Have come across some great blog posts on the stuff that matters here at MTR and I thought you should see them too. Opt 4 has perfectly captured the way objectification of women and girls is harful to them. And there’s some great action points at the end!
You’re flipping through your favorite magazine, newspaper, or just general rag that happens to be around. You’re focusing on 1-2 things per page, and if you asked most people they wouldn’t know half of what they saw while they were flipping the pages. You noticed a phone number here, a dress someone was wearing there, an interesting 100 word article that you skimmed, but nothing truly significant…and you put the mag down and (if you’re like most of us, like the majority of the people int he world) you’ll pick up another one and do something very similar.
What you don’t realize is that though you thought you were just flipping, your mind has allowed you to think that through the use of many many filters. If you consciously knew everything you saw, you’d go into brain overload.
SCARY PART – Your brain is imprinted with every single thing that crosses your eyes. It’s imprinted ont he main central control unit, or the CPU of your brain, the part of your brain that is in complete control of your thinking, your emotions, and how you live your life – your subconscious.
So in your 10 minutes of flipping, your brain was imprinted with every picture you saw.
Now, a lot of research has been done (by marketing and advertising agencies…this is no coincidence) as to what will catch your eye, what colors will entice and shock you, and what images and shapes will cause your eye to imprint onto your subconscious. The breadth of research is phenomenal…and it’s where a lot of our optical illusions come from. So everything that crosses your eyes’ path, is immediately imprinted on your main central influence section of your brain.
To begin this series we’ll start with Print media consumption.
So what are we looking at on a daily basis…here’s a group of print ads:
This blog has spoken about the problems of print media for years:
Can you believe these pictures?
Go here for more of these kinds of ads.
These are a very very very small example of ads that are seen throughout the fashion magazine, glamour magazines, and women magazine industries. Ads depicting women in brutal, abusive, object-like ways are churned out by the millions.
Most magazines are on average 60% advertising. Many of the fashion magazines ramp it up to 80-90% advertising if you add the captions that tell you the price and make of the things the models are wearing.
So let’s quickly do the numbers and see how far-reaching these images can be – Each magazine has about 800,000 subscribers (this is a very low number). There are 7 ads in each of our hypothetical magazines (the pictures above), that means these images were imprinted on 800,000 people. in a year, these people have each been imprinted with 84 images….that means 800,000 people have been accustomed and trained that images of violence against women are merely advertising and entertainment.
Now add this 800,000 to 10 different magazines for a total of 8,000,000 people! That is a country. That is a large cross-section of our Untied States. The sad part is that this is a low number.
BUT….
With what we know of brain imprinting we know that these images were imprinted on the subconscious and then created into a thought and opinion. A woman will see this as a representative of herself and her self-worth. A man will see this as a Representative of women in general and is actively learning how to treat “her” through these images. When we see 1 million images a day and 1/2 of them depict violence against women and gender inequality – we have a very heavy imprinting on our brain to think 1 view and idea of women.
When we put all of the ads together we see only 1 thing:
Woman are to be treated in violent ways.
Women are happy to be treated in violent ways….creating the idea of accepted sexual assault. This website explains this idea wonderfully.
Men are superior to women.
When 1 gender is seen to be superior to another gender, the superior gender will react in violence towards that lesser gender. This has been seen in racism, ageism, and sexism!
Add another aspect to this: Remember what I said above: “A woman will see this as a representative of herself and her self-worth.” Not only are men seeing that women should be treated with violence and that they as men are superior, but women are being taught they deserve this violence and they are less than a man. When a group of people are taught to see themselves as less than another group – the downtrodden group accepts the violence that is put on them as deserved and “normal”.
By allowing our brains to consume these images and by allowing these images to exist, we are promoting and imprinting on our brains – inequality towards women and violence towards women.
opt 4 writing letters to every advertising agency and magazine to end this violent campaign against women.
Opt 4 eliminating this kind of consumption from our society.
Opt 4 ending the consumption of disrespectful print media
As published on 
3 Responses
Yes that is how propaganda works and malestream media is the central tool of the Male Supremacist System because it constantly perpetuates the message man is default human and everything we women view/see/hear is through men’s eyes and their definition of how the world operates. Included in men’s definition is their misogynistic version of ‘what women look like/behave/act’ and whilst not all men completely accept 100% everything malestream media tells them – nearly all men accept without question their pseudo right to dominate and control women.
Dehumanising a group is one of the easiest methods dominators can enact to ensure the oppressed group accepts their ‘dehumanised socio-economic situation. And that is what men and their Male Supremacist System have been doing for centuries and the only difference in our modern 21st world is that technology is now the main tool whereas once it was men’s religion which was the main propaganda tool. Now it is men’s science combined with men’s use of technology which is used to justify male domination over all women.
What women need to do is to resist mens’ propaganda – and question everything men claim. Media literacy is essential if we women are to effectively challenge malestream’s endless propaganda. Understand how patriarchal universal language operates by reading Julia Penelope’s book ‘Speaking Freely: Unlearning The Lies of The Fathers’ Tongues.’
Then you will understand how the website Advertising and Sexual Assault also colludes with Male Supremacist System because it refuses to name the perpetrators. Ask yourselves who or which group are the ones committing sexual assault against women? This website doesn’t say and that is passive language used to hide male accountability and male power. We women can’t begin to challenge Male Supremacist System if we constantly refuse to name the agent instead of saying ‘sexual assault happens.’ This doesn’t mean anything because ‘sexual assault doesn’t just happen’ since that is descriptive and doesn’t name who or what is enacting such violence.
I disagree with this phrase ‘women are to be treated in violent ways.’ This invisibilises the agent because who or what is ‘treating women in violent ways?’ Martians perhaps? Correct terminology is ‘men have right to treat women in violent ways.’ So too this phrase should read ‘Men know women like/are happy to be subjected to male violence.’ Immediately upon reading these sentences the mind takes in who is subjecting women to such violence. It will be a ‘jolt’ to the woman/girl when she reads such a statement but unless we name the problem we can’t begin to challenge it. So all those images of ‘men’s violence against women’ are precisely that – images created with men as the subject and women as the object of men’s hatred and men’s contempt. Even when it is a woman/women creating these images/publishing them in magazines, it is the male view which is being perpetuated.
That is how Male Supremacist propaganda operates to convince women we are indeed sum total of what men claim and their misogynistic, women-hating claims are accepted as women’s reality of the world, not men’s mendacious vicious lies.
Brothers and sisters need to work together in shared, open minded harmony to cut through the fictions and illusions. It’s a group effort to discern the rhetoric and move forward with true heart. There is no excuse for ignorance, but grace affords both genders time and a chance to cut the crap and artfully build a balanced future together. Patience and persistence.
MMD sums it up wonderfully imo!