From: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu (Muffy Barkocy)
Newsgroups: soc.women,alt.feminism,soc.men
Subject: Re: Elle MacPherson causes rape?
Date: 6 Nov 92 18:52:27 GMT
Organization: Natural Language Incorporated
NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu
In-reply-to: williamt@athena.Eng.Sun.COM's message of 6 Nov 1992 17:48:37 GMT

In article <lflbvlINNh6j@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> williamt@athena.Eng.Sun.COM (Dances with Drums) writes:
>In article  891666t@dragon.acadiau.ca (Trish Turliuk) writes:
>>The fact is we see *one-type* of women portrayed everywhere as the idealized
>>women and even this isn't a real type for she is subjected to hours of makeup
>>and airbrushing before she goes in front of the camera. The majority of women
>>don't see themselves reflected in society at all. How many models have you  
>>seen with crooked teeth?

>I had to take issue with this.  When was the last time you saw
>a car in a car add anywhere that was dented and/or scratched, paint
>bleached out, seats torn, tires flat or worn, windshield cracked, rag
>top torn, etc etc etc...  The fact is when advertisers are selling somethink,
>they want to use 'perfect' models.

You're absolutely right that they want to show perfect models.  However,
how is "perfect" defined?  In the case of a car, the "perfect" model of
the car is the brand-new, untouched version, which is actually real and
attainable to anyone who has the money for the car.  Keeping it that way
is another story, of course...*grin*.

In the case of a person, however, what is "perfect" is not so clear.
Why should a person who has one body type be more "perfect" than a
person with another body type?  In this case, the advertisers are, in
part, defining what is "perfect," by which models they use, how they
make them up, etc.  They might polish the car to make it look better; it
would be easy for you to do the same thing.  They give the human model a
makeup person, who presumably spends a long time making the makeup
perfect.  They give her new clothes, possibly carefully pinned and
adjusted to look "perfect" in that one pose/picture (this is assuming
print ads, of course).  This is not realistic.  It is the rare person
who can wear new clothes every day, who can not move much, so that they
will always hang in just the right way, and who can pay a makeup person
to make their faces look exactly right all day, even *if* that person
already has the "right" body type.  While some of the body type stuff is
attainable (although often at rather too much physical cost), the person
who is born short cannot buy height, so there is some of the image that
is not attainable.

This is not to say that advertisers "should" do anything different...I
personally think that they're always slimy and manipulative, and their
manipulations of women are no different, to them, from their
manipulations of anyone else.  However, this does not make that
manipulation any less destructive of people's self-images.  This happens
to men, too, but not as much, as far as I can tell.

>[...]  I don't find my car represented or reflected
>in the media any more than the average woman finds her body represented
>there.  Should I regard this is as some horrible plot directed at me,
>or does it make more sense to realize that this is 'madison avenue' and
>should be taken as ignorable.  

In a way, it *is* a "horrible plot directed at you" - you are supposed
to look at your car, see that it is "inadequate" and therefore want to
buy a new one.  However, since the car is not *you*, you are more
fortunate than the person who is supposed to look at their body, see
that it is inadequate, and attempt to purchase a more perfect one.  I
think that it is much rarer for a person's self-image to be connected to
their car than it is to be connected to their body, since their body is
part of their self.

Muffy
--

Muffy Barkocy                               muffy@mica.berkeley.edu
~Weavers' fingers flying on the loom/patterns shift too fast to be
 discerned/all these years of thinking/ended up like this/in front
 of all this beauty/understanding nothing~ - Bruce Cockburn