Baio Press

March 5, 1996

 

Women's groups take on
advertisers

by Idella Sturino (McGill Daily—CUP)

It’s hard sometimes, reading the
newspaper. Or watching television. Or
riding the subway. Or waiting for a bus.
Not because the act itself is a strain, but
because of the number and nature of the
ads which are ever-present when we read
the paper, watch TV or travel. Wherever
we are, ads scream at us to buy more,
cat less and look better.

For women, the barrage of ads
pushing more consumption are more
than just overwhelming. They’re also
offensive. A 1994 study conducted by
Mediawatch, a non-profit feminist
organization which monitors the
portrayal of women and girls in the
media, showed that most women were
affected by the nature of the onslaught.

“We polled women across the country
and found out the vast majority of
women were offended by the portrayal
of women in ads,” says Shari Graydon,
president of the Vancouver-based
organization, adding that tackling the
sexist portrayal of women in advertising
has been on the feminist agenda for
decades. Mediawatch’s study showed
that the widespread dissatisfaction
women feel with the female images used
to sell them products manifests itself in
different ways. While only eight percent
of women polled voiced their
disapproval by writing a letter and 13
percent made a phone call, 53 percent
said they boycotted products marketed
to them in a way they found offensive.

Given these numbers, one would
think advertisers would begin to re-
evaluate the way in which they tell us
what we need. After all, Graydon points
out, there’s a huge financial incentive to
give women what they want in ads,
considering that they are the principal
buyers in everything from food to men’s
clothing.

But a quick glance through a glossy
women’s magazine or a minute channel
surfing in front of the TV shows that if
things are changing, it is happening
slowly.

Women—mostly white and under
25—are still depicted as passive sexual
objects whose weight and appearance
portray them more as mannequins than
humans.

Graydon notes that even though most
women don’t consider themselves
feminists, conversation among them
increasingly includes discussion of why
this kind of representation is
unacceptable. Some women are

boycotting various companies, others are
writing letters and others are arming
themselves with cans of spray paint in
an effort to improve the images
surrounding them. Billboard activism,
for one thing, has sprung up against
various ad campaigns both in Canada
and the U.S.

Last spring, Toronto-based This
Magazine reported the after-dark
messages left with paint and markers on
Calvin Klein ads and Toronto Sun
newspaper boxes—the newspaper
features a Sunshine Girl wearing a bikini
in each edition—by a group of teenage
women calling themselves The Bitch
Brigade. This type of activism is not
being taken by women’s groups alone.
Other activists, while joining the
campaigns to rid the negative images of
women in the media, are also pushing
for change in marketing tactics of other
industries.

Cicada, a group of New Jersey artists
covered a billboard advertising Kool
cigarettes with a message of their own.
The spoof ad, pictured in a fall 1995
issue of Adbusters magazine, attached
to the familiar

anti-ads, by taking control of the role
their products play in our lives and by
“culture-jamming.”

“Culture-jamming,” says Katherine
Dodds, a film-maker and associate editor
and columnist at Adbusters, “is
essentially activism. It’s not just
theoretically about the media and what’s
wrong with it but what can be done....

“Tt’s causing a bit of trouble along the
way, whether it’s billboards or the un-
commercials.”

Adbusters does not contain any ‘real’
advertising. Instead, its pages are full of
anti-ads, many of which have recently
been targeting Calvin Klein. The back
cover of the magazine’s latest issue
depicts a woman trying to “Escape”
from the view of a photographer’s
camera. Although many anti-ads poke
fun at the fashion industry and refer to
social problems like anorexia, many
others refer to the tobacco, alcohol and
fast food industries. Past anti-ads have
targeted Absolut Vodka, Benetton and
McDonald’s.

Jim Munroe, managing editor of the
magazine, says that what their famous
spoof ads try to do is open people’s

Women: The Beauty Industry is the
Beast,” is set to air on CityTV’s Fashion
File. These aren’t the first un-
commercials to be produced by the
Foundation.

A few years ago, Greenpeace
commissioned the group to make a spoof
ad drawing attention to the pollution
caused by automobile emissions. The
“Autosaurus” showed a choking,
smoking car polluting the environment.

It was aired on the CBC’s Drivers
Seat until a representative from
Volkswagen, which aired an ad right
after it, complained to the show’s
producer. The ad was then pulled,
breaking the two-year contract which
had been signed and leading to a lengthy
court case.

The Foundation won its claim of a
breach of contract, but lost its claim that
the breach also violated the right to
freedom of expression guaranteed under
the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Nonetheless, Munroe sees the court
battle as significant because it reminded
the public that it owns the airwaves.
“The legal battle was really a tactic,”
Munroe says, noting that changes to the

Charter are rarely

 

slogan “Forever
Kool” an image
of a corpse’s feet
protruding from
the letters,
morgue-style.
Concern and
anger about ads
has manifested
itself in other
types of activism
as well,. and
when expressed

Women are still depicted as
passive sexual objects whose
weight and appearance portray
them more as mannequins than

humans

made at a lower
court level, where
the Autosaurus ad
case was fought.
The Foundation is
bringing their claim
to the Supreme
Court, where it
thinks it has 4 better
chance of affecting
legal change.

But Munroe also
says that getting

 

loudly enough,
advertisers have
sometimes been forced to listen.
Archetypal mind polluters

Asa result, some media activists like
the Vancouver-based quarterly,
Adbusters, are continuing to exert
pressure. Adbusters, which has taken on
the Calvin Klein ads, has done
campaigns against other companies in
the past. The magazine calls itself a
“Journal of the Mental Environment”
and publishes articles about the
addictive, harmful and consumption-
driven culture of media advertising. Its
Media Manifesto, printed in the summer
1993. issue, declares the magazine “will
take on the archetypal mind polluters”
like Marlboro and McDonald’s through

minds. “Humour is one of the most
effective ways to do that. If people laugh
at something they previously took
seriously . . . I like to think we’re
breaking down the status quo opinion,”
he said.

Jamming the air waves...

The attack on Calvin Klein isn’t over,
nor is it confined to the pages of
Adbusters. The Media Foundation, the
non-profit organization which publishes
Adbusters, is on its way to jamming the
TV air waves with two un-commercials
based on earlier anti-ads. One ad, which
features the naked torso of a woman
hunched over a toilet bowl vomiting
under the caption “Obsession for

ideas about
advertising and
airwave ownership into the public
discourse is as important as legal
changes themselves.

Asked about any expected problems
when the Calvin Klein un-commercials
air, Munroe points out that after the legal
battle with the CBC, “The next
broadcaster will think twice about
rejecting us.”

In response to the growing body of
literature about the importance of media
education—or media literacy—which
arose in the 1970s and 1980s, high
school media literacy classes were
introduced in provinces across the
country except for New Brunswick, PEI
and Newfoundland.

In 1986, the Ontario Ministry of
Education mandated that 10 per cent of
Grade seven and eight English classes
and 30 per cent of high school English
classes focus on media literacy. Barry
Duncan, author of the best-selling Mass
Media and Popular Culture and
president and founder of the Association
for Media Literacy, was involved in the
province’s introduction of media
analysis into its curriculum.

Activists like Graydon agree that
media education is an essential part of
the process of effectively improving the
“mental environment” we inhabit as
mass consumers of media.

“We live in a media dominant culture
where we’re bombarded by what it
means to be a man and a woman-all the
time. They have a cumulative impact
that’s hard to measure. It’s not just about
what’s out there, but what could be,”
Graydon says.

In a recent speech to student
journalists, Dodds reminded the
audience that the offensive images of
women can indeed be subverted through
many different tactics. “What is
constructed can be destroyed,
reconstructed and revisioned, not with
one agenda, but with the one goal of
subverting the mass media and their
efforts to create a world populated by
clones of their archetypal Woman.”
Because Graydon recognizes the need
to move beyond criticism toward
replacement, she actively supported the
establishment of the Women’s
Television Network (WTN).

According to Graydon,studies have
shown that given enough choice through
cable programming that better represents
them, women will invariably choose to
switch off Baywatch in favour of
Murphy Brown.

In addition to making a business and
philosophical commitment to the
positive representation of women, the
WTN, says Graydon, “indicated a
commitment to running advertising that
wasn’t offensive to women,” adding that
she’s never seen an offensive ad on
WTN.

Graydon also recognizes that
guerrilla action can be a useful way to
replace offensive images with your own
message. It is perhaps this sentiment that
has prompted many young women, like
Toronto’s Bitch Brigade to take their
dissent to the billboards of city streets,
where activity potentially more
empowering than discourse can be had.

“_..tackling the sexist portrayal of women in advertising has been on the feminist agenda for decades.”

 

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