Women in Ads and Magazines: An RLB Chat

This morning S and I were chatting via gmail, as we are wont to do, and we decided that our conversation about how women are portrayed in magazines would make a pretty stellar blog post. Herein, a glimpse into the minds of the RLB creators…

(Note: Because I copied and pasted the chat, the “me” that appears is me, Elizabeth, and the “Sha” is S, because I have her listed in my email contacts as Sha Na Na Na. Naturally.)

me:  What I really want to do today is write a blog post about how this happened.

Sha: Hmm what do you think of it?

me: When I first read a quote from it I was pretty uppity, but then
1. I realized he was speaking at a Feminism in Media conference hosted by COSMOPOLITAN magazine and
2. He has some valid points. I won’t say, as many have, “at least he’s being honest” because being honest doesn’t equate integrity. If he followed up with “and I think this is a problem and we all need to work together to fix it,” well then sure. But he doesn’t. He’s all Shrug, this is the way the world works, which is the BS part for me.

Sha: I wouldn’t expect somebody in his position to recognize this as a problem

me: Right.

Sha: Because he sells these magazines

me:  mmhm

Sha: And they do sell. And I also agree with him that women’s magazines are much worse

me: See, I don’t know about Much Worse or The Root of the Problem. They are at fault, surely…

Sha: I see them as worse because they manipulate women directly

me: …but my Vogue doesn’t have ads of women in bikinis pouring milk on themselves. Or whatever.

Sha: Hahaha, unless it’s a new beauty treatment.

me: Haha.

Sha: Women’s magazines and men’s magazines are both guilty of objectifying women, totally. They just have different goals.

me: Exactly.

Sha: Women’s magazines want women to feel like shit so they buy stuff, and men’s magazines want to sell more magazines. And also stuff.

me: So they turn women into objects.

Sha: To sell objects

me: Yes.

Sha: So the images of women are presented differently in each. He’s right that the women in men’s magazines are more diverse, which is interesting, because a women’s magazine would have you think that all women look like 100 lb aliens with no pores, and that that’s what men want, lol.

me: Hahaha, right? When most men in fact prefer women who are human, and even (gasp) a little “flawed.” And he’s also generalizing, about women’s magazines. Glamour has taken leaps and bounds in this arena as of late,

Sha: Oh right I’ve heard about that.

me: whereas Cosmo is offensive just by existing.

Sha: Hahaha. The industry is just really fucked

me: Well yes. Women in media, in general, are not well represented.

Sha:  HENCE the blog. lol

me:  Haha huzzah! And I don’t think you get brownie points just for being “honest” about it.

Sha: No, he’s sleazy. But I would expect him to be, I guess? I don’t expect the editor in chief at Cosmo to be a good person either, or hollywood studio executives. They don’t want to upset the status quo, that’s how they make their money

me:  BUT THEY ARE CREATING THE STATUS QUO. Sorry for the shouty caps.

Sha: Hahaha. I think that we create it, by buying it. The collective we. If we stopped buying it they would stop making it that way.

me: True… I think it’s a cycle, because we are in a consumer culture, and we are desensitized. So yes, I agree with your point, but

Sha:  But we can make choices in what we consume. I don’t know if there’s like a male magazine equivalent to Bust Magazine? Is there?

me: I don’t think so. But let’s take Dove, as a for instance.

Sha:  yes

me: Great Real Beauty campaign, right, but so many women say

Sha:  right

me: “That corporation also owns Axe body spray, so they’re hypocrites, so I won’t buy Dove”

Sha:  ah

me: But by not supporting the campaign that’s great, aren’t we sending a message that it isn’t important to us? Unless you’re writing to them saying “I will not buy Dove until you stop making Axe,” then no one knows about your principled protest. And like you said, our dollars matter. So buy Dove, not Axe. Amiright?

Sha: Right, yeah that does make sense.

me: It’s not productive to say All Women’s Magazines are to blame, because they’re not all the same. We have to support the pieces that resonate with us. I subscribe to Glamour, not Cosmo. Bust is a women’s magazine, and it’s amazing.

Sha: It’s like the indie flick that gets great reviews and makes no money

me: Exactly! It’s why box office earnings are so important. Opening weekend, specifically. But I digress.

Sha: The thing about advertising and magazines, because most magazines are mostly about advertising, is that even if it seems good… like the dove campaign, for example, and even if good things come from it, like the dove campaign, we are still just being sold something (soap), but also a feeling…

me: Of course. I say better that feeling of positivity and acceptance than feelings of worthlessness and insignificance.

Sha: …and I’m sure that even though there are well-intentioned people who worked on the Dove campaign along the way, and they were glad to put it out there, it was backed by people who were like, “You know what women seem to want right now? Acceptance. Let’s sell that to them so they will buy this soap.”

me: Which again, in my opinion is a better message, and a result of what women want right now, what we are demanding, which speaks to your point that our dollars do our talking. So ultimately I think if more media responded that way – “this is what women want so let’s give it to them to sell our product” – that’s essentially a good thing! They’re going to try to sell us shit no matter what. That part isn’t going away.

Sha: Haha that’s true.

me: Personally I’d rather have diversity and acceptance selling me things than Rosie Huntington Whitley draped over a fur rug in her panties. (Added after chat: Omg I just said that off the cuff, but look! It’s almost an actual thing.)

Sha: Well we’re both from a demographic like that and plenty of companies use that on us. But not all. Many of them don’t need to use it. Like men’s magazines!

me: Way to bring it full circle! And I suppose my biggest issue there, is that the kind of objectification in men’s magazines is the sort that leads to perpetuating the treatment of women as objects.

Sha: Yep.

me: And in women’s magazines, the objectification makes women feel like they Should be treated as objects. So all around, things need to change, and if it’s one greedy corporation at a time, so be it.

Sha: It’s a gross business. I don’t know what it would take to change it but talking about it is definitely a start.

Elizabeth’s Summary: Talking about it is absolutely a great start. We can see the ripple effect that these conversations are having – there are countless grassroots campaigns that have set out to spark the necessary discourse, in order to change the way women are portrayed in the media and the way we see ourselves in everyday life.

Together, these campaigns have already had a powerful effect on representations of women in commercial media (as evidenced by the ads below, which were unheard of in popular culture before the body image movements of the last several years), but there is still a long way to go. Our voices, our insistence on respect and real representation, cannot be too loud or too prevalent. This is how we will change the story.

On that note, here are some steps in the right direction: 

 

Yes! More women of color! More women who are curvy!

Yes! Not all women are under 25!

Yes! Women’s bodies are strong, healthy sources of support for how we live our lives!

And if this:

Leads to this:

Then let’s demand more of it!

This link is also posted in my summary above, but y’all should check out Beauty Redefined! It was pure coincidence that I stumbled upon these amazing ladies while doing my google search for diverse ads. Show them some love and support. And let’s plaster the world with their amazing post-it notes!

Keeping it Fresh/Boyfriends Doing Makeup

Hey there, Real Living Beauties!

On Friday, RLB discussed MissRepresentation‘s Fresh Face Friday campaign, a call for concerned citizens across the internet to discuss the limited portrayal of female beauty in the media, as well as show off their natural faces, make up free– just to remind everybody what that actually looks like.

Ladies posted photos of themselves, smiling proudly without a stitch makeup, and looking great.  Check them out over at twitter, tagged: #freshface.

Well, that was Friday, and what is easy to feel great about on Friday is not always so on Monday. Enter, a YouTube makeup tag to brighten your Monday: My Boyfriend Does My Makeup.

I think we’re all in agreement that makeup is hard. There is a thing called primer. There is a (scary) thing called lip plumper. One does not come by these skills easily. It takes trial and error. There is eye poking. That is why I could watch this simple formula repeat itself all day: YouTubers post videos of their boyfriends putting on their makeup, with no instruction. The results of this “YouTube tutorial” spinoff are mixed, but consistently satisfying, and frequently cute.

Not all of these are safe for work, language-wise, so, headphones.

Enjoy, beauties! Maybe you’ll pick up some tips. Maybe we’ll even do a series of these, RLB style??! Happy Monday, you can do it!

Fresh Face Fridays

MissRepresentation is at it again! This time, they’re promoting a campaign conceived by one of their Action Reps (we’re like grassroots superheros), a teenager wanting to challenge the face-painting status quo. And I don’t mean butterflies and tigers on kids at the state fair. I mean you and your daily face-painting habits that likely began sometime circa junior high.

In all honesty, when I first saw the campaign, my immediate reaction was “Ha. I’m not doing that.”

So of course, here we are.

Here it is in a nutshell:

Never in my life have I been a Major Makeup girl. Day-to-day I have a very simple, basic routine. But it is my routine, and this little challenge made me realize that I cling to it like plastic wrap at a plastic wrap party. You see, dear reader, I have substantial/genetic/doesn’t matter how I eat or live, dark circles under my eyes. Once, in the seventh grade, a kid asked me if I’d been in a fight. His friend laughed, but I don’t think the kid was being snarky – he sounded genuinely concerned. Or at least that’s what my twelve-year-old self chose to believe.

Enter: Concealer. My constant companion since approximately my fourteenth year on the planet. Never foundation, always concealer, and just for my infernal, perpetually raccoony eyes. Even if my only plans involve the couch and a stack of magazines, I almost always wear concealer. Someone could stop by unexpectedly, and like a boy scout, I am always prepared.

The kicker here is that as a working professional, it feels like even a day without makeup isn’t really an option. My particular eye condition* makes people tell me I look tired, even when I’m not. It makes me look like I have a poor diet, even though I don’t. So going without makeup feels somehow… unprofessional. It’s an unfortunate conundrum.

Thankfully, RLB exists. A platform for me and S and sometimes Lou to celebrate, critique, pontificate, and take the occasional risk – all in the name of True Beauty. So while I am too nervous about challenging the world’s obsession with makeup in my workplace, I will instead post it all over the internets. As S once declared: “Here is a picture of me with no make up. On the internet. All in the name of science.”

The best I could do was ride my bike to work, makeup-free, then sit down at my desk and document this process. All photos are 100% untweaked. No Hipstamatic, no Photoshop, no magic wand enhancing. And at first, the photo above did make me flinch a little. And I questioned moving forward. But this isn’t about me, it’s about all of us, and progress, and confidence, and truth, and beauty! (that one was for you, B)

First step: Apply precious concealer to mask fatigue beliers.
Imagine my surprise when these two images turned out to be… really similar. In my mind, my pre-concealer self is very sloth-like. Apparently my mind likes to embellish. Suspicions point to exaggeration as a common problem among most females: we think we’re too fat, too thin, too pointy, too curvy, too this, too that… when in truth we could all use a refresher on the Goldilocks worldview.

Next step: Apply mascara, a little blush, and some lip balm.
And I’m done!

That’s it for me and everyday makeup. Is it a big difference? Not at all! Am I ready to rock my Fresh Face for an entire Friday at work? Probably not as long as I have the fancy job in the fancy office working among lots of fancy, important people. But thanks to this little exercise, I can now honestly say that I wear makeup at work because I feel the need to present a polished and professional persona** not because I think me without makeup = wildebeest.

Perhaps I’ll aim for Fresh Face Sundays… Not as catchy, but hopefully just as effective in starting conversations about the role of makeup in our daily lives.

So what do you think, RLB readers? What is your relationship to makeup? When did you start wearing it and why? Does your job or school or vocation support you rocking a Fresh Face once in a while, or do you feel it’s a key part of your daily persona? How does it make you feel when you venture out in public, Fresh-Faced? Share your thoughts in the comments, or email us at reallivingbeauty@gmail.com

 
*I almost wrote affliction. Working hard to turn it around, people!
**Yay, alliteration!

A Very Good Place to Start

This morning on my way to work, I walked past two young girls who were dressed for… Clubbing? The beach? Undoubtedly, they were meeting a boy or two (confirmed by later sighting). One girl had Amy Winehouse hair, they both had overly decorated their faces with a ton of makeup, and their agreed upon uniform for the day included microscopic denim shorts, low-cut tank tops, and push-up bras. They couldn’t have been more than 12 or 13 years old.

Witnessing the effort and excess of these two young ladies helped me determine what to write about today. My first thought was “Why? Why are you dressed like that at 8:00 am on a Thursday??” But I know why. And if you’re reading this post, you probably know why, too. I’ve mentioned the MissRepresentation campaign several times on this blog. Starting with recommending their documentary before I’d even seen it. Now they’ve launched a Keep It Real campaign to encourage magazines to reduce or eliminate the practice of photoshopping their images.

The girls I encountered this morning struck me as the most vulnerable age group when it comes to magazine images. Yes, like other grown women I know, sometimes models still make me feel icky about myself. But if the goal is to empower women and shift cultural norms from awarding us for our looks to awarding us for our abilities and accomplishments, then we need to start when the questions start.

What I remember most about the transition from girl to teenage girl are all of the questions. Should I start shaving my legs? How do you put on makeup? Do I want to put on makeup? How important is it for me to “have a boyfriend?” Is it nerdy to still like school? Reading a teen magazine today feels more like a manual than a guide. They contain resounding support for all of the above – makeup, fashion, the pursuit of boys – and not much in the way of real help making choices. A quick glance at today’s Seventeen magazine online features revealed such helpful tips as “Sneaky Ways to Get His Attention,” and “30 Days of Hair Inspiration for School.” Because that’s what school is all about – how you do your hair.

If you look at the photoshopped elements of this image you see the difference between a perfectly lovely girl and a phony, sexualized version of that same girl, making her look more like a plastic Bratz doll than a real human being. With images like this filling the pages of teen magazines, the choices made by the painted girls I encountered this morning are no longer a mystery. It’s painfully clear that they were trying to look like plastic, impossible versions of themselves. The world is telling them it’s what they need to do in order to be seen as beautiful, and that being beautiful is the most important accomplishment a girl can aspire to.

In honor of MissRepresentation’s valiant efforts to conquer that absurd notion, I leave you not in frustration and anger, but in hope and action. A teenage girl named Julia Bluhm has started a petition to Seventeen magazine. She asks them for what sounds like a perfectly reasonable request: commit to one unaltered photo spread a month. Only once a month. Julia and countless girls like her want to see girls in magazines that they can relate to, not girls representing an absurd, impossible, and damaging ideal.

Sign Julia’s petition and spread the word. Girls need more than one answer to their questions. To become confident women, they need to see their potential as girls. So let’s start at the very beginning.