Podcast: Interview of children and media expert Diane Levin

Check out Annie Fox's interview of Diane Levin, expert on media's impact on kids.

Sign TODAY: Stop Hollywood from marketing violence to young kids

The Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood continues to fight the good fight... Please sign this petition TODAY to stop Hollywood from marketing violence to young kids.

L'Oreal's hiring practices found to be racist

The cosmetics giant, L'Oreal, was found guilty of racist hiring tactics in their French market. Their fear that French customers wouldn't buy products sold by diverse models reflects the French cultural climate where anti-semitic acts seem to be increasing, a burqa ban is being debated, and so on. Beauty is definitely in the eye of the [social and cultural] beholder.

Selling chips to chicks

There is now a Frito-Lay ad campaign based on women's guilt about eating--and sadly, it was designed with women in mind, in order to appeal to women.

Advertising generally plays on our insecurities (and tells us to buy things to fill those holes or shortcomings), and the usual "guilt-free" commercial tactic often used for yogurts and snack foods is plaguing enough. But making a cutesy website of gabby cartoon women with men-focused personalities and back-stories seems to me to show just how far off-track we've gotten.

Who knew that eating junk food could bring such little fun? I mean, if we're not eating for the enjoyment of salty, crunchy, bad-for-you-ness, can someone tell me why we'd be eating chips at all? Revamped health-food-colored packaging and accompanying cartoons about women waxing their bikini lines does *not* make me want to buy or eat chips.

Frito-Lay tried to max out on demeaning stereotypes of women and our culture's guilty obsession with food and appearance--so not cute. At all. Hmph.

Marketing Earth Day (and Other Stuff) to Children

Another great point from the Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood:

Marketing Earth Day (and Other Stuff) to Children
By Susan Linn and Josh Golin

Have you done your Earth Day shopping yet? Between greeting cards, jewelry, mugs, and teddy bears commemorating the day, its roots in environmental activism have all but been forgotten. Now corporations use Earth Day to sell us on the belief that we can buy our way into ecological sustainability. We can't.

Reducing consumption is essential to preserving the earth's resources and preventing its degradation. The same companies that are painting themselves green depend on the profits they earn convincing us to buy more than we need.

Nowhere is this more obvious, and more troubling, than in the world of children's media and marketing, where companies like Disney, Sesame Workshop, and Nickelodeon are eco-marketing as never before.

Read on at the Huffington Post...

SpongeBob uproar continues

Joanne Bamberger of the blog PunditMom gives her take on the SpongeBob Burger King commercial on NPR...

SpongeBob isn't sexy

Lots of hullabaloo about Burger Kind's latest commercial that mixes SpongeBob and a bit too much booty. The CCFC offers a way to speak out against it and take action against sexualized marketing to kids:

"Our campaign to get the infamous SpongeBob SquareButts commercial off the air is gaining momentum. More than 7,000 of you have told Nickelodeon and Burger King that SpongeBob and sexualization don't mix and our campaign has been featured in newspapers, blogs, and on television -- including this morning's Today Show.

We've already cast an important spotlight on this reprehensible ad and the depths that marketers will sink to in order to interest children in their brands. Advertisers will now understand that they risk a significant backlash from parents if they include sexualization in their child-directed marketing. Burger King and Nickelodeon are clearly on the defensive, and are now disingenuously claiming the ad - which is for Kids Meals and features perhaps the most popular children's television character - was aimed at adults.

But the ad continues to run and, according to reports, aired this week on American Idol, a top-rated show for children under twelve. So let's keep the pressure on by signing this petition of disapproval to Burger King and Nickelodeon. Please let others know about our campaign by using this tell-a-friend page or by writing directly to friends and family and urging them to visit send their messages too. And please, keep spreading the word on blogs, social networking sites, and Twitter.

Thanks,
The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood"

Marketing to Youth (Culture)

This article geared toward photographers (and somewhat toward advertisers) spells out the do's and don't's of marketing to youth. Thinking from the angle of a photographer, the photos used in ads would, alone, be beautiful portraits of unique people and relationships. (There are some gorgeous examples in this article.) But, when incorporated into ads with taglines and messages, photos become props to spark whatever feelings and connections marketers want us to make...to buy their product.

Marketing to youth and about youth culture particularly irks me because advertisers are cashing in on a stage in people's lives where they figure out their identity--which means they try many things and are open to change and suggestion. Exploring yourself and the world around you sound like such a magical, great thing (and it can be!), but many teens and young adults feel immense pressure from an intangible source to be all at once sexy, perfect, smart, rich, and in command. These pressures are part of our larger culture and of course not created solely by marketing, but the wiley way marketing reflects and tweaks who we want to be seems to head many people down a bad road.

I'm posting this article because I think it's valuable to continually point out just how planned the images around us are. If we are aware of this manipulation, perhaps we can start appreciating ads for what they are, and peel them away from of our definitions of beauty, meaningfulness, and success.

Camel aims nicotine at kids...again.

From Shaping Youth - Like Taking Candy From A Baby: Camel Trots Out Nicotine Tricks (Again)

If only Camel could put their marketing genius toward health and self-esteem programming, windmill energy, or homeless shelters...

Interview with Liz Funk, author of Supergirls!

Liz Funk, author of the new book, Supergirls Speak Out: Inside the Crisis of Overachieving Girls, is on a virtual book tour--and a mission to widen everyone's tolerance and respect for being the imperfect, interesting, great people we all are.

In this interview with yours truly, Liz talks about how girls today feel they need to be perfect, gives insight into why trying to be perfect diminishes quality of life and relationships, and shares some tips on how to cherish being genuine. Enjoy!


JB: You’ve done a lot of research and interviewing for your book, Supergirls Speak Out, where you indicate that many girls and women today feel they have to be perfect, or “supergirls” who can do and be everything. Why do they have this feeling? What is particularly going on in our society that makes women feel so pressured?

LF: Girls today want to be a perfect 10. They want to excel at everything they attempt; in short, they’re perfect. Sadly, I think many young women get the message from the media, from their peer groups, and most notably, from themselves, that they have to be perfect if they want to be loved. It’s largely caused by sexism in society (especially in high schools and teen youth culture), the media, and our fast-pasted culture that doesn’t really encourage young people to spend much solitary time alone with their thoughts—they’re too busy blogging, and tweeting, and Facebooking!

JB: Is this an issue unique to the current female generation? Or, how does it tie in with past generations’ struggles for gender equality?

LF: The first draft of my book actually had a chapter about how the Supergirl dilemma is nothing new; it’s just the new century’s version of “the feminine mystique” that plagued women in the 1950’s! However, the tone of the chapter didn’t quite work, so I cut it (my initial major in college was women’s studies, so sometimes I have a tendency to write in a very academic way and bring up Friedan and Dworkin when it’s not the right place to do it. Haha…). Anyway, I think that what we are seeing here with the Supergirl dilemma is actually the exact same problem as “the feminine mystique” with symptoms that are the exact opposite. In the 1950’s; women were told that there was one way to be a woman—to be a loving homemaker mother who kept herself extremely busy with being pretty, having the latest swirling skirts and washing machine, and jetting off to PTA meetings and social committees, all in an effort to distract herself from the fact that society’s prescribed role for women was very limiting. Today, girls are told that there’s one way to be a girl: be a good daughter who keeps herself extremely busy with being pretty, having the latest season’s miniskirt and sweaters from American Eagle and the Gap, and keeping extremely busy with school and work and extracurricular activities, all in an effort to distract herself from the fact that society’s prescribed role for women is very limiting. There is the obvious difference that in the 1950’s, young women weren’t encouraged to be smart or intellectual or leaders, and today, young women are required to be intellectual and leaders, but at the end of the day, I would argue that the Supergirl dilemma is the second major crisis for young women since “the feminine mystique” that mostly arose because feminism’s work hasn’t been finished yet. We need to teach young women that it’s good to be a girl, and that they don’t need to feel confined to adhering to a very limiting female ideal in exchange for their community or their peer group’s approval.

JB: In your opinion, how does today’s media play into how women feel about themselves? What particular sources have what effects?

LF: I think the biggest problem in today’s media is that the women in the media look perfect. Female celebrities have never been thinner—Lindsay Lohan, Hilary Duff, Nicole Richie, etc. etc.—but also, we’ve never had celebrities all conforming to one limiting female ideal before: long hair, charming and giggly, and not particularly rebellious, like Kate Hudson, Anne Hathaway, and Jennifer Aniston (although I do love all three of these actresses). I don’t think that Angelina Jolie could have ever gotten famous today in her punk-rebel stage, because every female celebrity we see is well-groomed and nice and extroverted. Also, there are a lot of fictional Supergirls that influence how the girls at home feel about themselves: Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, the girls of Gossip Girl, and even Hannah Montana—although these are lovable characters, they give even the youngest girls the idea that beauty and success are simultaneous requirements and that you should make it look as though both come easily.

JB: What role do you feel women have in contributing to each other’s self-esteem or lack of confidence?

LF: Once young women observe perfect women in the media, they emulate having a perfect exterior, and then that model of perfection starts to take off in peer groups. I think that once one girl in a social circle—whether we’re talking in high school, in college, or among twentysomethings—starts to appear effortlessly perfect, her friends and her peers try to imitate that, and it snowballs from there.

JB: What are the consequences of trying to be perfect for individual women, their relationships, and even society or the world?

LF: Statistically, more young women than ever before are considering suicide, and I think it’s no coincidence that this is happening simultaneously with the rise of Supergirls. There are other mental health repercussions that I observed amongst girls, like anxiety, eating disorders, OCD, and depression. And I think the broadest problem is not having a sense of self; not having an identity outside of being a Supergirl or a hard worker.

JB: What are some tips you have for girls and women to positively feel they can be and do whatever they want, without feeling they must be perfect?

LF: First and foremost, girls should get some hobbies. Find things that you enjoy and that you feel passionate about that have nothing to do with work. For example, I just took up the oboe, I love to paint, I love to go to art museums, I love to read novels, and I love stupid movies (like Grandma’s Boy, Superbad, and Little Nicky). Make collages with pictures of random things that you find intriguing. Turn off the lights in your room and listen to music with your eyes closed. Meditate. Find your center! And the most revolutionary thing women can do is look in mirror and say aloud, “I love you. I appreciate you. You matter.” Say it enough, and I think the Supergirls will start to mean it, and see their Supergirl selves fading away.

Young women need to find their sense of intrinsic worth—why they matter regardless of what they look like, what other people think of them, how they make others feel, and what they’ve accomplished. Everyone has worth and everyone has value, and girls need to realize that when they are sitting on their couch in their jammies at 3pm on Saturday afternoon with their hair greasy and their nail polish chipping, they are just as special and just as important as when their hair is blown-dry and they are in a minidress and leggings out on the town for the night with a cute date! What I recommend is that young women spend as much time as possible embracing their creativity, developing their tastes and their personality, and finding themselves! Young women need to find their value, and I think the best way to do that is to be alone with one’s thoughts, spend time alone with oneself, and start to enjoy spending time alone and enjoy listening to one’s internal monologue.

JB: You mentioned that, under the pressure to be perfect, girls and women are oftentimes afraid to be themselves. What are some ways girls and women can feel comfortable exploring and being who they are?

LF: I absolutely love the movie Juno. Casting aside the movie’s puzzling treatment of abortion, I love the character Juno and how unafraid she was to be herself; she liked guitars and punk music and sarcasm and funky clothes. And I think that if more girls could embrace their inner-Juno, and be exactly who they want to be, regardless of whether it would affect how others see them or their place on the social totem pole, we’d be in great shape.

Supergirls on lizfunk.com
Supergirls on Amazon

NYT Video: Sex, Lies, and Photoshop

This New York Times article and video says we ought to give credit where credit is due: Magazines should credit their photo retouchers. Why? Because their craft is an art that takes talent and effort, and after all, results in graphic creations that bear no relationship to how real bodies do and should look.

Barbie's 50, and never looked...er....worse

Check out this article from the BBC, What Would a Real Life Barbie Look Like?

The line that makes me the most sad is from Sarah Burge, a woman who has tried to become a real-life Barbie through plastic surgery: "At the end of the day you don't see a personality from across a room do you." Honestly, I would disagree.

The Obamas stand up to marketing to children

Check out this editorial by Susan Linn from the latest CCFC (Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood) newsletter, called Protecting the First Daughters (and Other Kids, Too).

When the Ty Company celebrated Barack Obama's inauguration by exploiting his daughters, the First Parents were understandably outraged. The company launched two new African American dolls named "Sweet Sasha" and "Marvelous Malia," laughably denying that they had any connection to the real Obama children. Michele Obama issued a powerful statement about the dolls saying, "We believe it is inappropriate to use young, private citizens for marketing purposes."

The Obama's laudable effort to protect their girls from commercial exploitation is going to be an uphill struggle. They were already publicly urged to appear on the hit Disney show, Hannah Montana. The press refers to them as "first tweens," a marketing demographic dumping ground for children ranging in age from 6 to 14-and the Washington Post has called them "fashion icons."

Before his inauguration, President Obama wrote a public letter to his daughters sharing his hopes for them and, by extension, his hopes for all of the children in America. President Obama clearly sees his daughters as individuals, but can also see "every child" in them. I'm hoping this is one of those times.

While the form of their exploitation might be unique, the Obama girls are not alone. Corporate America routinely uses young private citizens for marketing purposes. They might not be turned into dolls, but they are exploited as research tools and as a vast, unpaid sales force. Companies like The Girls Intelligence Agency exploit children's friendships by conducting market research during pajama parties. Nickelodeon and Toys R Us, among others, have conducted market research in elementary schools. In the name of Internet safety, market research firms track children's online activities for their corporate clients. Popular social networking websites like Webkinz and Barbiegirl.com routinely encourage young users to reel in their friends through viral marketing.

What differentiates the Obamas from other parents struggling to protect their children is that the President actually has the power to take on Corporate America. As a first step, he could call on Congress to reauthorize the Federal Trade Commission's capacity to regulate commercial access to children, and repair the damage done when it was stripped of much of its power at the dawn of the Reagan era. As his administration reclaims the right of government to set limits on the market, I hope he remembers his children-and other people's children as well.

I would just like to add that these dolls were created by Ty, the same company that makes the Ty Girlz Dolls that I blogged about last year...'nuff said.

Guide to Commercial-Free Holidays

The CCFC has just released their guide to commercial free holidays. Check it out!

Barbie's Not a Real Woman

Looks to me like "Lingerie Barbie" (pictured left - I can't believe she really exists, ack) and this line of Barbie-inspired couture for real women are part of the same harmful trend that tries to sexualize girls and youth-ify women. It seems no one's perfect the way they are and absolutely everyone female should be Barbie incarnate.

An awesome girl I know at New Moon did a piece on Barbie, with all those stellar facts like, "If Barbie were real, she would cease to menstruate because of her unhealthy body weight."

Yeah.

Lessons on Sex? ie What my spam mail has to say on the topic

I get a lot of spam in my email. Today, instead of just grumbling about it, I began to actually *read* the subject lines on these emails, and they are really ridiculous. But obviously not that ridiculous, or someone wouldn't be writing them thinking that I'll open the email.

So let's see...I'm an alien from the next galaxy and I drop in to do a little anthro study on junk email topics. And imagine that, they're all about - sex. And they're all addressing men. And yep, they're all rather macho and violent, or at least James-Bond-sexy-dangerous. Here's a sampling:

"increase girth, length, and thickness"
"don't settle for anything less than 9 inches"
"length translates directly to happiness"
"cuum [sic] on her face longer and harder"
"penetrating deeper and harder"
"be a lethal weapon in the bedroom"
"you banged her while her guy waited"
...and the oh-so-believable "mariah carey wants to have your kids"

But how do these spammers propose males do these things? With pills and porn (and plastic surgery). And if you don't want to spend money trying to be SuperSexman, well shame on you. The "stop being the joke around town" type of subject lines I also see in my inbox that imply that if you're not super macho, you'll be laughing stock. Which means women are laughing stock. And men who are caring are laughing stock. Couples who have loving sex are laughing stock. Just brilliant.

It's not healthy for men to feel this much pressure to be sexually aggressive, and it's not cool that insurance companies continue to cover costs of Viagra etc. and while not covering birth control pills (not to mention medicines that help cancer patients and so on). When women spend money, effort, and time whittling themselves away into the "perfect" skinny body while men do the same to be bigger and more physically aggressive than ever, I'd say feminist work is really not done yet.

We all could benefit from a wider spectrum of acceptable behaviors, appearances, and ways of being. We should be free to just be who we are, since we're each all these things - simultaneously sweet, tough, sexy, powerful, and kind.

Yogurt...The only food women eat with happiness (according to TV)

This video just cracks me up. Really, why is yogurt the only food (maybe besides salad) a woman can eat without guilt?

It's too bad that yogurt has become a diet aid, a stand-in for other proteins you can sink your teeth into, because you know, it's actually good. But when you have it all the time while wishing you were eating something else, it really gets old.

Poor yogurt is so tied up in all our bad body associations...

There used to be a Dannon ad that read something along the lines of, "Proof that god is a woman and she's watching her figure." I think they were trying to imply that their yogurt was heavenly, so amazing that god was eating it, but mixing together the empowering notion that throws off the patriarchy and says god might actually be female (or, gasp, sexless!) with the fact that feeling insecure about how you look (need to look good being priority #1) is an inherently female trait super duper irks me.

Women certainly deserve the quality of life that comes with health, but they definitely don't deserve the quality of life that comes with the daily air-and-yogurt lunch. Let's not confuse dieting with a healthy lifestyle, please!

p.s. Buy Me Something artist statement

As a p.s. to that last post, here are exhibit comments from the artist behind the Buy Me Something photos.

"Play is an integral part of the growth and learning that all children undergo on their way to adulthood. With Buy Me Something, I look specifically at the tools of play, the modern consumer experience, and how these entities provide children with an education in desire and culturally acceptable behavior. I am influenced by my own, not-always-so-traumatic childhood toy memories and fascinated by the elements of contemporary culture I see reflected, amplified and impregnated in children's commodities. My hope is that these images challenge people to consider how toys and the mechanisims that facilitate their sale inform and reproduce a distinct set of culturally-defined values." - Nat Ward

Disturbing Images of the Day

From childhood "My Scene" (obscene!) dolls to boyfriend-tracking technology, here are my disturbing images of the day.

I don't even know where to start!

"Sniff," the boyfriend-finding application was advertised on the sidebar of Facebook...It truly creeps me out how technologies and programs that bring friends together also sort of encourage a culture of spying, gawking, making fun of, and intruding. (That said, I promise not to do any of those things on Facebook and would love to be your friend :)

The "My Scene" dolls are a shot from a photography show at NYU called "Buy Me Something." If you have a chance to check that out, please report back! It looks really interesting and thought-provoking and I do wish I could go. (I'm a big fan of how the arts can make such direct points in fresh ways.)

So yeah. Today's moral is...? Girls should objectify themselves, to try from a young age to look a certain way in the hopes that one day they'll be hot and fit into a "scene" (I can't really tell if this is supposed to be a beach party, night club, strip joint, or what); meanwhile, when you get there, your self-esteem is so low that you feel you need to stalk your own boyfriend. Why are boys not to be trusted? Why is a girl's boyfriend-choosing judgment supposedly so bad that she'd need to track him? (And what partner wants to be stalked?!)

None of this is healthy, folks.

The saddest part to me is, I'm sure little girls think those dolls are glamorous and gorgeous and love them because of that. There have been studies that show girls prefer dolls (and probably even friends!) that look "pretty." Hey, when I was a kid, I had one Barbie doll (a gift) - and she always went out on the town with her boyfriend while all the other toys and dolls had to stay home to mind the house, feeling inferior. Even if her body proportions were alien, at least she had the confidence to leave her boyfriend-tracking devices at home.

I'd love to hear your take! Thanks for reading and being your awesome, aware self. :)

My Beautiful Mommy

Hold the phone. I just got a Media Watch Alert that included protest of a picturebook for kids called My Beautiful Mommy. No, it isn't a loving and appreciative book about how awesome moms are and why they're beautiful in so many ways, it's a book about how to adjust to your mom's plastic surgery.

What an awful, self-esteem-bashing thing to teach your daughter! Mothers' insecurities and/or values of self-worth are often passed on to their daughters, but this book has made sure we're all going in the negative direction. Having the "option" of plastic surgery as a way to happiness is not, in my humble opinion, what feminism should be achieving.

Instead of needing books that teach kids how their mothers will go to drastic measures to look a certain way (note the Mom's thought bubble of being Miss America and getting lots of attention for her surgically enhanced beauty), perhaps we should take the daughter's advice in slide 3 who says, "You're already the prettiest mommy in the whole wide world!"