Slave to fashion

Just take a stroll to the nearest mall (or the nearest upcoming one) on a weekend and what do you see? Hordes of shoppers pushing their way through a gigantic stampede of other shoppers lulled by the power of the brand name and the “discount” price tag. Count yourself lucky if you can complete that shopping trip unmauled by the forces of “nature”. Shades of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land of Mecca flash before one’s eyes as one struggles to meander the unnavigable terrain of merciless consumers hunting for yet another generic Osim chair or “that new outfit by Forever 21 that I simply must have”.

Brand name consciousness, certainly, is the mantra by which we eat and breathe these days. From designer bottled water to purified mountain air, Nokia, OSIM, Nike, GAP, Levi’s, and its likes make up the Ten Commandments of the materialistic sub-culture we inhabit. One is easily compelled to wonder why of all things does one need to brave the throng yet another Sunday in the “largest shopping mall in (insert continent)” to purchase yet another little black dress and phone accessory to match when others can scant tell the difference whether its really Pucci or Grada or what the Ah Beng in Petaling Street said was ‘in’ this monsoon.

Nevertheless it is an untiring business as thousands of Ah Lians with boyfriends and butt-crack revealing jeans (and boyfriends in their butt-crack revealing jeans) join forces every other weekend to ensure the struggle does not fade from light. From ‘romantic’ strolls in bookstores while snogging each other and glaring at any poor soul who happens to read in their way, to snatching the last fur-coated cropped cardigan from any poor soul who happens to be paying for it in their way, the quest for more material goods continues. And again next week. Like what Arnie in good ol’California would say, “I’ll be back.”

Indeed, yours truly, a former avid shopper and holder of the longest shopping marathon award has now been relegated to a shadow of her former self. One is not ashamed to say that one is now terrified of malls due to the fear of the impending mindlessness and lack of consideration of others from the first step into the shopping sphere. A twilight zone of apathy mixed with feigned blindness engulfs as one takes that hesitant step. It is as though one is cloaked by the hands of evil – the evil of money, surely – as everyone else pretends to see no mercy, hear no mercy, and of course, speak no mercy as they bump you nonchalantly out of the queue you’ve been standing in since an hour ago. (Just try GSC Mid Valley on a school holiday).

You want to say you’re sorry for not letting them jump queue – you poor little kind soul – rare as you are like a gem in the rough. But they give you the eye and you shrink back – only to bump into the bouncer from Hell who is so dedicated to his night job, he lives it out during the day. So you scurry into the only refuge you think still exists – only to see that the toilet is now a war zone – or at least Daniel Craig must have had his first victim up as James Bond in there. And you’re at a total loss.

Don’t blame yourself, folks. Welcome to the realm of mass consumerism and the rebirth of Fordism, camouflaged in brand names. You can have any colour you want, the ads say, as long as its branded. Look at Paris Hilton’s twinkling lips. Of course its just an Ah Lian with blond hair and Japanese contacts in blue taking a puff. But the colour stays, like what they say at Maybelline. Or Revlon. Or any other brand of lip gloss, really. The product doesn’t really matter, it’s the tagline, dah-ling.

The extent of which corporations will go to in order to sell their products can be no less baffling. A number of these unashamedly breach the reins of political correctness, going all out to produce sexist ads. Sex, for them sells, and apparently, sexist-ness does too. Just watch TV for a night. You’ll see that nine (and I may be wrongly optimistic) out of ten ads featuring household products have women starring as doting housewives, inane smiles plastered all over their more-than-willing to play Stepford wife faces as they scrub yet another kitchen tile while the ‘man’ goes out to battle it out in the corporate warrior’s battlefield. When he (in all his glory) returns, he is treated to a spot-free house and dinner, with his wife all the while smiling that inane smile.

Or you get ads featuring some blossoming young girl, books in hand and all, apparently on her way to some educational institution. On the way she meets love. Love, as it is, is a boy riding a bike who crashes into a wall, mesmerized by our heroine’s beauty. Next scene we see her happily scrubbing child-stained walls, still mesmerized husband coming home from work. And its all thanks to some brand of paint. Need love? Desperate to become a housewife? Want a goofy husband who’ll promise you that dream job of wall-scrubbing? Discover paint. Period.

Some ads try to appear a little more “politically correct”. The woman, now, is some corporate warrior herself. She battles it all day at work. Then she comes home to see Mr. Househusband not doing too well in the domestic sphere. She loses temper. After all, which warrior doesn’t scream a battle cry or two occasionally? Husband makes her coffee. Its named after some sort of lighthouse. She wavers. She is drawn to the carrot. Now the man is back, wielding power in his hands. A woman, as it is, has to be tamed. Otherwise she is nothing but a screaming shrew. And the screaming shrew says, “Never mind, darling, you sit down and relax. I’ll do all the work.”

Of course, the most unpretentious ones tell the truth. Or the constructed ‘reality’ as they so often name that new brand of voyeuristic TV shows like The Simple Life. Some girl tries out a new brand of beauty products. Its named after some fabric that resembles satin. By implication the metaphor describes girl as ‘soft’. Of course. Then there’s an old man of a photographer, 90 or so. He is asleep on a chair. Initially sensibly dressed girl is now a sprightly beauty (one that many CCTV cameras would automatically wake up to, if a particular Minister gives the go) and her enthusiasm wakes the sleeping old man up. Old man is stimulated, girl is ecstatic, and they dance the dance of Eros, our old photographer all the while snapping away. Humbert Humbert would feel so betrayed.

It seems true, at times, the joke about TV shows “being those annoying breaks between endless runs of TV commercials”. What with Petronas ads and all. But sadly enough these too often fall into the trap of parochialism and bad taste. But see one, and you see ‘em all. After all, its all about the brands, not the contents, my dear.

This student essay was submitted for Sociology 435 (The Sociology of Social Change) at Athabasca University. It is a critical examination of  the “heinous” way the media treated the aids epidemic, and their absolute disregard for social responsibility or the deleterious impact media messages were having on the public’s understanding of the disease.  The media generated homophobic, racist, and stereotyped understanding of the AIDS virus that caused additional pain, suffering, and death. Ironically, these understandings persist even decades later. There is a lot going on in this paper but one message is clear, you can’t trust the media to give you the truth of things. They are subject to bias and misinformation, they lack social responsibility, and they even succumb to simple lack of awareness. We do ourselves a disservice, and jeopardize our families and children, when we assume that what we see on television, in the newspaper, or on our favorite news style websites, are accurate reflections of the realities outside our home.

Fight Aids T-Shirt

Fight Aids Tshirt

In 1976, twenty nine white middle aged and elderly men were struck with Legionnaires disease, an incident that received front page, top of the news coverage across North America. However, AIDS would take six years and twelve thousand deaths before most mainstream media aggressively started covering the epidemic (Kinsella 1989:2). This essay will conceptualize how media messages about HIV/AIDS have controlled and constructed social understandings in relation to the epidemic; as well, these declarations of knowledge will be evaluated relative to the media’s significant influence on societal education. Social change, including large-scale transformations, is the achievement of human actors, the result of their actions (Sztompka 1993:259). There is nothing in the social world that is not an effect, intended or unintended, of human efforts and the HIV/AIDS epidemic is a devastating illustration of deceit.

Originally, HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) were deemed to solely affect social outcasts, gays and junkies, two groups of social undesirables not of interest by family audiences. This was largely due to a lack of expertise, which lead to haphazard treatment of outbreaks by the media and in turn the public suffered. The coverage of HIV/AIDS in the news creates a relationship of the public’s perception of the urgency of the problem. Ultimately, coverage about the virus by mainstream media serves as one important gauge of how prominent the issue is and how overall attention to the epidemic has progressed over time both in terms of content and quality. Official confusion undermined efforts to deal with the epidemic since the first day of the crisis and this requires a critical rethinking of culture; of language and representation, of science and medicine, of health and illness, of sex and death and of the public and private realms because AIDS is a central issue which could affect anyone.

In many cases, the news media have served as a primary educational vehicle for the public regarding information about HIV/AIDS, but what happens when this information is incorrect or biased (Brodie, Hamel, Bray, Kates and Altman 2004:1)? How can society be properly protected or at least construct a proper understanding of danger when being disgracefully mislead? In a survey conducted in October 2003 by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 72% of the U.S. public said that the majority of information they receive about HIV/AIDS comes from media outlets such as television, newspapers and radio (ibid). Suffice to say, Western society was doomed from the beginning with regards to the epidemic because the content and quality of coverage was heinous. The production, content and reception of media messages pertaining to HIV/AIDS are studied to recognize more precise ways in which images of understanding are sustained or subverted. In addition, these studies expose the limits of imposed journalism with general editorial concerns, information marketing and assumptions about the reception of the typical audience (Eldridge 1993:6).

This HIV/AIDS epidemic came to realization in North America in the 1980’s and the essential feature of the virus during this period was silence, from medical organizations and media outlets alike. The silence about the epidemic was dominant and constructed whispers around the disease. In cities such as, Los Angeles and New York, marginalization of groups such as the gay community and intravenous drug users became apparent in relation to the epidemic (Kinsella 1989:4). There were few guidelines to indicate what deserved to be covered and for this reason society still felt safe because the messages being received ensured that only gays or drug users could contract HIV or AIDS. How voices are heard can be as important as how many are heard, sequentially images, conceptual structures and audience understandings are reproductions of information provided by media outlets, regardless of inaccuracies (Eldridge 1993:41).

Novel coverage of the epidemic seemed only to be by individuals touched by the HIV/AIDS in a personal way (Kinsella 1989:4). However, in 1981 almost no one at major media outlets was admitting to a personal connection to a disease affecting gay men or drug users (ibid:15). In addition, a lack of government support and failure to take the epidemic seriously, the disease became kind of a curio. The epidemic and the groups at risk were inevitably ostracized and the entire demonstration surrounding HIV/AIDS became simply an illustration of power. Those who have power, such as the media, determine what social conceptions are seen as acceptable. Power relations within groups of society, among groups and between groups, including dominant institutions all repeated errors in the struggle against HIV/AIDS.

General surveys suggest that the same problematic ways of understanding HIV/AIDS are reflected in the knowledge and attitudes of many people and vital health educational messages are often not understood (Kitzinger 1990:2). Both how the media structure thinking on part of a particular issue and how the process of audience understanding forms part of the meaning, in turn constructs a social understanding.  Perhaps the lack of concern about the virus then may be a case of monkey see monkey do; because seven years into the epidemic the American government had still not decided what its role should be namely because the “general population” had yet to be effected (Kinsella 1989:8). It was not until 1987 that President Regan even made his first statement concerning the epidemic simply requiring Health and Human Services to determine the extent to which AIDS had penetrated society (Crimp 1988:24).

The content of media messages created a particular crisis surrounding the AIDS epidemic and the lack of response by organizations, such as the Center of Disease Control (CDC), regarding these media misrepresentations furthered falsities. A resistance from health educators and a lack of inclusion was apparent due to their low degree of perceived authority and status, in spite of particular problems the media faced in sorting out uncertainties (Eldridge 1993:131). For instance, in 1983 Cosmopolitan magazine ran an article stating “there is almost no danger of contracting AIDS through ordinary sexual intercourse,” (Kinsella 1989:7). Additionally a Miami television station ran an outrageous series claiming AIDS might simply be syphilis erroneously diagnosed (ibid). This creation of dangerous ideologies in relation to the disease was steering people wrong; however the media defended themselves by declaring they were simply reporting what they were told (Eldridge 1993:130). There was complete disregard for the social responsibility in which the media should have upheld all because of the dominant influence the media has on the formation of knowledge.

During the years of 1981-82, papers like the New York Times reported a mysterious new illness that was considered a “gay man’s cancer,” and was readily compared with contemporaneous, sensational mainstream media reports on homosexual sadomasochism (Silversides 203:15). Regardless of the newspapers pioneering articles on the epidemic, most information was studded with errors of omission and wrongheaded emphasis (Kinsella 1989:3). More interestingly, while reporting incoherent nonsense pertaining to the epidemic, the New York Times chose to ignore stories of significance. Such as, a story involving a 20 month old boy born to healthy parents, who was discovered to have AIDS. One parent received a blood transfusion over a year prior, the donor who at the time had no symptoms of the disease (ibid:19). Even with AIDS being a much bigger story it was not considered front page news and the New York Times ignored the transfusion story altogether (Kinsella 1989:19).

Another publication, The Body Politic, attempted to reconfigure some of these misleading notions by responding to anything that smacked of homophobia (Kinsella 1989:19). But regardless of attempts to demonstrate that, media outlets throughout North America had a persistent capacity for major distortions in their coverage of gay-related issues; a gay specific virus made it even easier to discriminate and spread panic among gay men (Silversides 2003:15). This stigmatized stereotype of one dominantly infected group fed the minds of society because the media controlled mis-representation. The social production of meaning was namely created by the media and had significant bearing on the organization of society (O’Brien and Szeman 2010:366). Earlier information about the epidemic lost sight of rational fears surrounding the disease and focused on irrational fears of sexuality and otherness.

In 1988, Newsweek ran an article which stated the infection was spreading to the “broader population,” but the virus did not require sexual contact or sharing intravenous needles. It could and would however be transmitted through person-to-person contact in which blood or other bodily fluids from a person who is harboring the virus are splashed onto or rubbed against someone else (Kinsella 1989:7). This would mean that AIDS could be spread by something as innocent as a kiss, or simply a toilet seat (ibid). In addition, health organizations such as the CDC held no press conferences to either put out information nor to attract attention to incorrect information pertaining to the crisis. It took no coordinated approach to educate individuals about the epidemic or ways to avoid infection (ibid:14). There was always a source encouraging the notion that HIV/AIDS were a threat to everyone, including white heterosexual middle class couples, though they remained the lowest infected (ibid:4), but unfortunately this idea was neglected. As saddening as original stupidity was surrounding the disease, it did bring scientists one step closer to discovering how the disease was transmitted, believing it may be caused by an infectious agent transmitted sexually or through exposure to blood or blood products (ibid:6).

Rightfully, media messages about HIV/AIDS have been criticized for the lack of clarity, using language that is confusing or even undermining educational efforts. The contradictory ways society struggles to achieve and understand HIV/AIDS is a reality that is frightening, publicized and neither directly or fully knowable. HIV/AIDS is no different in this respect than other linguistic constructions, which in the common sense view of language are thought to transmit pre-existing ideas and represent real world entities and yet in fact do neither. As well, embodying prejudiced attitudes, perpetuating misconceptions about how HIV/AIDS is transmitted and failing to take into account the reality of people’s lives and their power to protect themselves and others. The result is that 24,000 Canadians were infected with a debilitating disease that they could have been protected from easily and relatively cheaply (Picard 1995:234).

This poor reflection pertaining to the awareness about unprotected sex and the risk of contracting this fatal illness was enabled by organizations which failed to proactively implement social change (Stoller 1998:3). Absent was individual’s human rights to complete and accurate information because news is not a reflection of the world ‘out there’ but is a product of the ‘practices of those who have the power to determine the experience of others,’ (Eldridge 1993:127) and these social interactions mediated incorrect understandings. Media messages were not only creating irrational fears about sexuality and otherness but the emphasis was more on homosexuals than HIV/AIDS; however the quality of these messages transitioned and the virus became more than just synonymous with homosexuals and deviant lifestyles.

The connection of HIV/AIDS and homosexuality is what delayed and problematized virtually every aspect of North America’s response to the crisis. Even though there were new emerging messages relevant to HIV/AIDS, there were also still errors made in accordance with heterosexual cases and distinguishing between the syndrome AIDS and the virus HIV. Figures showed only one case of AIDS attributable to heterosexual transmission during the late 1980’s, which displayed ignorance regarding HIV/AIDS infection and transmission. This prompted media outlets to suggest this claim was prominent and deserved coverage with headlines that read, “The Truth About AIDS” (Daily Mail, November 17/89) and “Straight Sex Cannot Give You AIDS – Official” (The Sun, November 17/89) (Eldridge 1993:215). The latter article which read,

AIDS – THE FACTS NOT THE FICTION. At last the truth can be told. The killer disease AIDS can only be caught by homosexuals, bisexuals, junkies or anyone that has received a blood transfusion. FORGET the television adverts, FORGET the poster campaigns, FORGET the end-less boring TV documentaries and FORGET the idea that ordinary heterosexual people can contract AIDS. They can’t…the risk of catching AIDS if you are a heterosexual is ‘statistically invisible’. In other words impossible. So now we know – anything else is just homosexual propaganda. And should be treated accordingly. (The Sun, 17 November 1989)

If this information were in fact truthful then why was it that during 1983 female partners of heterosexual males were showing up among figures? This was the constructed uncertainty around whether solely men could transmit the disease and in turn lead to a disregarded ideology of how society should protect themselves against this fatal epidemic (Altman 1986:37). HIV/AIDS, recognized or not, was also affecting ‘innocent victims’ and not just the “guilty victims” or social undesirables. However, the “guilty” are not just responsible for their own predicament, they are to blame for the deaths of others. The innocent victim category became synonymous with the general population, however tragedy and misfortune were more connected to deception by another and this is how innocence was emphasized. Mass media sensitized the public to the apparent threat and values were threatened by the breaking of normal heterosexual relations.

HIV/AIDS was largely discovered among groups such as hemophiliacs, pertinent to the Red Cross and the ‘tainted-blood-scandal’ North America faced throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s. Seemingly, this created a in shift medical understanding and sequentially a shift in the quality of media messages delivered to the receptive public. Due to a heavy reliance on blood and lack of knowledge about the epidemic hundreds of hemophiliacs died from AIDS related deaths that could have been avoided had the media and public health officials demonstrated a little foresight and leadership (Picard 1995:233). The question of most importance in relation to the tainted-blood scandal is whether the decision of public health officials not to tell hemophiliacs and transfusion recipients of the risks they faced, and their failure to implement preventative measures constitute similar violations of the ‘duty of care” (ibid:251). It seems unconscionable that there could have been hundreds of people who had been infected with HIV/AIDS during blood transfusions who were unaware that they had ever been at risk.

This illustrated a crucial point about practices and situations that facilitated the transmission of AIDS, in contrast to prior stigmatization stress placed on particular groups and identities. In Canada it was not until 1990 that the Red Cross and health authorities introduced testing upon blood donors, because the decade prior to that more than three million Canadians who received blood transfusions were unwitting participants in the lottery of death (Picard 1995:234). Despite the enormity of the HIV/AIDS tragedy, tainted blood did not become front page news in Canada until late 1992 (ibid). This combination of stigmatization and ignorance lead to countless people losing their lives based on knowledge of facts and theories propounded through the media.

Between 1987 and 1990 there was not a single major story about the epidemic that dominated media coverage (Brodie et.al 2004:2). The audacity of media outlets to publically sensitize individuals of apparent threats about this deadly virus and then withdrawal from providing any form of information did but one thing, served as a gauge to how urgent the problem was or was not. The media’s significant bearing on the organization of society is a representation of the social production of meaning, which is not inherent but created through culture, politics and history (O’Brien et.al:366). Though seemingly abstract the structural definition of culture as embedded symbolic forms, circulate in institutionalized channels of transmission and diffusion. These channels are increasingly those of institutionalized networks of communication in which the experience of individuals is increasingly mediated by technical systems of symbolic production and transmission (Eldridge 1993:44). In turn, the quality of media messages regarding the epidemic also transitioned to reflect the coverage of key news-generating events, however this type of media coverage did not appear till the 1990’s (Brodie et.al 2004:2).

Throughout 1991-1995 the biggest HIV/AIDS story was Magic Johnson’s announcement that he was HIV positive. This enabled a connection that was previously unrecognized; a lack of personal impact involving the epidemic was substituted by a connection being made to an all American individual. Additionally, in 1996 media coverage began to focus on the introduction of treatment for individuals with HIV and during 2000-2002 the focus transitioned to emerging stories of HIV/AIDS in Africa, drug prices and the Global fund to fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (Brodie et.al 2004:4). The most interesting thing to note about all of the stories pertaining to the epidemic is that they did not account for more than one to two percent of overall coverage during a twenty two year time period. The most of which was focused on Magic Johnson and accounted for three percent of coverage at that time (ibid).

This intentional shift by the mass media still presented vague concepts in message production to correctly illustrate social and institutional conditions pertinent to HIV/AIDS. The interpretation of ideology should involve claims and counter claims and media messages regarding HIV/AIDS should be produced critically. For instance, the lack of recognition of women’s vulnerability to HIV/AIDS exists on an institutional level, by preventing educators from speaking about significant facts (Silversides 1998:100). Additionally, the original stigma behind HIV/AIDS to undesirable groups has made it even more difficult for ‘others’ to reveal and except they have AIDS (ibid). Revisited here is the notion of audience understanding and how members of the societal audience interpret the HIV/AIDS coverage or the lack thereof. The new direction of HIV/AIDS messages as an international epidemic created more complex discourses and familiar to the past the focus was shifted again to ‘others’ or to those with whom most North-Americans cannot relate.

The ability of the media to create panic, virtually throughout the world, with regards to HIV/AIDS co-existed with considerable ignorance of its real impact (Altman 1986:56). With HIV/AIDS now dominantly being spoken of as a global epidemic, specifics of the virus shifted more from risk groups and infection to prevention; which accounted for thirteen percent of AIDS stories overall (Brodie et.al:4). Namely, stories were about education and awareness efforts but also included were stories about research, drugs treatments and vaccines. Moreover, only one of ten stories was regarding transmission, exactly the same number specifying in social issues (ibid). Progress in the understanding of the epidemic was slowly and continually advancing the cultural ignorance and insecurity that had been originally constructed (Sztompka 1993:27)

Although throughout this period the quality of health education messages shifted and became predicated on a number of basic facts; first HIV weakened the immune system and allowed many different infections to condition AIDS. Second, the impairment of the immune system may take a number of years to become apparent; finally, the presence of HIV is not present in a test, only the presence of antibodies which may have developed in response to the virus (Eldridge 1993:213). Sequentially, some clarity encompassed what was considered to be at “risk groups,” isolated individuals with identifiable characteristics that are predictive of the disease; as well as, criticizing it as misguided information (Crimp 1988:38). What is known about the virus suggests there are more “risky” practices for anyone, not just certain groups of people who might then be excluded from the rest of society either metaphorically or physically (ibid).

The deliveries of broadcast versus print messages need to be distinguished for the purposes of content and quality. Broadcast messages regarding HIV/AIDS were more heavily weighted on research, whereas print messages focused on funding efforts behind the epidemic. Sequentially, the tone of broadcast messages were more dramatic and pessimistic then print messages because broadcast messages were more volatile and time-dependent than print (Brodie et.al:6). Media messaging over time resulted in fewer stories with information related to consumer education. Early in the epidemic little was known about transmission, prevention and progress to HIV/AIDS but as recently as 2000 surveys found that four in ten North-Americans thought the virus could be transmitted through kissing, one in five thought it could be transmitted by sharing a drinking glass and one in six thought it was possible to be infected by touching a toilet seat (ibid:7).  Quality of media messages, regarding consumer education of HIV/AIDS, has evidently declined and this decline coincided with a change in the nature of audience understanding of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, from an absolute death sentence of the “guilty” to a chronic disease that even the “innocent” can live with.

“The public wants to see HIV as occurring in certain groups in order to reassure themselves that they aren’t vulnerable. But it isn’t about ‘them,’ it’s about us. And it’s not about groups, it’s about behavior.” Maggie Atkinson (Silversides 1998:98).

From the origination of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in North-America there has been a blatant shift in the content and quality of media messages. Informational messages created a need to formulate media strategies which recognize the variations within and between media and the process by which their representational practices are shaped (Eldridge 1993:139). Misguided messages regarding HIV/AIDS have been framed in terms of individual behavior rather than government policy, passive suffering rather than active resistance, risk groups rather than risk activities and as a minority concern rather than an important social issue (ibid:299). The intentional shift in attention regarding HIV/AIDS messages is now devoted to the epidemic in third world, yet this is more simply a problem about which one hears and this shift only deafens the silence of the dominant media in North America.

However, the progression of messages have attempted to produce some clarity to audiences, from the mere understanding of the epidemic to more prominent details of legality based on conscious neglect when infected. Messages now focus on the criminalization of AIDS based on subjective recklessness, the awareness of being infected and the risk of transmission to an unknowing partner (Policy and Law Review:2005). As well in North America safer tattooing practices have been implemented as have safe injections sites for drug users, which are all encompassed in new media messages pertaining to HIV/AIDS (Policy and Law Review:2007). Although ultimately, these messages ar

Introduction

You are watching network television. It is late evening, the time of Dallas and Falconcrest. Even more suddenly than most commercials begin, a gorgeous model appears on the screen, looking directly at you with those compelling, magazine-cover eyes. Her voice is friendly, direct, and in complete control. By the time you become aware of her, you have heard her say:

“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”

The line is carefully delivered. Its emphasis falls, lightly, on “beautiful,” almost as if, discarding “beautiful” as a reason, we might find other causes to hate her. But like most television, the line (which takes about two seconds) melts into the commercial, then flows into the ongoing dramas of power, passion, and perfection that haunt the television landscape.

But wait: That’s an astonishing statement–”Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” It begs a question. Is it, “Why would anyone hate a beautiful woman?” Not quite. More like: “Why would anyone hate a beautiful woman on a commercial?” More fully, I think the question is this: Can we find a way of looking at beauty, commercials, and hatred– that makes a link among them plausible?

I’d like to argue that we can.

Recent critical works on advertising employ a variety of approaches. In Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising, Williamson (1976) analyzes a collection of individual print ads for recurring themes and semiotic patterns. Her commentaries are often lively, provocative, literate, and insightful. Goffman (Gender Advertisements, 1979) brings an imposing sociological relativism to a selection of print ads, in order to illustrate how ads employ stylized versions of gestures and postures–”hyperritualized” gestures–to signal the relations between the sexes. Leymore’s Hidden Myth: Structure and Symbolism in Advertising (1975), caps a wide- ranging series of observations with a structuralist analysis of advertisements from print and television. Her discussion culminates in mathematical analyses of the basic “binary pairs” structuralists seek in myths–opposites like endogenous/exogenous, happiness/misery, nature/culture–and the results, while fascinating, are rarefied.

In Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, Ewen (1976) traces modern advertising as an essential function of the rise of mass production and consumption. Advertising is depicted as one of the main ways people’s minds are kept oriented to serve the structures of the capitalist system of production. Drawing from psychoanalysis, anthropology, and especially Marx, Jhally (The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society, 1987) criticizes advertising as a system where products function like magical fetishes that help mass media and the marketplace replace traditional institutions.

In this paper, I draw upon these authors less for their technical methods than for the broad issues they hold in common.

• They all consider ads culturally significant.
• They all look for recurring structures in ads and deep structures beneath them: “[Advertising] obviously has a function, which is to sell things to us. But it has another function, which I believe in many ways replaces that traditionally fulfilled by art or religion. It creates structures of meaning.” (Williamson, 1978, 12).
• Though they consider ads a force influencing people, these authors (in varying degrees) emphasize that people participate in advertisements as active interpreters, not as pawns.
• For each of these authors, advertisements form some kind of system that must be approached as a whole: Any individual ad makes sense only against a larger backdrop, what Goffman calls “the realm of being of which the drama in every individual ad is but an instance” (22).

My methodology is much closer to literary analysis. It resembles the approach used by a fellow student of literature, Kenneth Burke, in The Rhetoric of Religion. It is an attempt to uncover relationships inherent in the structure of certain dominant strategies of advertising– and to use those to interpret “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” I take the line as a given, then try to create a context in which it makes sense.

Note: Due to copyright restrictions, I have not posted copies of any of the advertisements in the series, “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful.” I hope the verbal descriptions help you imagine what they were like.

The Company She Keeps: Values in Commercials

The immediate context for any commercial consists of other commercials. Viewers apparently remember and compare commercials. That supposition underlies Frank Deford’s 1984 scrapbook on the Miller Lite commercials. On a deeper level, advertising–as Williamson and others have argued–forms a system of meaning. The TV viewer “sees all advertisements as one, or rather, sees their rules as applicable to one another and thus part of an interchangeable system.” (Williamson, 1978, 13). Many television commercials, for example, are loaded with images of ways to be. Watching them, you are virtually flooded by images of values, ideals, desirable states of being–such as liveliness, fun, pleasure, self confidence, contact with nature, family closeness, sex appeal, success, power, sophistication, popularity, patriotism, youth, adventure, superior knowledge–and, of course, beauty.

A commercial of this kind from the summer of 1987 shows vivid, masterly scenes of idealized family togetherness. Parents, children, and grandparents move together in a miniature drama of family closeness. They smile, they move close to one another, they look at one another with glowing fondness. Their world consists of 30 seconds of an idealized relationship. As the commercial goes on, M&Ms candy plays in increasing role in this togetherness, until it seems to be the cause, the motivating force behind the happiness of the participants. M&Ms share the stage with a nearly mythical moment of magical togetherness.

Many commercials follow a similar strategy: Images of desirable states of being are associated with products. In The Best Thing on Television: Commercials, Jonathan Price quotes advertising author Walter Taplin to illustrate how the approach is recognized and discussed in the advertising industry:

“Most of the things we want are not material but mental. We want states of mind. The advertiser, beginning with a material object, which is to be sold, suggests the states of mind which may be achieved by the purchaser” (50).

Here are some recent examples. When environmental awareness grew in the ’70s, tobacco companies presented glorious images of backpackers communing with nature (and with their cigarettes). As jogging became popular, many commercials featured images of happy joggers–associated with unlikely sponsors (such as banks) that had nothing to do with jogging. As our divorce-torn culture groped for the meaning of family in the early ’80s, idealized images of family togetherness, family reunions, and traditional extended families appeared on many commercials, associated with candy, diet cola, fast foods, and other products. Around a decade ago, billboards began to announce “Alive With Pleasure!” and implied that the product responsible for this happy state was Newport cigarettes. A current commercial states, “There’s someone exciting living inside you,” and offers a product to set that person free.

To the extent such a commercial is successful, it convinces us (on some level) that the product is a good way, the best way, or the only way to achieve the ideal state celebrated in the ad. For the ad to be successful, its product must become the link between our reality and the idealized image. Through such advertising, products become the connecting link between people and a wide range of personal, social, and psychological ideals.

Advertising and Sermons

Commercials repeatedly imply that products can connect us with almost any conceivable value. Watching them, you might conclude that virtually any desirable state of being can be attained, if only you purchase the right products. The seemingly innocent M&M commercial, for example, is structured to imply that M&Ms bring families together. The commercial implies that the ideal–family togetherness–comes to us by means of the power of the product.

Commercials of this kind employ a common rhetorical method: Present an ideal; convince your audience they need it but do not have it; convince them that you have the secret for moving from where they are to the desired state; tell them what to do next. This structure has frequently been used in sermons, especially at the revival meetings of my youth, where it appeared in this form: There is a God and heaven. Due to Adam’s fall and your own failings, you are separate, a sinner. Christ is the only link between you and God. Embrace Christ and you will enter the desired state of being saved. Refuse Christ and you will not only remain a sinner in this life, after death you will live forever in damnation. Now, since you clearly don’t want to burn in Hell forever, come down to the prayer rail and be saved. (See Table 1.)

In both cases, the method of presentation is designed to emphasize the importance of the mediator and the powerlessness of the listener. In both sermon and commercial, viewers are led to feel that they lack something, they are cut off from an ideal state of being which they can attain only through a mediator. Jhally (1987, 171) uses the term “fetishism” to describe consumer products in the same series of relationships: a desired state, a separation, a magical object that connects you, and a ritual for evoking that magic. In advertising, the product serves as mediator between us and the image of beauty–or other desired states of being. The product symbolically becomes the savior, the mediator, the fetish, the efficacy that promises to save us from the ordinary and elevate us to the company of those perfect beings whose images grace so many advertisements.

The Two Faces of the Ideal

In his study of gender in print ads, Goffman illustrated how the models in ads abstract certain gestures which reveal social relations, then project those gestures in simplified, amplified, “hyperritualized” form. Even animals are susceptible to selective, exaggerated versions of the normal. In his classic study of the herring gull, the ethologist Niko Tinbergen (1953) found that the the begging response of the newly hatched chick was triggered by a red spot on the bottom of the parent gull’s bill. Through an elaborate series of experiments, he pinpointed just which features (position of the red spot, color, contrast, color of bill, head color, head shape, shape of bill, lowness, position of bill, etc.) trigger the response. He was then able to construct a model which the chick preferred to the real thing! In other experiments, Tinbergen constructed stimuli other birds preferred above natural stimuli. An oystercatcher, for example, will prefer a giant, specially-painted model of an artificial egg to its own egg. Normal responses–even those vital to survival–can be subverted by symbolic stimuli that are more powerful than natural stimuli.

People are also susceptible to “supernormal sign stimuli” (as he called them in The Study of Instinct, 44). Tinbergen discussed one example: exaggerated sign stimuli derived from the face of the human baby. He observed that dolls, films, and the pet trade all employ idealized baby faces. Here is his characterization of the elements that go into the idealized baby face: It must have ” a small facial part and a large brain part of the head. Moreover, its cheeks must be fat and rounded. The baby’s crying, and its clumsy movements, are also necessary to make it really cute.” (Herring Gull, 223).

Advertising’s easy-looking images of hard-earned perfection may, in general, work like hypernormal stimuli. Such images certainly do not come easily. Diamant (1970) and Arlen (1980) documented the mind-boggling lengths to which a producer will go to achieve the fleeting images in 30- or 60- second commercial. No family can be as perfect as the one pictured. Few moments in life can have the immediacy of the AT&T commercial that took weeks to stage, shoot, and edit. We can seldom reach out and touch so vividly, so completely, so gorgeously, so ideally, as those immaculately staged images do in the ads. Technology amplifies the ads’ perfection. Anyone who has attended a demonstration of the Scitex graphics workstation can verify how easy it is for graphic designers to make magazine pictures even “more perfect”–deleting inconvenient portions of the picture, enhancing color balances, moving component parts of the image around, even importing images from other photographs–all without leaving a trace.

No one can look as good as the picture or video image of a fashion model–not even the models themselves, whose looks are for the camera. In life, many models are said to look startlingly skinny. A book like Cheryl Tieg’s The Way to Natural Beauty documents the immense effort required for a professional model to maintain her casual good looks. One line suggests the magnitude of the labor of being beautiful: “I hate spending even an hour fussing in front of a mirror in the morning” (19, italics added). As a result of her labors, she became one of those who embodied the ideals of beauty and presented them for women to emulate.

The supernormal images of perfection presented on the media (such as a photograph of Cheryl Tiegs) are worth some thought, because any kind of guiding image has a double nature. One the one hand, idealized images can uplift and give direction. In the pursuit of the unattainable, people attain great things. The uplifting ideal may be to love like Jesus, to manifest the compassion of the Buddha, to show the wisdom of a beloved Rabbi, to be the fastest runner in history, to raise a happy family, to look like Jane Fonda at 45, to live a balanced life, to bring about world peace, to end hunger, and so on. Even if you try but fail to attain such ideals, you can remain pointed in the right direction and ennobled by the effort. We belong to a culture guided by unattainable ideals: liberty, equality, happiness. Noble failure while pursuing great ideals is central to our striving, romantic spirit. For Americans, the hyperreal has often been merely a way of pointing us toward a future that has exceeded science fiction’s wildest dreams.

But idealized images are uplifting only when there is some way to move from where you are in the direction of the values implicit in the image. If there is nothing to connect you with the image, so that the ideal seems unattainable, you can feel cut off from it. If the ideal is important and the gap formidable, an unbridgeable gap may seem to loom before you. Instead of inspiring you to cross that gap, the separate, unattainable ideal begins to mock you and becomes a torment. In the worse case, you can become obsessed by an ideal, yet feel you have absolutely no means of moving from where you are to it, or even toward it. You can become stuck, powerless to move toward what you most desire.

By using idealized images that have no connection with the product, commercials may be promoting, not the joining of the viewer and the ideal, but just such a separation. Through certain strategies in commercials, we are led to desire various states of mind, yet we are misled in the means for achieving them. By depicting highly-valued states of being, yet offering no avenue to those states except consumer products, commercials make us the cognitive equivalent of sinners: cut off from the ideals we aspire to and mocked by the mediators that promise to take us to that heaven implied by television images. In showing us what to aspire to, but providing us means that will surely fail, advertising has given us a formula for despair.

“Despair” may sound like a harsh word to apply to a commercial, but I believe it is accurate. I am not implying that television viewers are all lying around in paralytic states of despondency. Rather, I want to suggest that certain advertising strategies provide the cognitive preconditions for a well-known state of being whose structure has been documented for centuries. Turning to an excellent summary from experts on the subject–the New Catholic Encyclopedia–we find this definition: Despair “signifies a positive act of will by which a man gives up the expectation of salvation because he considers that, in his own case at any rate, it is a thing too difficult to be achieved.” Because of my early training, I tend to turn to literature first for illustrations, and we find one of the most powerful depictions of despair in Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, a play contemporaneous with the early works of Shakespeare. In his last scene, Faustus finds he must live out his part of the bargain and surrender his soul in exchange for his great knowledge.

O, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop! Ah, my Christ!

Notice how he portrays his desired ideal–salvation–as something far away. Although he can vividly imagine the heaven of his desires, he finds himself with no way to attain it. He is unable to reach up toward that salvation, and no mediator reaches down to him. The God of love becomes transformed into a God of wrath:

Where is it now? ‘Tis gone. And see where God
Stretcheth out his arm and bends his ireful brows.
Mountains and hills, come, come , and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God….
My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!

I am not calling upon these sources for their Christian perspective, but to point out how much the inner structure of despair resembles the way I have just analyzed advertising: one is enticed to desire an ideal, then cut off from all means of attaining it.

Advertising promotes despair of this kind, first, by surrounding us with images of unattainable perfection. Second, advertising promotes despair by implying that the product will deliver the ideal–when it can’t. In both cases, consumers look across a vast gulf at the promise of values–and find that the offered means (products we buy) cannot take us there. As one critic of advertising put it: “Sadness betrays the idyll [of advertising's more-than-perfect world] …. While busying themselves with feeding us, the ads are offering to appease a more unassuageable hunger, and failing to do so.” (Conrad, 118) We do not gain titillating encounters through DoubleMint Gum, a youthful dancer’s vitality through diet Pepsi, family closeness through Priazzo, or power and control through Z-cars. Despair–I am arguing–is a natural byproduct of the experience structured into the way advertising promises to deliver the values implicit in its hypernormal images.

Beauty may bring its own forms of despair. Beauty, and women’s relations to it, are far more complicated than just imitating the example set by gorgeous models in advertisements. What Ewen called “the pursuit of beauty through consumption” (1976, 181) has a discouraging effect on many women. Women have written of the way advertising has promised that “perfection is obtained on your grocer’s shelves. Perfection, cleanliness, godliness, gracious hospitality, and an adoring family are attained through the purchase of Lemon Fresh Joy and Drano.” (Scott, 199). Yet many women say the pursuit of such perfection has made them not more beautiful, but more ashamed of their bodies:

“Whole industries depend on selling us products through slick ads depicting ‘beautiful’ women, playing on our insecurities and fears of imperfection…. The media defines ‘looking good’ so narrowly that few of us ever feel we have made it… We always have to measure up to some image” (Boston Women’s Health Collective, 5).

Even for women who meet the prevailing standards for “looking good,” there are problems in what the poet William Butler Yeats called “the putting on of burdensome beauty.” In “A Prayer for My Daughter,” Yeats wished that she might be blessed with beauty, but in moderation– not enough to draw upon her the kind of destructiveness precipitated by the beauty of Helen of Troy. In their book on the politics of beauty Lakoff and Scherr summed up the burden of beauty this way:

“Women do not have power through beauty: beauty has power. Therein lies the paradox. Men–whose judgments are what give beauty what power it has–envy and resent women for their supposed ‘power’ through beauty over men’s hearts and minds (and pocketbooks). Women fear the dependence upon men, since only men can unlock the ‘power’ of beauty and make it function to woman’s advantage. Men are angry at women for possessing a power which, in fact, women do not possess; if anything, it possesses them.” (279)

Arguing from a psychoanalytic framework, Holbrook in The Masks of Hate (1972) claims that “the glamorous images in the mass media” are manifestations of the “intense unconscious hatred of woman” that is “expressed…widely in our culture” (41).

Beauty has not always seemed so complicated. From the time of the Greeks till the early 20th century, philosophers and poets connected beauty with such glorious ideals as truth and harmony. Plato considered beauty “a self-subsisting idea shining through bodies, laws, and knowledge itself. Every beautiful thing partakes of this eternal oneness of beauty. Beauty and goodness are found together…; in fact, they are identical” (New Catholic Encyclopedia). For Plato, as for Dante, such ideals were the guiding lights that illuminated existence. One has only to remember the conclusion of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn:”

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

In contrast, listen to the words used about beauty by the modern commentators we have quoted: vacuum, depersonalized, power, paradox, envy, fear, dependence, advantage, angry, possession–and hate. We have travelled a long road to come back to that commercial for hair conditioner with such a vocabulary in mind.

Let’s continue our discussion of the way advertising uses idealized images, by focusing on the term most central to our commercial: “envy.”

The Two Faces of Envy

Near the end of Ways of Seeing, John Berger describes advertising in terms of envy. Advertising “proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more…. [Advertising] persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour.” And advertising (he uses the British term, “publicity”) “is the process of manufacturing glamour.” (131) Advertising, he concludes, is about the solitary happiness that comes from being envied by others.

In this sense, envy implies the admiration of others. This “envy” suggests that others might covet your possessions, looks, manner, etc., and want to be like you. Surely Berger is right in a way; advertisers must want us to want to be like those beautiful people in the ads. But envy has a dark side which has largely been lost to twentieth-century thought. For at least a thousand years, a distinction has been made among envy, coveting, and jealousy. You are jealous to protect something you already have. You covet what you want but do not have. Coveting and jealousy are minor sins. But since medieval times, envy has been considered a major term for identifying the causes of human suffering. In many versions of the Seven Deadly Sins, envy took first or second place. According to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, from envy come “hatred, calumny, detraction, and many types of malevolent behavior.” In Purgatorio, Canto XIII, Dante meets Sapia, whose punishment for malicious envy–she rejoiced to see her countrymen lose in battle–was to have her eyelids sewn shut with steel wire. Plotting the death of Cassio, Iago tossed off these chilling lines: “If Cassio do remain,/ He hath a daily beauty in his life/ That makes me ugly.” (Othello, V.I.18- 20). Shakespeare’s audience would almost certainly have recognized this as an instance of envy.

Modern writings on envy are rare, but the German sociologist, Helmut Schoeck, has produced a rich, scholarly volume on the subject: Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior. In his review of what great thinkers have said about envy, he quotes Nietzsche’s compelling definition: “When some men fail to accomplish what they desire to do, they exclaim angrily, ‘May the whole world perish!’ This repulsive emotion is the pinnacle of envy, whose implication is, ‘If I cannot have something, no one is to have anything, no one is to be anything!’” (179) Schoeck argues that envy is a universal drive that ranges from a spiteful Schadenfreude (malicious glee at another’s misfortune) to horrible acts of mutilation and murder for no other reason than that the perpetrator felt belittled by the accomplishments of the victim.

I covet when I want something I do not have; I can covet my neighbor’s wife, car, house, talents, or achievements. Coveting, indeed, may be one of the virtuous vices of a competitive economy; but there is nothing virtuous about envy. Coveting says, “He has it; I want it.” Envy, though, says: “If I can’t have it, nobody can.”

Envy is frustrated desire turned destructive. Envy is what leads a child to break another child’s favorite toy, or a boss to frustrate a talented employee. In the play and film, Amadeus, Salieri enacts a highly theatrical version of envy as he sets out to destroy Mozart for effortlessly writing music far greater than all Salieri’s labors can produce. Impotent to attain the ideal, the envious person feels destructive toward it. Like despair, envy derives from the separation of the person from the object of desire, combined with a sense that one is powerless to attain what is desired (Schoeck, 17). In envy, the urge to reach out becomes the urge to destroy.

Envy seems to be a difficult concept for the modern mind. In their recent collection of wise quotes on almost every subject, Good Advice, for example, William Safire and Leonard Safir confuse envy with coveting and jealousy. I have given up finding the meaning of envy in Britannica III. In November, 1987, Harper’s ran a parody in which a different agency produced an ad for each of the Seven Deadly Sins. Many of the sins were represented both keenly and humorously. The advertisement based on envy, however, left one with the feeling that envy was an amplified form of griping. Going back as far as the turn of the century, Schoeck consulted decades of American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, The British Journal of Sociology, and other prominent journals–without finding “a single instance of ‘envy,’ ‘jealousy,’ or ‘resentment’ in the subject indexes.” (9) Anyone unconvinced of the reality of envy will find the case argued well by Schoeck. It is remarkable that such an ancient and powerful concept can have disappeared from the moral landscape of educated people. It is even more remarkable that a television commercial could bring it back to mind.

[Added Oct. 16, 2007]

Some recent images document the way “envy” is frequently used in a positive, even assertive way, as if to say, “This is something really good. Don’t you wish you had it?”

Advertising as Mythology

From a variety perspectives, different writers have concluded that advertising is the consumer culture’s version of mythology. Such is the theme of Leymore’s book, Hidden Myth:

“No society exists without some form of myth. Once this is realized, it is not very surprising that a society which is based on the economy of mass production and mass consumption will evolve its own myth in the form of the commercial. Like myth it touches upon every facet of life, and as a myth it makes use of the fabulous in its application to the mundane.” (156)

The sociologist Peter Berger, not quick to embrace the structuralist approach of Leymore, defines myth as “a conception of reality that posits the ongoing penetration of the world of everyday experience by sacred forces” (1967, 110). A few hours’ worth of television will show you “sacred forces” at work transforming people and products, working magic, causing cats to sing, rescuing victims from halitosis, body odor, and other fates worth than death–all on commercials which are strong candidates to meet Berger’s definition of myth.

In order to understand why the makers of a commercial would want to evoke hate and envy, we must recall a central function of myths. In his book comparing Piaget and Levi-Strauss, Howard Gardner wrote:

“Myths are designed to deal with problems of human existence which seem insoluble; they embody and express such dilemmas in a coherently structured form, and so serve to render them intelligible. Through their structural similarity to given ‘real world’ situations, myths establish a point of repose or equilibrium at which men can come to grips with the crucial components of the problem, and become aware of the ‘fix’ they are in. Thus, a myth is both intellectually satisfying and socially solidifying.” (148)

A sharp summary of this view comes from Jonathan Price, at the end of his anecdotal study, The Best Thing on TV: Commercials:

“Myths [and commercials] also help us express and control in a safe way, impulses that could potentially tear our society apart…. They arouse our deepest impulses toward sex, violence, and faith, and they express these instincts while at the same time keeping that expression aesthetic, rather than physical, thus saving our society from the potential chaos of orgies and massacre.” (158, 162)

To see evidence for this kind of mythology at work, turn to the magazine version of this television commercial–as it appeared, say, in the May, 1988, Elle. On the left, a full-page, color picture of the model’s gorgeous face bears the bold headline: “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” Facing her is a page containing a block of text and a small black and white photo of the same model looking like a wet puppy: her hair stringy, disheveled, and (especially) dull, half her face pleading, the other half pained and shadowed. The viewer of this ad does not need to ponder an envious attack upon the gorgeous model; the attack has been accomplished for you in the small picture. It is a ritual, surrogate defacement. One is given the satisfaction of seeing her defaced, without having to feel the full power of envy, violence, and guilt. The print version of the commercial supports the possibility that the ad was designed to arouse and appease the specific emotion of destructive envy. From this perspective, the commercial acts as a surrogate myth for viewers whose cultural myths are not adequate to help them identify and deal with the socially destructive emotion of envy.

Beauty, Hate, and Religion

Now that I have reached a neat conclusion, I have to complicate things by emphasizing that envy is only part of the story, and there is another way of looking at “myth.” In The Rhetoric of Religion, Kenneth Burke analyzed the opening chapters of Genesis as the sequential spinning-out of a series of relationships that were essentially simultaneous–a horizontal version of a vertical story, so to speak. Burke wrote, “‘Myth’ is characteristically a terminology of quasi-narrative terms for the expression of relationships that are not intrinsically narrative, but ‘circular’, or ‘tautological.’” (1970, 258) The context in which I want to view “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” is mythic in Burke’s technical sense. It is a linear, narrative version of what I believe to be a set of cognitive and emotional structures inherent in the kind of advertising we have been discussing.

I am proposing a mAP Test, That locates beauty, advertising and hatred in a relationship to one another. Hate, on this map, can be reached from several directions. The fullest route comes through envy, after passing through the despair caused by believing in media images that offer inadequate means for attaining the ideals they depict. Beauty–with highlights in its conditioned hair–sits among those unattainable ideal images. (See Figure 1). After finding out ten thousand times that the product does not provide the psychological reward implied in the commercial, why should one not hate the teasing, unattainable image of the beautiful model who makes the promises?

If we hate her, it may not be for being intrinsically beautiful in her own right, but because she is part of a conspiracy–a conspiracy, among other things, to appropriate our idea of what is beautiful, along with other ideals, values, and longings–and tell us that only by consuming products can we attain them. We may hate her because, being “beautiful,” she reminds us of all the values that we–as good viewers, bombarded by yearnings, yet left with no instructions but to consume–are cut off from. We may hate her not for being a sexual tease, but for being part of a system that teases and frustrates our need for valued states of being–such as family togetherness, community, self-confidence–and beauty.

There may, then, be reasons to hate her–”her” being the image in the commercial. Hate, however, is but one node in a web of reactions–and a particularly difficult place to settle. You might be able to sustain hatred if you had a specific object: something, someone to become the hated center of your life, the great counter-motivating force. But less-focussed hatred is nearly impossible to sustain; it leads past the beautiful models and their beautiful products to a soul-wearying exhaustion–fatigue–inertia. No doubt people arrive at apathy through other routes; but this pathway will suffice: from impossible ideals, through disillusion and envy to the exhaustion that lies on the other side of a wearying and impotent hatred.

Because products do not provide the kind of psychic payoff promised by the imagery of advertising, we are left to doubt whether anything can. If we follow this doubt, we wind up contemplating the state of mind in which a black hole surrounds almost every product like a ghostly negative of its radiance–the black hole of failed promise.

And into this black hole, dug by advertising’s exploitation of so many ideal images, steps any religion that promises to cut through the cycle of idolatry and connect us with the one great ideal that transcends all others: God, immortality, cosmic consciousness, enlightenment, the spirit world, the deep self, the light, or whatever name It has. In using techniques that are fundamentally religious, advertising inadvertently advertises religion.

Conrad (1982, 117), Jhally (1987, 197, 203), Williamson (1978, 12) and others have plainly labelled advertising a form of religion. Jhally cites a marvelous passage from drama critic Martin Esslin:

“The TV commercial, exactly as the oldest known types of theater, is essentially a religious form of drama which shows us human beings as living in a world controlled by a multitude of powerful forces that shape our lives…. The moral universe…is dominated by a sheer numberless pantheon of numberless forces, which literally reside in every article of use or consumption, in every institution of daily life. If the winds and waters, the trees and brooks of ancient Greece were inhabited by a vast host of nymphs, dryads, satyrs, and other local and specific deities, so is the universe of the TV commercial. The polytheism that confronts us here is thus a fairly primitive one, closely akin to animistic and fetishistic beliefs…We may not be conscious of it, but this is the religion by which most of us actually live, whatever our more consciously and explicitly held beliefs and religious persuasions may be. This is the actual religion that is being absorbed by our children almost from the day of their birth.” (Esslin, 1976, 271)

If you consider the resemblance between advertising and religion, this paper’s use of traditionally religious moral terminology–such as envy and despair–will appear less arbitrary. Considered in terms of religion, advertising encourages people to believe that the most vivid and appealing ideals of our culture can be easily attained, if you just find the right product–or, by extension, the right savior, philosophy, church, guru, cult–or even drug. (I first made the connection between advertising and drug psychology before a U. S. Senate subcommittee in 1971.)

That is a disturbing possibility; but another possibility is even more disturbing. Years ago, Hayakawa pointed out how “poetic language is used so constantly and relentlessly for the purposes of salesmanship that it has become almost impossible to say anything with enthusiasm or joy or conviction without running into the danger of sounding as if you were selling something.” (1972, 223) Could we be producing a generation that distrusts ideals altogether, because the most powerful, forceful, convincing presentations of those ideals occur on TV commercials–where the ideals are prostituted in the service of sales? Are we creating a disillusioned generation? A generation that will have difficulty not hating beauty of the kind used to manipulate and disappoint them in advertising? And will they also hate being delicately overpowered by real beauty when they encounter it in the world? After being nibbled to death by little broken promises, will people continue to be able to hope, have faith, set goals, and believe in something beyond themselves?

In view of such questions, is it enough to reach the neutral conclusion–as some recent authors have — that advertising is merely a “modern myth,” serving the same function as the mythology of traditional cultures? (cf. Leymore). That approach fails to reckon with the possibility that a mythological system may be debased, manipulative, life-negative, or one among several competing value-systems. If advertising is a genuine mythological system (which I doubt), it is surely a myth that has failed in its primary responsibility to give personal identity, community, and spiritual meaning to those it reaches.

The Broken Connection

Figure 1 depicts the thesis of this paper as a network that pinpoints just how I understand the line, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” to make sense in the context of advertising’s use of idealized images of values people desire.

http://www.longleaf.net/ggrow/Hate/HateFig1.gif

This figure is based on larger conviction that human experience has structures that are shared everywhere–in this case, structures deriving from the mind’s inherent idealizing tendency–or, on a more subtle level, the act of categorization that underlies language.Throughout this paper, I have been implicitly arguing from the conviction that the human imagination and human emotions have a high degree of structure, and that structure underlies everything we experience. This approach stands in sharp contrast to the post-modern belief that human experience is local and consists of an opaque surface that prohibits us from finding such structures.

As you can see, however, I have not been able to pull all the ramifications of even a single line on a single television commercial into a tight focus. If this were a large topic, I would feel bad about reaching such a diffuse conclusion; but the small moments of daily life are, I think, the most complicated to explain.

To summarize: From what appears in advertising today, I conclude that creative, resourceful, insightful, and unscrupulous people constantly try to discover what others value most — then look for some way to hitch their product to that star. There need be no connection whatsoever.

It is precisely this breaking of the connection between values and means that is my real subject. By their very nature, few products can help us attain the ideals that are “visually promised” in so many commercials–ideals such as family togetherness, personal power, self-esteem, sociability, authoritativeness, security, sex appeal, and clear orientation in a confusing world. The promiscuous coupling of so many products with so many ideals promotes a deep confusion. Williamson called the results a kind of surrealism:

“All ads are surreal in a sense: they connect disparate objects in strange formal systems, or place familiar objects in locations with which they have no obvious connection. We are so familiar with perfume bottles haunting desert islands and motor cars growing in fields of buttercups that their surreal qualities go unremarked. (Dali’s ‘Apparition of a Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach’ could be the description of an everyday advertisement.” (1986, 69)

Advertising is a diverse field, of course, and not all commercials exploit ideal images or imply that products will deliver values. But commercials driven by value-laden images which are unrelated to the product may be alienating us from the very values they exploit, confusing us about how to attain those values, laying the groundwork for despair, resentment, and apathy, and even prompting us to turn outside the culture to seek ideals that do not seem corrupted. Perhaps advertising will make Buddhists of us all.

Head-down in the midst of this tangled web hangs hate–hatred of the product that fails to link us to the ideal, hatred of anything that reminds us of the tormentingly unattainable ideal, hatred of ourselves for still yearning for the exhaustingly unattainable ideal, hatred of commercials for exploiting our deepest yearnings, and hatred of those supernormally beautiful people who promise us values but deliver only products.

And yet, at the heart of this hatred lies the remarkable depth and simplicity of human longing–a longing for life, ideals, values, vitality, and love. A longing for connection. For beauty. It is a longing that projects itself optimistically through symbols, images, and idealized concepts, then draws a world together in the spaces between what can be imagined and what is. It is in those spaces–cosmic spaces silently inhabiting our smallest thoughts–that we hear the resonance of “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” And it is in those very spaces that we can create other relations between ourselves and the unattainable images of advertising, media, and culture.

And we can create a relation other than hate. Indeed, our main alternative is to create–to create a context more generous and expansive than the inevitable, controlling simplifications of the images we inherit, and even of the images we make.

For, contrary to the commercial, we are not the haters of unattainable beauty, we are the creators of ideals of beauty, creators of ideals of all kinds. And in us lives the power to translate those ideals into reality. We are not, as the commercial seems to presume, separated from fulfillment by an unbridgeable gap and despairingly dependent on a missing messiah. We are the gap. We are the longing. And we are the bridge.

The real challenge is to look knowingly–even affectionately–at media, advertising, culture, conventions, and all human forms, and reclaim ourselves as participants and co-creators in the world of images that limits us as it sets us free.

Conclusion

In discussing a single line on a single television commercial, I have sought to provide the most fundamental requirement for interpreting meaning: a context that makes sense of it (Douglas, 1970, 37). Unfortunately, there is no procedure for identifying the correct, best, or even a good context by which to bring meaning to a given event. But because the line turns on “hate” and because the commercial uses some of the strategies that have led critics to call advertising a form of religion, perhaps terms from the traditional moral vocabulary have provided an appropriate context for interpreting the commercial. I have considered the commercial a “mythic” way for ritually discharging envy, and I have argued that the neglected universal emotions of despair, envy, and hate are potential byproducts of the cognitive strategies employed in certain types of advertising.

This paper has sought to open up a fleeting, seemingly trivial moment–a single line of a single television commercial–in order to glimpse the intricate symbolic resonances that we share under the guise of ordinary reality.

Bombarded by commercial images that imply that using a certain product will cause them to become as suave and vivacious as the beautiful woman selling it, viewers have good occasion to develop destructively envious feelings toward these idealized and unattainable images. On the television documentary, Quest for Beauty, Nina Blanchard, “the most famous model agent in Hollywood,” discussed the hostility professional models arouse: “There is anger about beauty….I think that beautiful women provoke anger when they walk into a room.” A closer term might be “envy.” If you feel immune from envy, think how satisfying it is when the cover of the National Enquirer shows one of those impossibly gorgeous celebrities caught looking like a drunken pig!

On the simplest level, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” is the model’s plea to be free from the destructive envy of the viewer–the kind of envy that expresses itself in a range from catty remarks to the recent slashing of a model’s face on a New York street. It echoes the plea of every person of beauty, talent, wealth, luck, or distinction–the plea for protection against the “levelling” violence of envy. It may even reflect the viewer’s fear of being envied for becoming more beautiful.

We are now able to ask the central question: Why would an advertisement try to arouse such a difficult emotion in viewers? The first answer to this question takes us into the interpretation of advertising as mythology.

References

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Arlen, Michael J. (1980). Thirty Seconds. New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

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Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas. (1967). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books.

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Diamant, Lincoln (Ed.). (1970). The Anatomy of a Television Commercial. New York: Hastings House.

Douglas, Jack D. (1970). Understanding Everyday Life: Toward the Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.

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Gender Socialization

When children view advertisements, what are the images that they are exposed to?  The majority of the time children see stereotypical representations.  Girls are presented in traditional roles such as playing house and cooking.  Girls are also shown playing with dolls and being concerned with being popular and beautiful.  Girls are also portrayed as being  cooperative and more passive and less aggressive and competitive than boys.   Boys on the other hand are shown seeking power, speed and physical action.   Aggressive behavior is almost exclusively limited to advertisements targeting boys.  Boys are also shown as being more independent than girls.

One needs to look no further than the advertisements during Saturday morning cartoons to find evidence of these stereotypes.  Commercial after commercial shows girls playing with dolls or makeup and boys playing sports, racing cars or battling action figures.  Among the more popular toys for girls are Barbie dolls, Bratz dolls, stuffed pets to care for and make up.  The girls in these advertisements are seldom pictured away from their homes, instead they are contently playing inside in their bedrooms or in their on backyards.  The boys in the advertisements are allowed more freedom to roam the world.  They are more mobile and active.  The popular toys for boys involve more action.  They actively battle each other through play with sports, transformers or Star Wars action figures.  It is important to note that a clear distinction between a doll and an action figure has been created.  Although an action figure would seem to resemble a doll, it has carefully been defined as a toy suitable for a boy to play with.  Because of gender stereotypes, it is unacceptable for boys to play with dolls, but perfectly fine for them to play with action figures.  The emphasis being on action rather than the caring and nurturing associated with dolls.

An episode of the popular television show Friends illustrates the gender stereotype surrounding dolls.  One of the male characters, Ross, had recently become a father.  He was divorced from his wife, who had taken a lesbian lover.  During one of the episodes, Ross’ ex-wife dropped the baby off for him to spend some time with. Much to his dismay his son was hugging a Barbie doll.  The rest of the episode centered around his efforts to interest his son in GI Joe instead of the Barbie doll which is stereotypically associated with girls.  The GI Joe doll is stereotypically associated with boys, because he is an “action figure”.  When confronted by another character that GI Joe is a doll, Ross quickly counters that he isn’t a doll he is an action figure.  Thus, somehow making him more appropriate for boys.  This example illustrates the stereotypes surrounding dolls.  Girls play with dolls and boys play with action figures.  By calling the doll an action figure it makes is an appropriate boy toy, because of the emphasis on action.  This example also illustrates the influence of parents in reinforcing gender stereotypes.  Apparently Ross’ son was young enough not to be aware of gender differences and was willing to play with anything.  Ross, however, was uncomfortable with his son playing with a Barbie and reverted to gender stereotypes by encouraging the boy to play with an action figure instead.  Another thing that this example shows is that television programs as well as advertising can be influential in perpetuating traditional gender stereotypes.

A study by Browne (1998) provides further evidence of the substantial gender stereotyping that is found in advertisements.  According to Browne,

Boys appeared in greater numbers, assumed more dominant roles, and were more active and aggressive than girls. (p. 12)  In commercials containing both boys and girls, boys were significantly more likely to demonstrate and/or explain the product even when the product used was not sex-typed.  Girls were never shown using products designed for boys (e.g., guns or trucks), and no commercials showed boys using products targeted for girls (p. 6-7).  Gender role reinforcement was observed at the level of body language and facial expression; girls were portrayed as shyer, giggly, unlikely to assert control, and less instrumental (p.12).

A print advertisement for a play castle exemplifies the type of gender stereotyping researchers have found in advertisements.  In the two page advertisement a boy and girl are playing with the pop up castle.  The boy is shown standing inside the castle looking out while the girl is depicted as cowering outside the gate of the castle as if in fear of something unseen.  The boy seems to possess the power as he looks down on the girl.  This advertisement further perpetuates gender stereotypes by containing a picture of a pink castle in the right hand corner of the advertisement.  Apparently, the gray castle is intended for boys and a pink one is available for girls.  The use of color to indicate the appropriateness of a toy for a girl or boy is found in many advertisements.  Another example of this is Leap Pad, a popular learning toy.  The original Leap Pad was blue and green.  However, last Christmas a pink Leap Pad appeared in ads and on the shelves of stores.  Because of gender stereotypes, the pink Leap Pad rather than the blue one was intended for use by girls.

At this point some of you may be saying so what.  What’s the big deal if a toy is blue or pink or if it’s a doll or an action figure?  Isn’t it just advertising trying to sell a product?  The problem is that within these messages of consumption are lessons about gender roles and expectations.   These advertisements specifically target children with a message of what is and isn’t appropriate for boys and girls.  Although these may be “just advertisements” they are also one of the places that children learn about gender roles.

According to Bandura’s social learning theory, children formulate gender role concepts through observations as well as through rewards and punishment (Bandura, 1969).   As the definition of social learning has expanded , the focus has included both imitation of others and expectancies of reinforcement for that imitative behavior (Rotter, 1982). The media have become a focus of study related to social learning, because the most readily available sources of models for children to emulate aside from their parents are movies, books and especially television (Mayes & Valentine, 1979).  Considering the number of hours of television that children watch, their exposure to televised models through programs and advertisements may even be greater than their exposure to their own parents’ behaviors (Bandura, 1969).

It could be argued that children learn all sorts of behaviors from television that either sex could perform.  However, research has indicated that children tend to imitate same-sex models with greater frequency than opposite-sex models (Courtney & Whipple, 1983).   According to Smith (1994), “one argument for this occurrence is that peers and parents are more likely to reward children when they imitate same-sex models.  Children also generally recall more about same-sex models than opposite sex models.  This sex bias is especially true of boys and also especially pronounced when male models behave in sex-stereotyped ways (p.324).

The concern that behaviors observed and internalized from television advertisements may have considerable influence in shaping gender role concepts of young children is reflected in the number of studies in this area (Kolbe & Muehling, 1995; Smith, 1994).  Expectations of sex roles and self-labeling processes have the potential to influence many aspects of a child’s life from social interaction to occupational plans, and even to cognitive functioning (Macklin & Kolbe, 1984).  Basically, children’s social learning from television advertisements result in the advertisements showing children how they should behave.  As has been discussed, the behavior taught by these advertisements to children is stereotypical gender roles and behavior.  This is important because many gender role development theorists believe that despite intervention from influential adults like parents and teachers, children often remain very specific in their judgments about the gender appropriateness of behaviors, occupations and play objects (Katz, 1979; Bettelheim, 1987).  For example, several studies have demonstrated that heavy viewers of television hold more traditional gender-stereotyped notions of proper role behavior than light viewers of television (Signorelli, 1989; Signorelli & Lears, 1991).

In terms of the social learning theory, girls continue to see models of domesticity.  Limitations for girls’ behavior as well as boys’ behavior exist in television commercials.  It is often easy to point out the limitations for girls’ behavior, and this has received a lot of research attention.  However, it must be remembered that boys are also limited in their behavior by gender role stereotypes.  For example, advertisements often show boys as aggressive, physically active, and needing to win rather than nurturing or sharing.

In fact Larson (2001) has found an increase in the occurrence of violence and aggression in the commercials.  According to Larson, more then 34% of the commercials featuring children and targeting young children included aggression (p.9).  He compares his findings to the 12.5% found by Macklin and Kolbe in 1984 and argues that there has been a nearly three-fold increase in less than 15 years (p. 9).

Klinger, Hamilton and Cantrell (2001) have recently studied the relationship between children and violence and/or aggression in toy commercials.  The commercials in their study were rated as demonstrating stereotypic sex-role behavior.  Male-focused commercials and imagined toy play with the boy-toys were rated as more aggressive than were female-focused and neutral commercials, and their respective toys.  Based on their research Klinger, Hamilton and Cantrell suggest that boys are particular targets of aggressive content in marketing and more desensitized to aggressive content than are girls.  According to Deborah Tannen (1990), aggressive behavior is stereotypically associated with males.  Therefore, by depicting aggressive boys but not girls these advertisements are reinforcing gender stereotypes.  Klinger, Hamilton and Cantrell cautioned that since children’s programming is saturated with toy commercials, young viewers are at best reinforced by stereotypic sex-role behavior, and at worst, inundated with violent content.

Children do not acknowledge a difference in gender roles and gender appropriateness of toys until they understand the concept of gender constancy.  Gender constancy means that the child is aware that he or she will always be male or female regardless of superficial changes such as haircuts or clothing (Smith, p.325).  The development of this awareness is generally achieved by age seven (Browne, 1998).   Once children have reached the cognitive stage of gender constancy, they become more attentive to same sex models and they are more willing to model the character’s behaviors.  Prior of gender constancy, children do not differentiate the sexes and are more willing to model behavior regardless of the models sex.

Past studies suggest that children as young as four years of age are likely to choose gender-typed toys when they have seen them modeled on television by same-sex children (Ruble, Balaban, and Cooper, 1981).  Hence, most children tend to accept sex stereotypes, identify with the stereotypical role of their gender, and punish other children, especially boys, who exhibit cross-gender behaviors and traits.  This punishment of other children can be especially harsh.  If a boy prefers “girl toys” or exhibits girl behaviors or traits such as being kind and caring, he can expect to be teased and called a sissy or gay.  Girls who prefer to play sports, be active and play with “boy toys” are often times labeled as tom boys or as being butch.  Being labeled as a tom boy may or may not lead to punishment by other children.  When I joined my daughter for lunch at school one day, I noticed that she sat with the boys while most of the girls in the class sat at another table.  The boys told me that my daughter was a tom boy because she liked boy things.  They accepted her as “one of the boys.”   As I have experienced with my daughter, six and seven-year old children are able to identify gender behaviors and traits and quickly label those children who exhibit cross-gender behaviors and traits. As a young child, my daughter didn’t differentiate the sexes, was willing to model behavior regardless of the models sex and developed a preference for “boy toys” and more active play.  As she has begun to understand the concept of gender constancy, she is able to identify gender roles and acknowledge her “deviance” from what is considered gender appropriate by accepting the label of tom boy.

However, research by Kolbe and Muehling (1995) indicates that the evaluation of gender appropriateness can be altered through non-stereotypical advertisements.  They found that, boys who viewed ads with a female actor were more likely to indicate that the toy was appropriate for both genders than boys who saw male actor only ads.  The boys who saw the male actor ads said that the advertised toy would be preferred by boys only.  Girls who say the female actor ads also indicated that the toy was less appropriate for boys only.

This finding is significant because it indicates that males may not respond negatively to female models in advertisements.  Nontraditional presentations appear to have the capability of altering the gender-appropriateness classifications of an advertised product.  Kolbe and Muehling argue that this finding is important from a social influence perspective, because boys who saw counter-stereotyped ads were more likely to indicate that the toy was for both genders than were stereotyped ad treatment males.  Overall, their study suggests that some changes in gender appropriateness are possible, but are limited by the already strongly held beliefs by children about gender and the lack of counter stereotypical advertisements presented on television.

Based on the research, it would seem that gender role portrayals in advertisements continue to be stereotypical.   Although there are more representations of girls in advertisements creating more equity in comparison to boys, these portrayals continue to be largely stereotypical for both the girls and boys.  This is disturbing because, these advertisements have the potential to reinforce for children conventional sex-role definitions, meaning that children may come to believe life is supposed to be like it is portrayed in commercials (Ivy & Backlund, 1994,p.116).  Advertising may also influence how children develop an identity for themselves, relative to their own sex and gender, and how they come to expect certain behavior from men and women (Macklin & Kolbe, 1984).  Another disturbing finding is that change in gender portrayals to less stereotypical ones has been slow to occur in advertisements, yet portrayals of violence and aggression have increased.

It should be kept in mind, that although it has been shown that gender portrayals in advertisements tend to be stereotypical, the presence of advertising is not the problem.  As Smith (1994) notes, advertising brings a wealth of information to children at the same time as it financially supports programming aimed at them (p.335).  Advertising is a part of our culture that will not go away.  Advertising needs to adjust its messages concerning gender roles to reflect a non-stereotypical portrayal.  Just as advertising can teach children stereotypical roles and behavior, it can teach them non-stereotypical roles and behavior.  Advertising and the media can be useful in teaching change and discouraging stereotypes.  Although things have changed, they have not changed that much.  Advertising and the media need to reflect the changes that have occurred and possibly encourage more change by depicting non-stereotypical gender portrayals.

Works Cited

Bandura, A. (1969), The role of modeling processes in personality development. In D.M. Gelfand (Ed), Social Learning in Childhood: Readings in theory and application (p185-196), Belmont, CA:Brooks/Cole.

Bettelheim, B. (1987), The importance of play. The Atlantic, 259 (March), 35-46.

Browne, B.A. (1998), Gender stereotypes in advertising on children’s television in the 1990s: a cross-national analysis.  Journal of Advertising, 27 (1), 83-97.

Courtney, A.E.,& Whipple, T.W. (1983), Sex stereotyping in advertising. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

Ivy, D.K & Backland, P. (1994), Exploring GenderSpeak. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc.

Katz, P.A. (1979), The development of female identity. Sex Roles, 5 (February), 155-178.

Klinger, L., Hamilton, J., & Cantrell, P. (2001), Children’s Perceptions of Aggressive and Gender-Specific Content in Toy Commercials. Social Behavior & Personality: An International Journal, 29(1), 11-21.

Kolbe, R.H., & Muehling, D. (1995), Gender roles in children’s advertising. Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising, 17 (1), 49-64.

Larson, M.S. (2001), Interactions, Activities and Gender in Children’s Television Commercials: A Content Analysis. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media,  45 (1), 41- 57.

Macklin, M.C., & Kolbe, R.H. (1984), Sex role stereotyping in children’s advertising: Current and Past Trends. Journal of Advertising, 13(2), 34-42.

Ruble, D.N., Balaban, T., & Cooper, J. (1981), Gender constancy and the effects of sex-typed televised toy commercials. Child Development, 52, 667-673.

Smith, L.J. (1994), Content analysis of gender differences in children’s advertising. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 38 (3), 323-337.

Tannen, D. (1990), “Gender Differences in Topical Coherence: Creating Involvement in Best Friends’ Talk,”  Discourse Processes, Vol. 13, 1990, pp. 73-90.

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There are now a range of academic disciplines which have been indelibly marked by — indeed produced by — the interests and actions of the propagandists. The field of Public Relations research, the discipline of marketing, some aspects of Human Resource Management and Management and Business Studies more generally all bear the mark of propaganda victories by their systemic refusal to face their origins in propaganda. nor have sociology, psychology, and political science dealt with their demons over this. It is an incredible victory for great power that there is no institute for the study of propaganda (in its real meaning) anywhere in the world. Those that remain studying propaganda do so almost entirely from within the authorised framework that this happens largely in war. Let us be clear about this. We do mean that most academics have been ‘persuaded’ and have come to see things in terms conducive to great power. (Miller and Dinan, 2004: 180. Italics in original).

So you think that the Nazi’s wrote the book on propaganda do you? You think we live in a functioning democracy? Well, think again. In this book by sociologists David Miller and William Dinan you will discover the truth about public relations, propaganda, and corporate control over the public mind. And I’ll be honest with you, it is not a pretty truth. Did you know, the Nazi’s learned about brainwashing the masses from British and American public relations experts? Did you know, some of this centuries most successful public relations experts where in bed with the most brutal and infamous dictators and “serial human right’s abusers” of all time? Did you know the term public relations is a drop in replacement for the term propaganda and is considered the solution to the elite’s “problem” with democracy? Did you know, Britain’s PR man Max Clifford openly acknowledges he lies on behalf of his political clients? “I’ve been telling lies on behalf of people, businessmen, politicians and countries for 40 years” he says “…All PROs at all levels lie through their teeth.” A Century of Spin provides a fascinating and well researched look into the world of corporate mind control and corporate spin. Beginning at the turn of the century the authors document, in painstaking detail, propaganda victory after victory as the global mind control experts carefully and successfully crafted a mass mind set suitable and accepting of neoliberal market reforms. By engaging in massive (and expensive) brainwashing campaigns (er, sorry, public relations campaigns) and by socializing the world’s most powerful individuals in secret and highly exclusive private clubs and getaways, the PR masters have made the world safe for autocratic control of labor, resource, and economy.

It may not be a pretty or popular argument, especially amongst those working in the corrupted hallways of PR research, and it might be surprising to people who believe their concentrated corporate media is anything other than an extension of ruling class propaganda and control, but if the well documented and candid look at the world of corporate influence and propaganda is accurate as presented by Miller and Dinan, and if functioning democracy is important to you, then it is certainly worth taking a brave and open minded look at.