Tag Archives: Campaign for Real Beauty

Fighting the Pornification of Christmas (and Almost Everything Else)

Lynne Murray says:

Collective Shout is a small group of activists in Australia who got together about a year ago aiming to:

…name, shame and expose corporations, advertisers, marketers and media engaging in practices which are offensive and harmful especially to women and girls, but also to men and boys. Collective Shout is for anyone concerned about the increasing pornification of culture and the way its messages have become entrenched in mainstream society, presenting distorted and dishonest ideas about women and girls, sexuality and relationships.

Collective Shout’s latest target is the pornification of Christmas. Advertising has increasingly tried to grab customers by the lapels and in the last decade or so it has aimed with more and more precision at both stimulating and raising anxiety around sexuality.

Another Australian commenter, Steve Kryger, points out that the MTV videos he sees during workouts at the gym amount to soft core pornography

Sex has been so shamelessly and thoroughly grafted into video clips, that it’s hard to find a clip without highly sexualized imagery.… “It’s just video clips”, I hear you say. But for me, this is just the straw that’s broken the weary camel’s back. I’m sick of turning to the left and to the right and at every turn to be confronted with the same depiction of women – they are sexual playthings, who exist to live out my fantasies and satisfy my desires. Women need to be given far more respect, and men need to stop being manipulated. Our sexuality is far too precious to be treated with such widespread contempt.

As Collective Shout points out, unrealistic body images and videos framing sexuality as a predatory activity do genuine damage. Anyone who watches can be influenced, but the most vulnerable viewers, young girls and boys, absorb the distorted messages with few real world experiences to contradict them. Along with the products, viewers learn to buy into a damaging model of human behavior that guarantees them body anxiety, unrealistic social expectations and, oh yeah, a miserable sex life.

If consumers swallow this distorted presentation of reality without protest, the advertisers will have succeeded in grooming another generation of anxious buyers, stimulated by toxic fantasies that only find release in hapless spending.

It’s been a successful year for Collective Shout, gaining 2,000 supporters and joining forces with other groups to expose, for example, the way Unilever Corporation goes after the “empowering women” market with their Dove “real beauty” campaign and simultaneously goes after the “women as sexy prey” market with their commercials for Lynx, known in the US as Axe, a men’s deodorant. (Body Impolitic has been writing about the Campaign for Real Beauty for many years: a couple of key posts are here and here.

Collective Shout counts among their successes

• “Getting Bonds to withdraw bras for 6-year-old girls
• Getting supermarket chain Woolworths to disassociate itself with a sexist Lynx promotion
• Getting Calvin Klein billboards suggestive of sexual assault removed

We’ve reminded companies of the importance of corporate social responsibility. We have put them on notice that if they do the wrong thing, they will be exposed and boycotted. The bodies of women and girls should not be seen as fodder for companies to exploit for profit. We’ve had great media coverage. Just this month, we’ve appeared in everything from Harper’s Bazaar to the Tumbarumba Times.

Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” was paired with the company’s charitable sponsorship of self-esteem programs through the Girl Scouts,, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, and Girls Inc.

Some people see a a moral dilemma because Unilever’s Dove “healthy self image for girls and women” campaign is contradicted by its Lynx/Axe “hunt those bikini-clad wenches through the jungle” ad campaign. But we live in the real world and charitable sponsorships come and go. Personally, I think the Girl Scouts, etc. should take the money while it’s offered (which is unlikely to be forever, since charitable campaigns are regularly rotated by large corporations) and keep their eyes open.

Speaking of partnerships, I’m encouraged by the way that Collective Shout has joined forces with other organizations such as the Women’s Media Center:

The High Cost of “Normal”: Children’s Height, Intersex, and Other Pressures

Laurie and Debbie say:

Jessa Crispin, well-known “bookslut,” is talking about a book we hadn’t known about: Normal at Any Cost: Tall Girls, Short Boys, and the Attempt to Manipulate Height, by Susan Cohen and Christine Cosgrove. In Crispin’s longer review, she covers not only this title, but Wetlands by Charlotte Roche (a novel) and Bodies by Susie Orbach.

Crispin also references another of her long reviews, this one of Thea Hillman’s Intersex (for Lack of a Better Word), and Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience by Katrina Karzakis.

Lots of books, and we haven’t read them (yet.) Crispin’s reviews alone make interesting points and raise good questions. First, what does children’s height have to do with intersex? Lots, and Crispin sums up the connection in one pithy sentence:

We have always gone to extremes to occupy some sort of physical middle ground.

Oddly, despite the book’s subtitle, Crispin doesn’t discuss how Normal at Any Cost covers the issue of short boys. However, Debbie has been reading Our Daily Meds by Melody Peterson (watch for a review here soon), and Peterson does talk about this issue:

Iowa doctors sometimes referred their young patients to a nonprofit group called the Magic Foundation, which was started by mothers with children with rare growth disorders in 1989. Over the years, the foundation had accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars form the companies selling prescription growth hormone products. In a campaign in the early 1990s, the Magic Foundation, as well as another group, the Human Growth Foundation, had measured the height of children in public schools. The screeners suggested that the shortest children visit their doctors for medical treatment. …

A story published in the foundation’s glossy magazine in 2005 was entitled “Me and My Growth Hormone.” The story began, “I was short. My little sister was taller than me. Kids at school picked on me and called me names.” The tale continued with the child getting growth hormone injections and growing so much his pants got too short. “I’m almost grown now,” the story ended. “I’m in the normal range on the growth chart. Growth hormone is like a miracle drug.”

Here’s Crispin on tall girls:

In the mid-20th century, doctors discovered they could control excessive height in girls medicinally, as opposed to the previous method of breaking and surgically removing sections of the leg bones. … If girls were brought into an accelerated puberty with high doses of hormones, they would stop growing earlier and shave off a few inches from their potential height….

Girls were loaded up with DES, short for diethylstilbestrol — a synthetic estrogen primarily prescribed to pregnant women to help prevent miscarriages. Unfortunately for the pregnant women, and the girls who were too tall, DES had a bevy of side effects: vaginal cancer, breast cancer, sterility, blood clots, increased rates of miscarriage, and depression. (The babies in utero were not spared: Many of the girls developed problems like T-shaped uteri, sterility, and vaginal and cervical cancer.)

We’ve known for decades about DES and pregnant women, and the next-generation girls who died from those treatments to their mothers. We didn’t know until now that the drug had other, less justifiable and equally dire, uses. It isn’t clear from these excerpts if tall girls are still getting hormone therapy, but a quick web search seems to imply that the practice has been so frequently revealed to be dangerous to the girls that we can hope it is no longer widely practiced.

And here’s Crispin on intersex surgeries:

Doctors and parents think they are sparing children embarrassment and pain. But now intersex activists are fighting to create a new protocol, one that waits until the child can participate in “hir” (forgive me — I know the pronoun is a clumsy compromise, but one that comes up a lot when you start reading about gender theory) own treatment.

… surgery that is mostly cosmetic is still performed on infants — despite the fact that it usually requires follow-up surgery, that puberty will alter the appearance of genitalia anyway, and that it can elimination sensation or even make arousal painful means — that this is an issue beyond functionality or health alone.

“The debates over when to perform surgery and how best to decide gender assignment obscures the fact that in trying to make infants with intersex diagnoses ‘normal’ boys and girls, physicians and parents are necessarily drawing on cultural ideas about what constitutes male and female.” That includes assigning sex by guessing future sexual orientation in the hopes of avoiding any homosexuality.

The pressures on us as individuals, and especially as parents, to do what ever we can to move toward “normality,” (always a slippery concept and most frequently a divisive and nasty one) are enormous. Some of the most tragic mistakes are made “for the sake of the children.” Every parent wants their children to be healthy, happy, and successful: it’s incredibly easy to transfer this protective motivation into dubious or inappropriate choices. The pharmaceutical companies, the doctors, the media, and often our families and friends are arrayed on the side of this middle ground. Holding our own, accepting ourselves as we are and our children as they are born, dividing medical necessity from cosmetic panic, embracing variety: these things are difficult.

Crispin buries one clue to what makes them so difficult in her comments on Orbach’s Bodies:

One wishes she offered an action plan for women on how to navigate such a toxic environment with confidence. She has been writing about this issue for years, publishing her monumental book Fat Is a Feminist Issue in 1978 — surely she has some tips by now.

This is a terrifying statement. In Fat Is a Feminist Issue more than 30 years ago, Orbach laid out exactly such an action plan. She was one of the first to do so, she has hardly been the last. We can find these action plans in Our Bodies, Ourselves and all the spin-off books. We can find them in almost any size acceptance book, or blog (including this one). We can find them wherever feminists gather, wherever feminists write, wherever feminists talk. Our voices aren’t as strong as the “normality” crowd, and we don’t have as much money–but we still have the power to move even the multibillion-dollar beauty industry, as in Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which is not only popular but has many imitators.

Crispin herself makes one of the key points: “If we want to raise happy, healthy daughters, it would seem we have to start with ourselves.” That the well-read careful thinker Crispin knows so much about this issue and is still looking for such roadmaps tells us not how hard they are to find, but how hard they are to remember and hang onto.

Thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty for the pointer.