Fashion hypocrisy

Sasha Grey for Equal Pay Day

Sasha Grey (a former porn star) is starred in an ad to draw attention to the fact that the only place where women make more money than men is in the porn industry. The goal of the entire campaign is to make girls aware that the study choices they make today determines their pay in the future. This however isn’t clear in the clip.

Their objective is to stimulate highschool girls more to choose for studies that are dominated by men, like engineering, and that boys should be more stimulated to join the care sector. And I have to admit that as a kid I was good at math and sciences and I would read books about animals and science all the time, but somehow I did end up studying Psychology. And it’s a choice I made, but I can’t really say that anyone ever really tried to convince me otherwise. I do am stubborn like hell, so most people that know me should know that changing my mind is as easy as turning water to wine, maybe that's why  nobody ever tried.

Here are some things that do make me think that it wasn’t entirely just my choice.

As a kid I once told my grandmother that you shouldn’t get to good grades, because else other kids don’t like you. I do think this is the same for men as well.

At highschool I’ve heard a guy that was in my class in primary school bragging about how he nearly always was the first to finish his test at primary school. It stunned me, because I would always wait until someone else would give his test to the teacher. When I would finish my test early, the teacher would tell me to go back to my place and check my answers, which I hated, so after a while I would just wait until someone else (usually him) gave his test to the teacher.

I’ve spent my senior years at 2 different colleges. One of them used to be a boy’s school and the last one was a girl’s school. So in the first one there still were more boys than girls and at the latter it was the inverse. At both schools they would give advice on what college degree was right for you. At the former boy’s school they would emphasize how much money you could make with each degree, how secure you would be of finding a job and they would rank all different engineering subjects based on difficulty and students were stimulated to choose the most difficult study that was within their capacities. At the girl’s school they wouldn’t talk about money or job security, they would help you to find what interests you the most. When I told them I wanted to go to the university to become a psychologist (master level), they’ve told me that you do would need to study there a lot and that it might be better to study for psychology assistant (bachelor level). I do think they’ve told this to everybody. They would also emphasize that you need to make sure it’s something you like doing, because you would need to do it for the rest of your life.

Women are barely stimulated to choose a well paid job, but men aren’t stimulated at all to do a job they enjoy. They are stimulated to do a full time job that gives them a nice paycheck every month. And this is what I like about the campaign. It’s also focused on giving men more opportunities to be more involved in the family life and to give people more opportunities to combine work and life. Working fulltime and overtime in a job you don’t enjoy and not being able to spend time with your children is not a privilege. Even though women are still under pressure to confirm to their traditional roles, men are under an even higher pressure. As long as a man that says he would rather spend more time with his children is called gay, a wussy or a paedophile you can’t talk about equality.

Look up how you can recognize a paedophile, apart from the obvious ‘they get aroused by children’, you also find things like ‘they regularly attend children’s events in the community’; ‘They volunteer in youth organizations’; ‘They seek jobs where children are easily accessible’ and so on. This seriously discourages men to do anything with children. If you go to the playground with your kid and moms warn their kids to stay away from you, you're not going to do that twice.

Note: When I would google ‘how to recognize a paedophile’, I saw that google suggested me ‘how to recognize a virgin’ and than I’ve found this: http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/HowTo:Spot_a_Virgin In one word: ugh. It’s not really that hard though. Ask her birthday. If she’s born between the 22^nd of August and the 22^nd of September, she’s a virgin for sure.


The website of the campaign: http://www.equalpayday.be
The website of the organization behind it: http://www.zij-kant.be/ (not in English)

Milan fashion week Spring 2012

Milan was inspired by the romanticised gypsy woman, a woman that loves her freedom, her family and her tradition, a woman that dances with her chin up instead of her ass up, a seductive, sensual and mysterious woman.

Blumarine had a bright colourful gypsy flowing down her runway. The cut-out flowers and the raffia gave it a playful feeling. It looked like something you would do yourself if you would want to personalize your outfit. And one point extra for Anna Molinari that would greet the audience with a smile that made you feel like she was very proud of her collection and that she enjoyed making it.

Peter Dundas (Pucci) had a more dark gypsy in his mind: torn between her religion, her tradition and her bodily desires. I’m also a big fan of the blue cloudy dress. It’s definitely a piece you’ll see in many fashion editorials. If I were rich, I would buy it and I would play Pucci ghost all day in my big empty house.

Why are classic boring advertisements always aimed at women?

Have you ever noticed how these days the quality of advertising has improved?

The commercial break often is more entertaining than the TV-shows that are interrupted by them. It’s because marketers feel like people have become so overexposed to advertising that people have become extremely hard to influence.

To respond to this marketers have adopted a new vision on their customers. They no longer see their customers as people that need to buy their products. They see their customers as people that need to enjoy their brand and products. They try to make as intelligent, original and entertaining advertising as they can in order to influence their potential customers.

Have you ever noticed how about 95% of this new original, creative and entertaining advertising is directed to men (or both men and women)?

Have you ever noticed how about 95% of the old classic boring advertising is directed at women?

Marketing actions directed to women are usually clearly made by marketers that seem to assume that their customers are a brainless herd that needs to be directed in the right direction, their direction.

It often excels in a lack of originality. If you’ve seen one advertisement for washing products you’ve seen them all. If it’s something you haven’t seen a zillion times before, it usually is because it wants to give you something new to be insecure about. ‘You may not smell how much your house stinks, but other people do.’ ‘Have you ever thought about how ugly your armpits are?’

On top of that advertisements that are aimed at women, usually have a woman that you are supposed to want to be. In Italy where everybody has brown hair, this woman you should aspire, usually is a blonde. In Asia, Africa and Latin-America she usually is fair-skinned. So the message of these advertisements is: ‘you may not ever be able to be blonde like me, but you do can have a house that smells like mine’ or ‘you won’t ever be white like me, but you do can get lovely armpits like mine.’ One of the few examples of a diverse advertising campaign is the Ikea-catalog, Ikea, coming from the country with all the natural blondes.

Advertising directed at women often assumes women are stupid. It encourages old insecurities and creates new ones. The marketing industry is not dominated by men. There are nearly just as many men as women in it. In companies aimed at women there usually are more women than men working in the marketing department.

So the problem isn’t that men use marketing to make women feel down so they can more easily suppress them. The problem is that there are too many women and men in the marketing industry that see (other) women as idiots. The problem is that there aren’t enough women and men that are brave enough to create a marketing strategy aimed at making women enjoy their brand.

Victoria's Secret

I have written this post because I am participating in the FFB round-up of this month. I had written a post earlier that I find better suited for the round-up, but you’re supposed to submit only recent blogposts (I think), so I have decided to join the club of people that nag about Victoria’s Secret.

I feel like Victoria’s Secret often is depicted as the enemy of women. It has turned into the symbol of how women are objectified, but I find this extremely exaggerated.

First of all, they have advertisements and catwalk shows with women in lingerie, because it’s a lingerie brand. I don’t know how else you’re going to show lingerie.

Secondly, they indeed use only beautiful women, but so do all other fashion/beauty brands and 90% of all non-fashion/beauty brands.

They could also indeed use more different body types, but they don’t make bras for different body types. Their bras only go up to DD. I don’t think they don’t make these, because they hate women with big breasts. I think it’s more likely because bigger breast have different needs. A larger version of a good bra for an A-cup is not a good bra for an F-cup, because it wouldn’t offer enough support. Bras for big breasts are another product and it requires another expertise, an expertise that Victoria’s Secret doesn’t have.

It also is true that only a few women can still feel comfortable with their own body after watching a Victoria’s Secret advertisement, but removing beautiful women from the streetview is not the right way to make women feel satisfied with their own bodies. You can’t blame beautiful women for making you feel ugly. There will always be people that are more beautiful than you and you should just get over that.

Victoria’s Secret sometimes is accused of exploiting their angels. These angels are usually already high-earning models. They don’t need to do a Victoria’s Secret runway show. They can easily say no. Compared to runway shows of other brands, Victoria’s Secret probably is one of the best employees. Other fashion brands use underaged models. Other fashion brands prefer models with a certain ‘aesthetic’ that you can only achieve by not eating. If a model doesn’t speak English it’s not a problem, because than she won’t be able to say she doesn’t want to do something or to complain she hasn’t been paid. That is what I call exploiting.

The Victoria’s Secret angels also are criticized for objectifying themselves, but I think if women want to walk around in their underwear it’s not wrong as long as it is their own decision. Some women want to wear a veil and some women want to wear mini-skirts and if you would ever have talked to either of them, you would know that both these women usually are blessed with an incredibly big mouth. What women wear says nothing about how much they submit themselves to men. It says something about where they draw the line on how much of their body they want to show to the world.

If you want to read the blogpost I had written earlier on fashion and sexuality, you can read it here.

Madonna and aging

As a woman gets older she is expected to keep her beauty and physical youth, but the pressure to do anything with her life experience is much lower if not non-existent. When Madonna turned 50 she received a big applause for having preserved her beauty, but I didn’t feel like applauding. I didn’t understand why a music artist that has never written a song on her own and that hardly ever sings live should deserve any applause. 

A lot of people found it sexist how the media was focused on her age and her looks. I was more disturbed that nobody seemed to notice that after all these years she didn’t ever try to be more than just the packaging of her songs. I can’t imagine a man would be taken serious as a music artist for over 25 years if he would be more focused on his looks than on his music.

Madonna is the prototype of the female music artist and when they look for a new female music artist, they look for a new Madonna. They will first search for someone with the right looks, good dancing skills and maybe good vocals too. Whether or not she writes her own songs is not even considered. Women are just packaging for songs men wrote and Madonna has perfected the art of being packaging.

But do people that listen to music from a female artist really care more about the packaging than the content? I think you find the answer in MySpace. If you discovered a song you would like on MySpace, it was easy to send it to your friends and they could easily send it to theirs. Nobody would consider how many other people might like it. The people would only consider how much they liked it themselves. It was a democracy far away from business decisions. And who did MySpace discover? Lilly Allen, the type of pretty girl you pass by, but a pretty girl that would just make good music. A pretty girl that gave up, because as soon as she left her space on MySpace it would turn out that the world cared more about her pregnancies and her weight than about the music she put her hart and soul in. And that’s what I thought was truly sexist. 

War and fashion

“…the charming full skirts falling to just below the knee did suggest a decorous army wife in olden times…” I think the person at style.com that commented on the Burberry Spring Summer 2012 doesn’t have a clue idea of what it’s like to be an army wife. If someone you love is at the battlefield, you couldn’t possibly care less about being ‘decorous’.

I don’t understand why the fashion world keeps on referring to the military and occasionally even glorifying it. War is something awful and if you would actually understand what it is, you couldn’t possibly feel ‘inspired’ by it. War only leads to the suffering of innocent people, while those that started the war hardly ever go to the battlefield. They rather enjoy their newly acquired status by surrounding themselves with bodyguards and women that are drawn to their power or women that know they don’t have a choice other than pretending they care about that.

Another example: the Michael Kors spring/summer 2012 fashion show seemed to be inspired by Africa and the military. Knowing how much the people in Africa suffer from armed conflicts, I find it two things you can’t put together. A few of the outfits of Michael Kors even looked very much like the uniform of Congolese soldiers: not really the greatest defendants of human rights. On top of that, the handles of his handbags reminded me of bullet belts for automatic guns. Even though I suspect he’s oblivious enough not to know whose look he’s copying. I still don’t understand how you can be inspired by the look of Congolese soldiers, even if it’s not consciously. The people from Congo that you should be inspired by are the ones that don’t carry guns.