Long time no typing. I've written a couple of bits and hope to stick them up here in the next few days, I squirrelled them away but putting it mildly it's about time I posted again.
This post is about internt advertisements. They're on pretty much every webpage. Generally they're telling me to lose weight or how to whiten my teeth "A Mom from Manchester discovered this one free tip!" I recently came across this one you can see on your left, fingers crossed..
Apart from the general abhorrent sexism of 'creating your perfect woman' relying on only breasts, lips and back side, I couldn't fathom where this link could possibly take you.
Yeah, I should have guessed- Evony.
For those of you who are blissfully unaware of Evony, it's an online role playing game where you have to conquer a medieval empire, I think. Not really my thing. As far as I can tell these games are ten a penny, I keep seeing adverts for one called 'The West' at the moment. Perhaps predicting that their game wasn't unique enough to keep anyone interested, they began using increasingly sexualised images to promote it, to the point where it was impossible to tell what the game even was.
Here's a brief history of the offending advertisements here.
As you can see, they began with a knight, then promises of a queen to save and "Discreet Play" promises began appearing. There are is no queen, no boobs and no faux lesbians on this game (I know, I was completely taken in and wasted two weeks of my life looking for boobs.. Not).
To be honest, as far as I can tell, the only reason you would need discreet play on Evony is so no one else sees you on it and thinks "The game with the boob adverts? Loser".
I find the Evony adverts stupid and offensive to men as well as women. The objectification of women is something that in our culture is seemingly inescapable, but the assmuption that men who would previously not be inclined to play an online RPG would be tempted by boobs is rather.. well. A sweeping generalisation to say the least. If anything, signing up and beginning to play a boring game seems like a lot of effort when you can simply flick open 'The Sun' on page 3..
There's another example of a banner advert that made me think twice on the right at the top. I hope. These ones are fairly standard, and I see them a lot on my travels across the land of interwebs. However this one got me thinking. Where do I recognise the "fat" photo from?
Oh yeah.
Dove's Real Beauty campaign. Guess that just shows that no matter how 'progressive' companies try to be with inclusive advertisements (how bad must it be when we consider adverts with 'imperfect' people progressive?!), there are always those who seek to profit from the insecurities of others.
I've also heard stories in which when woman changes her relationship status on Facebook she is bombarded with adverts for weight loss products that weren't there before, with titles such as "Time is running out- get slim for the big day!".
Kind of sickening really.
(Side note: I always get banner adverts about breast enlargements on Facebook- I wonder if my bra size was included as part of my basic information would those adverts disappear? Hm).
In a culture where negative messages about our body are everywhere, we need to keep our eyes open, our minds sharp and our bullshit sensors alert. People get rich off of our self hate, and it makes me want to put some kind of Lord of the Rings style adventuring team together to sort it out.
If we can shake off the effects of harmful advertising and love who we are, it'll make it a lot easier to the next generation of even more advertising saturated human beings to do it too.
Stop the put downs, end their power.
