Author Archive for Gerald Grow

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful

First published in 1994 by Gerald Grow, this article takes a critical look at advertising, exploring the meaning behind the images. Commercials work not because they sell a product, but because they sell a “state of existence,” or a “way of being” that we find desirable or that we attain towards, but that we can never achieve! In a very real sense advertising, argues Grow, promotes despair and depression because advertising shows us things that most of us can never attain. Are advertisers to blame, then, for the exploding rates of depression and mental illness, eating disorder and pathology, in our “modern” world?