Advertisements and Feminism

This post is a response to the below video, promoted by Upworthy here. While Upworthy's take on it was pretty obnoxious, the video itself is charming:

Ketchup Bottle Ad
This ad is actually still funny-- though it was probably a lot more true at the time than it is now since opening ketchup bottles has as much to do with force of will as it does with physical strength. The ad would also never appear in modern advertisement, and this is a testament to the cultural changes wrought by second wave feminism. A modern counterpart to the ad might be the "strong enough for a man, but made for a woman" deodorant campaign-- once again they are playing off the fact that men are generally stronger and bigger (and consequently stinkier) than women. Of course, the fun part is that the deodorant campaign's trick plays into the "ra ra" of feminism. Appeals to feminism are not at all uncommon in modern advertising. I'm sure plenty will gripe that it's a cartoonish kind of feminism, to which I say if you're going to complain that media is obnoxiously cartoonish, then you're consuming the wrong media. Vote with your feet.

Sexualization and Objectification
Regarding the sexualization and objectification of women-- this is true and this is long-standing and this is near and dear to advertising, which seeks to seduce. As women make an increasingly significant proportion of the national income (projected to make more than men for my generation), you can also witness the increasing objectification and sexualization of men in the exact same mediums. That trend will undoubtedly continue.

There is a lot of hand-wringing about this trend, seeing it as "making men more effeminate". I think calling it that is missing a lot. This issue touches on a question at the heart of a lot of feminist debate-- how much should equality involve women becoming more like men or men becoming more like women? The other big question of course being "How far is far enough?" I think the end result of feminism will be terribly nuanced, and that in some ways men and women cannot but help to retain distinct identities, and that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with people associating one gender more with some things than others.

To those who feel that objectification itself is inherently masculine, I say that while this is an essentially sexist sentiment, it probably has some merit. You'll note the brief portion where the video discussed the presentation of men as strong, dominant and aggressive-- this is an objectification of character, which may perhaps be an oxymoron, but as the video points out it is certainly an idealization that impacts men's aspirations and expectations, and not necessarily positively.

Mock Rape and Debasement in Fashion Magazines
First of all, its worth noting these are advertisements that are meant to appeal to women. Now you can't take that at face value because they are also self-consciously high art, and the intention is to provoke/confront rather than to please the audience persay. These ads are are playing off feminist  ideals. They aren't going up against them as much as they are forcing the audience to think about sexuality and submission/dominance. To treat these ads as merely anti-feminist propaganda is to give the ads' makers and their audience too little credit-- this is part of the modern conversation about sex relations, and it is excruciatingly self-aware.

Role Reversal
The role-reversal is hilarious and perhaps the most educational part of the video, because it inspires reflection on a couple of interesting points.

First, the pictures (for sake of humor, I'm sure) mostly illustrate fat not-especially-attractive men, which is demeaning in its own right and obviously inverts more than just the subject of objectification's gender. It's an unwitting commentary on the too-close relationship between feminism and what I'll call male slobbism (it could less charitably be described as female chauvinism, though it is by no means specific to women).
 
Second, with the more attractive men playing the role of women, I was struck by how closely they mirrored many fashion ads for men's clothing and accessories (Ambercrombie comes to mind). This comes back to the point that equality in advertising seems to be following right along with growing equality in broader culture, driven of course by the desire to sell things. Advertisements must work within the cultural norms of the time and often, if it is to catch the audience's attention, play off of them. In my humble opinion, the influence of culture on ads and ads on culture constitutes a feedback loop, but a fairly benign one in which the former influence acts as primary driver.

Blackout for SOPA and PIPA

Well, I can't figure out how to blackout this blog, but I will have you know that I stand in solidarity with Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Reddit, Yahoo, Twitter, Ebay, AOL, LinkedIn, Mozilla, a whole host of other websites and a legion of regular citizens against SOPA and PIPA. If you don't know, these are bills in Congress that go up for a vote in the coming days. They are nothing less than an all-out assault against a free and open Internet. I encourage all of you to contact your representatives today about this bill. Wikipedia will help you.

Here is what Wikipedia looked like at the time this post was published.

For a thorough but readable analysis of these two bills, see Reddit's blog.

It wasn't until I tried to contact my Representative that I discovered who my Representative is. Can you guess? It's fucking Nancy Pelosi!UPDATE: SOPA was shelved after the overwhelming response elicited by the blackout protest. PIPA is undergoing revision. A new version of anti-piracy legislation is expected to return to the floor sometime in February. As Wikipedia states in its banner, "we're not done yet".

Change is Happening

This is an exciting time to be a citizen of the world right now, but it's also an abjectly terrifying time. If you, like me, have largely slept the slumber of apathy for most of the last decade, now is the time to awaken. Important things are happening across the world and here at home. This is the most formative moment in world and national history since the fall of Communism in 1989 or the protests of 1967. At stake is no less than the new world order. If you've ever wanted to change the world, now is your window of opportunity to do so. Change is happening faster than I ever thought possible.

In the last year, three Arab countries have overthrown their government to set up democracies. The European Union is skirting the precipice of either economic collapse or essentially making the equivalent leap that the United States made from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. Six Tibetan monks have immolated themselves in protest against brutal Chinese rule. In December Hillary Clinton will be the first Secretary of State to visit Burma in over fifty years. USA-Pakistan relations have nearly completely deteriorated. The USA will be stationing military presence in Australia to counter expanding Chinese ambitions. Mexican protesters are calling for an end to the war on drugs. WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have been brought to their knees. Activity from Anonymous has exploded. Scores of repressive regimes are making concessions like allowing free elections and rolling back censorship. Scores of countries (including some of the same ones liberalizing) stand on the precipice of civil war. Occupy- and Indignants-inspired protests have spread to 951 cities and 82 countries.

In more local news, Congress has been locked in political gridlock for the last year, apparently completely incapable of changing the budget from a course of economic stagnation and extraordinary debt. Occupy Wall Street is fighting for a complete reevaluation of the structure of American democracy. A bill is going through Congress with evidently enthusiastic bipartisan support that will fundamentally change the relationship between government and internet, allowing the government to block entire websites and making it a felony to stream or view copyrighted material --like listening to a song or watching a clip of a TV show on YouTube. Another bill going though Congress seeks to define America as a warzone and thereby authorize the military to arrest American citizens on American soil and hold them captive indefinitely without trial, making it the natural successor to the PATRIOT Act and step two on the road to authoritarianism.

At stake is freedom, justice and the financial future of the world. Become aware. Raise your voice. Take action. Utilize the enormous mobilizing potential of the Internet. Don't forget to think. Terrible things are about to happen. Amazing things are about to happen. The world stands on the tip of a double-edged sword. Don't forget to think, but by all that is holy, participate!

Oh The Humanity: Regarding Foie Gras

I saw this banner on Facebook:

"Humane Foie Gras?

aldf.org

If you have purchased Foie Gras, believing it was humanely raised, we want to hear from you. Contact the Animal Legal Defense Fund."

I figured it merited a reply.
Dear Animal Legal Defense Fund,
I have bought Foie Gras with the knowledge that the poultry I am eating represents some of the most humanely raised meat available for purchase in the United States. I have seen the videos of geese eagerly lining up for their feeding and the idyllic living circumstances of high dollar French foie gras geese. These birds are not suffering. To assert that they are suffering amidst a backdrop of the breathtakingly inhumane treatment of the average American chicken is so absurd as to be motivationally suspect. Does any of your funding come from the poultry industry?

Sincerely,
Max


Dear Mr. Vidrine,
Thank you for your email. I appreciate your interest in animal welfare. I would be very interested in speaking with you further about this issue. Would you be available to speak by phone in the next week, and if so, when would be a good time?

Meanwhile, I will explain briefly Animal Legal Defense Fund’s position on foie gras:

While the video featuring Mr. Bourdain suggests that the conditions in force-fed foie gras farming are humane, it appears that it shows only the early stages of the force-feeding process. Our research has shown that ducks in the mid and late stages suffer serious health consequences as a result of the high-calorie, nutritionally deficient diet they are fed. Aside from the risk of injury to the esophagus from repeated insertion of the feeding tube, ducks develop lameness, bone and skin disorders, respiratory problems, and an inability to groom properly as a result of obesity. Some ducks, unable to walk, attempt to push themselves around their pens with their wings, causing themselves injury. In some cases the excess food leads to aspiration pneumonia. Many ducks develop painful foot infections due to the combination of their increased weight and the wire-mesh flooring of their pens. Finally, the accumulation of fat in the liver interferes with liver function. Many ducks slaughtered for foie gras would otherwise die of liver failure or other conditions brought on by the force-feeding. Based on this information, we do not believe that this production is humane.

You can find more information in an EU study of foie gras production and in a report by the Humane Society of the United States.

Although it is true that some ducks naturally gorge in preparation for migration, the amount of food that is force-fed to ducks in foie gras operations is well beyond what a duck would normally ingest, even while gorging.

Finally, I assure you that Animal Legal Defense Fund does not accept funding from any industry that exploits animals. We are fully in agreement with you that the treatment of chickens in factory farms is unacceptable and inhumane. Addressing those conditions is one of our aims as an organization. The attention we give to foie gras is in no way meant to express an endorsement of other forms of factory farming.

Sincerely,
Michelle Lee


Dear Ms. Lee
After perusing the literature you linked, it seems clear that foie gras production has been subject to considerable rationalization in the last 20-30 years and that it is no longer as uniformly idyllic as my father and Anthony Bourdain would present it.

That said, most of the health consequences you mentioned refer back to the ducks/geese being made extremely fat. I'm afraid I do not find the existence of such health problems troubling. This is because of two things, the first being that fatness is the point of force feeding and the second being that these animals only live in such an extremely fat state for a relatively short period of time before they go to slaughter.

Frankly, as a foodie, being indulged to the brink of death doesn't sound so bad. Furthermore, however rationalized most foie gras production now is, the fact remains that the poultry involved are substantially better off than mainline poultry on factory farms. Also important is the fact that foie gras ducks/geese represent a tiny, delicious minority of all poultry produced and consumed.

Now apart from the humane-ness or inhumane-ness, I dislike foie gras restriction as a political issue. It sits, along with curtailing deer hunting (deer are overpopulating throughout the US without natural predation from wolves), as one of the most misguided routes attempted in the name of animal rights. Don't get me wrong, I understand why it is brought up as an issue: it is both moralist and populist without actually affecting the welfare of poultry in any significant way. It makes activists feel like they are accomplishing something without incurring the wrath of business-conscious conservatives. Imported luxury goods are always an easy political target to raise a rabble with.

Unfortunately, this does nothing to address the very real problem of inhumane living conditions for chickens and other factory-farmed poultry. It wastes political capital on eliminating one of the handful of reasonably ethical segments of the poultry industry. It discourages people like me who eat meat, but would like to see meat not produced in a living poultry hell. It is a slap in the face to gourmets (who, generally speaking, do care about how their food is treated). It discredits animal rights as a movement by giving emphasis to its bleeding heart, little picture, meat-is-murder contingent.

I'm glad your organization receives no money from the poultry industry, but I hope you understand my distaste for foie gras as an animal rights issue. Thank you for bringing me to a better understanding of how foie gras is actually produced.

Regards,
Max Vidrine

Between you and me, I lied about having bought foie gras. I've only eaten it, but now I'm super hungry for some. If only I weren't so poor...

Pitchfork and Allmusic

It all started with Sufjan Stevens.

Sufjan Stevens was at the height of popularity when I was finishing high school, having just released the second album in his fifty states project. All of my hippest friends had him in heavy rotation on their iPods, right up there with Radiohead. The next year, in the dorms, I used iTunes's network to view and listen to the libraries of fellow students. It became apparent that Sufjan was among a group of bands whose popularity could be traced back to heavy promotion by Pitchfork Media. It also became apparent to me that Sufjan Stevens was a sort of fraud.

His music was all surface and no substance. That was notable enough, but my real epiphany was the realization that his music's surface catered to the sensibilities of critics and aspiring pretentious white kids everywhere. The elaborate arrangements, unusual instrumentation and hyper-empathetic vocals broke through bored critics palates and bypassed well-rehearsed cynicism. This would be all well and good if most music critics emphasized songwriting/musicianship over the progression of music's sound. Sometime before they actually wrote a review that sounded like a fourteen-year-old having a wet dream, they would have realized that the songs just weren't that great. It wasn't that Sufjan Stevens was bad, he just wasn't the musical genius he got billed as.

In the last couple of years Sufjan has admitted that the fifty states project was a publicity stunt that he never actually intended to carry out. At the end of last year he released his densest, most use-weird-noises-to-cover-a-lack-of-underlying-talent album ever, to an excellent reception by Pitchfork.

Hype is a pretty natural tendency of art criticism, especially when the critics in question are relatively young (when I was finishing high school the mean age of Pitchfork staffers was in the mid-20's). Some amount of self-policing must exist for an organization to produce a thoughtful body of criticism worthy of respect. The "Pitchfork band" phenomena indicated that shiny new, rapidly rising Pitchfork Media was (and continues to be) the most prominent, most irresponsible perpetrator of music over-hype in the industry.

Sometime during my freshman year, I started reading AllMusic. They gave the Queens of the Stone Age respectful reviews, said nice things about Sufjan without implying that he had any real talent, and panned Radiohead's alleged masterpiece Kid A. That last bit caught my attention and it earned my respect, even though I disagreed with their review right up until they backtracked and conceded to the album's greatness last year. In short, AllMusic embodied the contrary, thoughtful kind of snobbery that I saw in myself.

With the aid of dorm broadband, I was downloading music about as fast as I could keep up with. AllMusic provided comprehensive artist bios, discographies and a wealth of internal hyperlinking (genres, similar bands, bands influenced, etc). It's design was ideal for me to rapidly sift through music and investigate and expand my tastes into unknown territory.

It soon became apparent that I faced a dilemma. If I continued to blindly trust AllMusic's reviewers, my tastes would quickly become beholden to and bounded by the tastes and knowledge of a small group of individuals. I had to decide whether or not to sell my soul to AllMusic.

I mulled the decision over for a couple of weeks, but in the end it was an easy choice. I was fresh off my discovery of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. I was eager to develop a taste for the "classic" bands and albums of rock and roll. I never put much stock in individualism and indeed, I'm irritated by the definition and cultivation of "personal taste". Personal taste should be treated as bias that must be filtered out of any final, "true" assessment. There is such a thing as great art in absolute terms.

I sold my soul to AllMusic. And I never looked back.

On Media

This post is not inspired by the death of Walter Cronkite. In fact, he can be only viewed as the catalyst of this post in the most roundabout of ways. I've been planning on writing this for a long while, and the last person I planned on mentioning was the iconic anchorman of someone else's generation. I am, after all, generationally-minded, and this is a commentary on the media of my generation, not my parents'. However, it would not have been without Walter Cronkite's death that Jon Stewart would be named America's Most Trusted Newscaster, and if that isn't a headline worthy to catalyze this post, I don't know what is.

When I started high school, I started to read the Los Angeles Times. I read the front page and the funnies practically every day for those four years. I'd delve deeper into the paper as time permitted and every week I read the Food section. The Times was one of my great high school loves.

With a firm understanding of political events gleaned from the paper, I started to watch the Daily Show my senior year. It inspired me to pay attention to mainstream TV News when my parents watched it. I finally had an explanation for why public discourse was so stilted and myopic. I realized that the events told in the Times were only half of the story, how events were extruded through televisions into people's brains was an incredibly important component to understanding public opinion. You see, most people's only source of news comes from the major TV News networks.

Never mind the "rich people control the world through media" bullshit, TV News is just not very informative. I never really watched it because it was boring. It took five or ten minutes for the TV to tell me what I could have gleaned in thirty seconds from skimming a news article. During "breaking news", a similar quantity of information is conveyed over the course of a few hours. Worst of all, the feedback between giving the people what they want and people wanting what they know produces what's known as the news cycle. And of course like a sorority house, all the networks' cycles sync up so that every channel provides a practically identical set of stories.

This willingness to follow results in a hulking mass of media might that answers to the whims of chance or whoever is smart enough to lead it around, and this kind of media tends to amplify the public's natural fickleness and retard their critical thinking. The truth is that mainstream media does not appreciably help the left nor the right. Rather, it changes the rules by which they play. If a trumped up scandal can be dropped on one's opponent at the opportune time, such that that is all anybody's talking about on election day, plus ten points for you!

Thus, it came to pass that I blamed the media more than the Bush administration for the invasion of Iraq. I watched coverage of Hurricane Katrina with disgust. I found the overplayed empathy obnoxious. Anderson Cooper should try harder to be an anchorman, not a saint.

When it comes down to it, it's the show that once followed profane puppets that tells it like it is and challenges both the people they report on and the populace they serve to think. It's not surprising that the Daily Show's preeminence is not obvious to everyone. The show's reliance on the world to provide material means that it is inconsistent and there's always plenty of low brow humor, but damn, when John Stewart went on Crossfire, I was starry-eyed with admiration. The man single-handedly had a show cancelled, but it wasn't his power that impressed me, it was his unabashed intellegence and his willingness to call a spade a spade on the rare occasion it's necessary. It was the same qualities that make him a such an amazing interviewer. I won't pretend like all of his interviews are riveting, but at their best they are the most intelligent conversations on television.

On a more somber note, my first media love is dying. The LA Times is smaller every time I go back home. I hear the quality has suffered too. When I left for school, I planned to read the Christian Science Monitor online in lieu of the Times. It's a well-written, relatively unbiased (certainly more neutral than the Times) and most importantly free online newspaper for those of you raising eyebrows at the name. Unfortunately, school was distracting and reading online just wasn't the same. I mean it's great if you want to google current events for something specific, but to get a good, reputable overview is a little trickier. Maybe I'm being picky or maybe the CS Monitor just isn't as good, but I think I'd read the news more if the Los Angeles Times was delivered to my door, skinny or not.

I think what will really happen is that smaller papers will stop printing altogether and having the paper delivered to your doorstep will become a luxury. I don't think the fee vs advertising business model question has been settled, but I and my age bracket certainly prefer advertising, so I hope time will see that win out.

Amateur blogs like this aren't a good source of news, but they're a nice digestion point, and some blogs like the Davis Vanguard are going professional and competing with established newspapers for quality reporting. I think a little turnover will be beneficial to everyone except some mediocre newspapers.

The California Aggie

UC Davis is not a school with a reputation for journalism. It shouldn't be expected to have a stellar student periodical. Yet it is slightly embarrassing that I myself am a better writer than most of the California Aggie's staff. And it's not just me. Guest editorials and letters to the editor consistently outshine the general staff's contributions.

Two Aggie columnists have something interesting to say and are more-or-less capable of articulating it. Michelle Rick works the sassy/clever approach for her column. Though the approach is deeply cliché and sometimes interferes with the actual content of her articles, she otherwise executes it well and, let's face it, it's a medium whose principle objective is to entertain rather than to inform. While I appreciate her talent, her flippancy and posed coolness have earned her one of my friends' undying hatred. Lior Gotesman on the other hand is a solid, if stereotypical, advocate of philosophy. He's hostile to thoughtless consumerism and passionate about the meaning of life. It would put me to sleep if it wasn't interestingly written.

The columnists have improved since last year to the point of consistent mediocrity (except columnist/editor-in-chief Richard Procter who is an excellent writer). There is no low hanging fruit for me to pounce on. The same cannot be said of the Aggie's editorial section.

Zach Han is the worst writer I have ever seen published. He generally chooses topics immediately after they have been beaten to death by mainstream media. He then manages to demonstrate misunderstanding of even TV news' terribly oversimplified explanations of current events. It's as if he took a fractured understanding of a Fox news report, applied some ill-conceived restructuring and then imposed some asinine moral summation he'd heard from a passerby. To add insult to injury, he goes out of his way to use big words and complex sentence structures beyond his apparent reach. The result is a series of syntactical and logical errors that confound the flow of his insipid conclusions. I am appalled by Zach Han's writing on so many levels that just thinking about it makes me see red.

In diametric opposition to Han is the finest Aggie writer I have come across, one James Noonan. There is no minority perspective so persecuted or valuable at a liberal university as the intelligent conservative's and James Noonan is living proof. He writes articulately and fearlessly, exposing hypocrisy and waste in our university and country. Noonan is no partisan hack, though. One of my favorite articles was his caustic assault on Bill O'Reilly.

Unfortunately, Noonan and Procter are in the stark minority at our campus paper. Most Aggie readers pick it up for the Sudoku rather than its bumbling calendar section, comic strips, articles, columns or commentary on world events. I find myself reading it more to mentally shred the writing than for information. Instead, I've taken to scrounging the faculty and staff's weekly periodical, Dateline UC Davis.

In contrast to the Aggie, Dateline UC Davis is interesting, competent, informative, coherently structured and unobtrusively written. It is especially good for finding seminars, guest lectures and Mondavi Center events. It also finds fascinating campus research to report and thoughtfully probes into campus trends and occurrences. By trying for less, Dateline is ultimately more useful to students than the paper the students directly fund.

Dateline is produced by the full-time UC Davis News Service, so its professionalism shouldn't be surprising. I just have trouble legitimizing the university staff having access to higher quality campus information than students. Furthermore, I have trouble understanding why the Aggie can't tap into the student potential that letters to the editor assure me exists.