binge & purge

Oct. 12/2007 – This week’s readings deal with the cult of domesticity and the naturalization of ideology through advertising. As we see in the Kilbourne reading, which focuses specifically on food advertisements but offers a broader critique of common advertising practices, it is in the interest of advertisers to rationalize and encourage the irrational habits of audiences, “[making] their obsessive and addictive attitudes seem normal and appropriate,”(119). Kilbourne presents a host of examples that express his point effectively, including some that play to primal human emotional impulses such as Hagen Dazs’ “Taste the Passion” campaign. As a consumer in the marketplace, I see these kinds of messages so often that they often slip under my radar. Just this morning I was at my local corner store and saw a merchandise rack covered in an ad for Cadbury chocolate bars. Close-up photographs of Wunderbar, Crunchie, Caramilk, and Crispy Crunch were accompanied by the words, “Why Resist?”. This is another example of advertisers knowingly targeting (and rejecting) the guilty feelings of the presumably overweight consumer, to “normalize and encourage heavy use, even if that might have destructive or even deadly consequences,” (121).

The Goffman reading also dicusses the distortion of consumer minds, in this case the manipulation into perceiving that the purchase of a product depicted in advertising to be glamourous will eventually result in glamour for the buyer. This is a huge bonus for the beauty industry, which has generated billions of dollars by exploiting the physical insecurities of consumers, especially women. The beauty industry is largely responsible for the epidemic of body image problems in our society's young girls, who are raised in an environment that suggests the ‘perfect’ female form is tall, thin, and aesthetically flawless, a convention that has flourished in our body-conscious culture especially over the past 50 years or so. Gone is the female desire to be big, healthy and strong, with wide, fertile, childbearing hips. Magazine covers do not feature powerful, middle-aged women, but instead concern themselves only with the youngest and thinnest models they can find in order to appeal to beauty-conscious youngsters. Because the main readership of fashion and teen magazines are teenage girls, the pattern produced gives even a wary teenaged audience the impression that the way an underwear model looks is ‘normal’ and to look differently is to be flawed or imperfect in some way. I’m genuinely scared at the prospect of raising a daughter in this cultural environment.