’re delivering still the same? What have you seen
change as far as advertising messages and women?
JK: Well, sadly, in many ways things have actually gotten much worse. I actually
originally made Killing Us Softly in 1979, and I remade it in 1987 as Still Killing Us
Softly, then again in 2000 as Killing Us Softly 3. And Killing Us Softly 4 just came
out in April. So I’ve been tracking this for a very long time; I actually started
collecting ads in the late 1960s. It’s has gotten much more powerful than ever
before, much more intrusive than ever before. It’s everywhere, whereas that
wasn’t so much the case before. And many of the things that I talked about in the
early version of the film, such as the tyranny of the ideal image of beauty—you
know, the fact that we’re surrounded by this impossible image of beauty that
makes us all feel bad—that’s much worse, because of computer retouching and
Photoshop, and the ability that advertisers have these days to create absolutely
impossible images. But there are many other things too that I originally talked
about in 1979, let’s say—such as the sexualization of childhood, or the way that
the objectification of women leads to violence—that are more true now than ever
before.
KW: You mentioned Photoshop, but how else have you seen technology
influence ads?
JK: Photoshop has just made a huge difference in what photographers are able
to do now to create an absolutely perfect image. If you look at other aspects of
technology, such as the way that advertisers can research people’s brains in
order to find out which area of the brain lights up in response to a certain
stimulus—and then they can design ads that are designed to make us have
these basically subconscious emotional responses: that’s huge, and that’s very
different than before.
KW: Concerning Photoshop, it has really been kind of “outed” in a way—you see
a lot of blog posts that show the pre- and post-Photoshopped images. And
different celebrities, like Kate Winslet or Jessica Alba, have come out and said
that they don’t look like their images. What do you think about the fact that a lot
of consumers realize they’re looking an unattainable image, but are in some
ways still affected by them?
JK: What’s amazing is that an awful lot of people still don’t really get it, that this is
a completely idealized image, that it’s completely constructed and artificial, that it
has nothing to do with what a human being can really achieve. And I think one of
the reasons that it’s hard to really grasp that, even though there’s been some of
this, as you say, outing of Photoshop, is that we’re so surrounded by this
flawlessness. You know, everywhere we look, whether it’s music videos, or TV,
or the Internet, or ads, there are these absolutely flawless female faces and
bodies. On an intellectual level, maybe, we say, “OK, that’s not real,” it’s hard not
to feel in some ways that it is. Or not to judge our own imperfect selves against
these flawless beings. And one thing that’s happened that’s been very positive
has been some real protests against this. For example, in the UK, Parliament has
been working to demand that photographs be labeled as having been
Photoshopped, so that in a magazine, if there’s an ad—sort of like the tobacco
ads that say, you know, “This product is harmful to your health”—there has to be
a label that says, you know, “This model does not look like this! This was done
by Photoshop.” And even something like that—which may seem kind of, oh well,
how could that make a difference?—really would, if that were there all the time,
so that we got used to understanding that every single one of these images is a
completely artificial construct. That might begin to make us change, you know,
the way that we see our own bodies. you know, there’s a bill before Congress
right now, the Healthy Media for Youth [Act] I think it’s called. It’s fantastic—I
mean it’s one of the things that does say, I think, we can do something about the
Photoshopping. And this is (to go back to sort of how things have changed)—
what has gotten better is that when I started talking about this, you know, 40
years ago, I was really alone, and what I was saying was considered radical, and
I had to convince people that this was an issue, and, you know, all of that. And
now these “radical” ideas are really quite mainstream, and there are many, many
organizations, and other books and films, and all sorts of things, talking about
these issues. So there’s been a real groundswell of opposition, and of education
and information about it. So that’s been a very positive change. Now we still
need more people, you know, we need more of a groundswell of opposition; but
at least there’s something happening.
KW: Speaking of a shift in media-literacy, when you speak at college campuses,
have you noticed students getting more media literate?
JK: Since we don’t really teach media literacy in this country, or we do it very
sporadically, I can’t say that they’re very media-literate. You know, they’re not
really critical consumers of media. The United States is the only developed
nation in the world that doesn’t teach media literacy in the schools. And, you
know, arguably we’re the nation that needs it the most.
KW: Why do you think that is, that we don’t have as much media criticism
taught?
JK: it’s that it is not in the interests of the powers that be, the powerful people, to
have a media-literate public. It’s better to have a public that’s kind of apathetic,
misinformed, uninformed. If you had a media-literate public you wouldn’t be able
to use the sort of incredibly stupid political advertising that we’re surrounded with,
you know
KW: RightJK: —people would see through it. And that would be good for democracy, and
good for all of us, except it wouldn’t be so good for people who want to use those
kinds of ads in order to get power or stay in power. At the same time, certainly
big media—they don’t want people to be media-literate, that’s not in their best
interests either.
KW: Right.
JK: Because their major focus, their point really, is to deliver audiences to
advertisers. It’s all about marketing, it’s all about advertising, and if people were
really savvy and really media-literate, then that could change; and that would not
be good for the bottom line, for the profit margin. And one of the things that gives
that away, Kelsey, is that when we’ve tried to have a media-literacy movement in
this country—and there is one, definitely—big media has stepped right in and
said, “Oh, let us help!” You know, “We’ll give you money, we’ll give you grants.”
And then they’ve created programs that really don’t change anything. You know,
that just kind of skim the surface of what needs to be done. It’s not unlike the
tobacco industry saying, “We don’t want kids to smoke! We’ll do the prevention
ads!” You know. That’s really why we need independent kind of media reform
and media literacy, not the kind of programs that are funded by the industry.
KW: As someone who doesn’t have kids, it seems so difficult for me to try and
navigate the landscape of advertising messages with a young person. What are
your thoughts on that, as someone who’s done it?
JK: I think it is very difficult, and I think when parents feel that it is, you know,
maybe more difficult today to raise a child than ever before, I think it is. Because
I think in the past parents raised children in a culture that was more or less
congruent with the values that the parents had for their children. More or less, I
mean not perfectly, but one felt that the culture, the society was on your side.
And I think now most parents are raising their children in a culture that they feel
is hostile to what they want for their children. I certainly felt that way with my
daughter, that the messages that she was getting from the popular culture were
the opposite of what I wanted for her. You know, the messages about beauty,
and about consumption, and about alcohol and drugs, and about everything! And
this is one of the reasons why I address all of these issues as public-health
problems: I feel that parents obviously have a lot of responsibility, and we all
should do the best that we can, and talk with our children openly about all kinds
of things, and there’s many things that parents can do—but if you’re raising your
child in a toxic cultural environment, you can’t save your child, you know, child by
child, house by house, any more than if the air were poisoned, you could keep
your child from breathing somehow. That’s why we need to address this as a
problem that affects all of us, and try to change the environment to make it
healthier for all children, and safer for all children. Rather than just leaving it up
to parents to somehow, you know, fight the tide, constantly.
KW: Do you ever just feel so frustrated that you want to quit? Or have you
always felt [laughter] … the motivation to keep going?
JK: Oh, no, absolutely, I mean I do feel sometimes, you know, sort of frustrated
and, “Oh my god, I mean how can this be going on for so long?” But on the other
hand, as I said, it’s very heartening to know that there are a whole lot of people
now working on these issues, that there are, you know, progressive media—like
Bitch—you know, and that young women are involved in this issue is fabulous, I
think that’s just wonderful, and are sort of picking up the standard and moving
forward: that’s very important. And sometimes I look at the whole issue of
tobacco, you know, and how much has changed in that regard; so that when I
started talking about tobacco advertising in the 70s…in those days, believe it or
not, if you flew on an airplane, you got cigarettes with your meal. And if anyone
had said to me then, you know, “Twenty years from now or so, there will be no
smoking on airplanes, no smoking in bars in Manhattan or pubs in Dublin,” I
wouldn’t have believed it. Now we haven’t won this battle; the tobacco industry is
still extremely powerful, and, in my opinion, absolutely evil—but we’ve made
tremendous progress. And so I’m hoping that, you know, maybe 20 years from
now, people will look back and say, “My god, can you believe that, you know, we
had those incredibly thin models everywhere? Or that we encouraged little girls
to dress like that?” That we’ll be as astonished by that as people are today,
young people, when I tell them that airplanes served cigarettes with their meals.
And I think that it’s not impossible. I think that action is the antidote to despair.
So that if one is feeling despairing, about whatever is going on in the culture (and
there’s plenty of things to feel despairing about), for me the best way to feel
better is to do something, to bring about change. And there’s a wide range of
things that people can do, on this issue and other important issues, to feel as if
we’re making a difference no matter what small step it might be—that as more
and people get involved, and get engaged, I think that’s how things change.
You can order Killing Us Softly 4, which came out this spring, from the Media
Education Foundation, at mediaed.org, and you can hear the extended, full
interview with Jean Kilbourne at bitchmedia.org/audio, which touches more on
marketing towards kids and standing up to the evils of the advertising industry.
Thanks again for tuning in to Bitch Radio. This project was made possible in part
by a grant from Oregon Humanities (OH), a statewide nonprofit organization and
an independent affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which
funds OH's grant program. Visit bitchmedia.org/blogs/mad-world for weekly blog
posts dealing with advertising, and if you’re in Portland check out
bitchmedia.org/events for our upcoming forum and book club on advertising.
You can listen to other Bitch Media podcasts at bitchmedia.org/audio or by
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