User:Demet Adiguzel / ‘I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’ Draft - 2

‘I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’

Abstract

The system is so corrupted that even it raises mothers with complexes and dedicated to ruin their children’s life by dressing them like little prostitutes and entering them to beauty pageants, it does not even realize how abusing it is for a mind that young to capture the power of ‘the gaze’ and what that might mean.
 It might mean that being looked at has the most importance; it is the meaning of the life itself. So they learn the need to be looked at. 
And the hungry corruption feeds itself by millions spent on clothes we don’t need; pours our savings on cosmetic surgeries to look like Angelina Jolie, eye creams that ‘graft’ youth, the ‘ultimate’ mascaras to extend our eyelashes to the stars.
 But how do we know we achieve the beauty by these, how do we know what is beautiful? And why, why can’t we embrace our age with all the wrinkles, gray hair and inability to lose weight quickly? Why aging is so ugly that we need ‘anti-aging’? And what is waiting for us in the future if we keep this way?

Introduction

I don’t know how to say it without sounding feminist. I don’t know how to show it without stating the obvious, the obvious truth that we all got accustomed to. I only know there is something really wrong about this system we live in. And it pisses me off. For thirty years, media have been taken to task for reproducing and reinforcing stereotyped images of women. Yet unfair representations of women in media still prevail worldwide. Sex stereotyping has been so deeply ingrained, even glorified, that the women themselves have become desensitized to their own inferior portrayal. The prospects appear even gloomier as the globalization of media progresses. (Kyung-Ja Lee, 2000, p. 86) It’s been eleven years since these sentences were published. Within these eleven years the world witnessed life-altering events, crises, political games (as always). The word ‘terrorism’ took its common place as a scare tactic, altered our freedom as individuals, called his brother ‘financial crisis’ and built a wonderful global prison to live in. 
My aim is not to speculate about the monetary and political system but to refer to how our everyday lives are shaped by its most efficient tool : the mass media.
 The world is spinning around the transactions with money; selling, buying, consuming. 
Advertising as a medium is dedicated to convince people that they ‘need’ things constantly. In order to succeed in this false appeal, first it makes people believe that they lack something or they are incomplete or flawed. So there are thousands of signs it puts around us to suggest that it can complete what is missing. It surrounds us with the idea that it has the cure for our problems – artificial problems that were put to blind us from the fact that we are being slaved rather than managed. They make inevitable and natural facts like aging look like a defect so that they can suggest that they have the cure for it. Make the whole environment occupied with it so no one can wake up. And I’m guessing without someone on the screen telling us to open our windows to shout out ‘I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!*’ the masses will stay in their living room in front of their TV-sets to sleep the manipulated dream. A dream where being attractive is the most important thing and that it should be achieved by trying everything that they are offering.

Killing Us Softly

The dictation of how to look is even more severe in women’s case. As Jean Kilbourne mentions in her Killing Us Shortly Series, there is a pattern in the images that we are bombarded everyday, which actually is kind of a statement about what it means to be a woman in this culture. In her speech on Advertising’s Image of Women, she claims the ads, as the foundation of the mass media, are everywhere and the primary purpose of the mass media is to sell products. It also sells images, values and concepts of love, sexuality and success.

Ads tell about women how they look and women learn from a very early age that it’s very important to be beautiful and that enormous time, energy and money should be spent to achieve this ideal beauty, and that they should be ashamed and guilty when fail to do so. But failure is inevitable because the ideal beauty is based on absolute flawlessness, which is almost impossible so that it is constructed for ads.
For ads the images of models are changed dramatically, retouchers create women who do not exist in the real world.
They combine features from different images to make up a composite ideal image for ads, a perfect face from four different faces.
Ads say we can look like these made-up images if we try enough – if we buy their products, use their services etc. and the reason we are not thin, beautiful, rich, successful is simply that we are not trying hard enough.
These images of ideal beauty are not real they are artificial, constructed but real women and girls compare themselves to these images every single day.
These images of ideal beauty as much as affect women’s self esteem, also influences how men feel about the real women they are with.
She gives many examples of the messages that ads give : “He said the first thing he noticed was your great personality. He lied.” So the message we learn here is that it is never our personality but always the looks.

Basically women are told they are acceptable only if they are thin, young, white, beautiful and carefully groomed and now even being thin as a concept is not enough so there comes complementary definitions like size 0 and size 00.

Anne Becker’s famous study found a sharp rise in eating disorders among young women in Fiji soon after the introduction of television to the culture. “Girls who said they watched television three or more nights a week in the 1998 survey were 50 percent more likely to describe themselves as ‘too big or fat’ and 30 percent more likely to diet than the girls who watched television less frequently.”

The celebrities that teenagers adore come in the same size with great statements like “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” – Kate Moss
Or “It’s about starvation. Pop stars don’t eat.” - Lady Gaga
While some of them die at the age of 21, weighting 40kg because of eating disorders like the super-model Ana Carolina Reston.

Ads also suggest sexual – as if sex is the only thing in the world and now with food products the commercials are more erotic.
And the Internet changed everything; pornography on the Internet is not just accessible but inescapable. And the language and the images of porn have become mainstream, porn has become cool, edgy.

Star of scores of porn films Lauren Phoenix appear in the American Appeal ads to sell tube socks to teens.
Porn queen Jenna Jameson has launched her own fashion line.
Young celebrities emulate the porn stars eg Miley Cyus performs pole dancing at a music awards ceremony.
So girls are encouraged to look like strippers and porn stars.

A research from American Psychological Association Task Force indicates “Virtually every media form studied provides ample evidence of the sexualization of women, including television, music videos, music lyrics, movies, magazines, sports media, video games, the Internet, and advertising (e.g., Gow, 1996; Grauerholz & King, 1997; Krassas, Blauwkamp, & Wesselink, 2001, 2003; Lin, 1997; Plous & Neptune, 1997; Vincent, 1989;Ward, 1995). Some studies have examined forms of media that are especially popular in with children and adolescents, such as video games and teen-focused magazines.
In study after study, findings have indicated that women more often than men are portrayed in a sexual manner (e.g., dressed in revealing clothing, with bodily postures or facial expressions that imply sexual readiness) and are objectified (e.g., used as a decorative object, or as body parts rather than a whole person). In addition, a narrow (and unrealistic) standard of physical beauty is heavily emphasized. These are the models of femininity presented for young girls to study and emulate.“

As we are bombarded with sexually suggestive images/ messages, children of course receive them as normal. The children and teenagers want to fit in with the norm, they want to resemble with their idols, and they want to be popular which is the key concept. And now to be popular you have to be hot, you have to give sexual energy. It’s essential being sexy, it means being thin for most of the part, dressing in a certain way and having a certain attitude, which of course they take from imitating their idols.

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