My high school English teacher–the one who told me feminists could wear white robes–had a bulletin board in her classroom devoted to advertising. Not only did she display the ads, but she led close-reading/seeing discussions on the sexist and racist images and symbols in advertising–and once she clued us in to what we were seeing, we saw it everywhere. What could have been a better lesson for the girls and boys in her classroom than how to read their world along with their literature? Particularly when they learned to read the messages they didn’t even know were there.
We found and collected those images, picked them apart and vanquished them with our discussions, then relegated them to the corner of the room where they belonged.
You were lucky to have such an awesome teacher in high school. I didn’t have that until college.
That is unbelievable. I thought this was going to be about the Tonka Trucks boys thing…but this is frightening. I don’t want my kids seeing something like this. Thanks for the link.
Fark! How can this be allowed to be shown? And what kind of society are we living in when this is believed to be a good image to sell a brand, that people aspire to this?
follow up to kris…
not only do we live in a society that creates ads like this, but we also live in a society where a kiss can cause a movie to have a higher PG rating than violence. we’re okay with sharing violence with our kids, we’re not okay with showing love. how farked up is that?
Here’s scary for you – I teach media courses among other things and I had a group of students do a final project on images of masculinity in advertising and they had an amazing powerpoint presentation about their findings, which included lots of ads, including this exact D and G ad.
One of their conclusions? Wait for it –
They were pleasantly surprised to find that there were no violent images in their sample.
….so after the paramedics revived me with the smelling salts, we had a long diiscussion…
Seriously – and I’m at a very elite institution of overacheivers.
I really was lucky to have this teacher in high school. She taught English (classes like African-American literature and Women’s Literature) and her husband taught Social Studies. It would take a whole other blog, or an entire book, to explain the impact they both made on their students. They were everything to my high school experience.
Mom, that absolutely is scary. But of all the people who would just flip through a magazine and see this without blinking an eye, these students have you to get them to really see it, so that’s the happy ending to a scary story. They’re lucky to have you.
I got goosebumps reading your comments on your HS teachers. I suspect they know how much you think of them, but just in case, you should send a letter, and cc the superintendent. They sound amazing.
Unfortunately, even I’ve been conditioned to be a little turned on by that ad.
I just had an epiphany. All the media, print, tv, satellite, cartoons, books, everything… is competing with the INTERNET, that’s why there is so much FILTH in the mainstream marketing, it’s competing with the INTERNET, where anything goes all the time. There is no stopping it. no one regulates it and anyone has access to it. Our kids generation of what are acceptable expectations of self worth and how to treat others will be shaped partly by sites like LiveLeak and . We worry about “Cyber safety”….the perv in the tween chat room is the LEAST of our concerns. …lets stick our heads further in the sand….what can we do? The CIPA laws? A joke, that’s a bandaid on a gaping wound.