There are reports Victoria’s Secret may be planning to set up shop in Australia.
As if we don’t already have enough companies spruiking their pornified and false idea of empowerment for women?
This guest blog post by Lindsay and Lexie Kite, PhD students at the University of Utah, couldn’t be more timely. The 25-year-old Kite twin sisters 
recently established the website Beauty Redefined to “help people recognize and reject harmful messages about bodies and then redefine beauty for themselves”.
In this piece, they cut through Victoria’s Secret claims to empower women and
increase their confidence. The company, they write, “teaches and normalizes self-objectification and normalized pornography as desirable, self chosen, and empowering.”
In the U.S. and now across the world, a multi-billion-dollar corporation has been fighting a tough battle for female empowerment since 1963, and according to their unmatched commercial success, women appear to be quite literally buying what this franchise is selling. Holding tight to a mission statement that stands first and foremost to “empower women,”
and a slogan stating the brand is one to “Inspire, Empower and Indulge,” the company “helps customers to feel sexy, bold and powerful.” This is being accomplished through the distribution of 400 million catalogs to homes each year, a constant array of television commercials all hours of the day, a CBS primetime show viewed by 100 million, and 1,500 mall storefront displays in the U.S. alone. And to the tune of $5 billion every year, women are buying into the envelope-pushing “empowerment” sold by Victoria’s Secret, the nation’s premiere lingerie retailer.
8 Responses
Victoria’s Secret is the same company than banned a woman from breast feeding in one of their change rooms. Heaven forbid a woman’s breast is used for any other function than titilating men!
Bras are primarily for women, right? Portraying women in lingerie ads as if in whiskey/motorbike ads means you don’t get your target audience! And that’s just bad ad sense. I saw this one other lingerie ad and I’m like are they trying to convince me that I need this product? It seems more like they’re telling guys to date only women who wear these products.
VS have lovely products – but their brand image is just a bit too… demanding? 😀
When I look at those pictures I don’t feel empowered, nor do I feel my confidence increasing. I don’t feel (from their slogan) “sought after” either. I don’t look like those women. Even if I starve myself I will never look like those women. They’re about half my age, for a start… and I’m not tanned, slim, tall, muscular; I don’t have a perfect smile or model hair.
I’m reasonably intelligent, I’m well-read, I am passionate about seeing TRUE empowerment for women and girls, I’m more than capable of deconstructing advertising and seeing the manipulation… and yet I can STILL look at ads like that sometimes and feel completely inadequate because I don’t measure up to the so-called ideal. So what’s the effect on young girls who don’t yet have the maturity or life experience to see the manipulation behind the advertising? Who honestly believe they’re being empowered?
Emily Sue, I feel the same way you described in your post.
Emily Sue and Kimberly,
I’m right there with you and I wrote this post! It’s a tough battle, and that’s why I really want to speak up about VS and other media texts that commodify feminism and feminine bodies simultaneously. It’s a scary trend, and it has profound effects. VS tells us these images are “for women to feel good about themselves and NOT for men to look at.” Most people can quickly disagree with that. But today, women are not only objectified, but through wildly popular campaigns like that of Victoria’s Secret that display normalized porn FOR women, we must now understand our objectification as pleasurable, normal, and self-chosen. Agency and “empowerment” become the very vehicles that regulate us – that get “inside” and reconstruct our ideas of what it is to be desirable and empowered as women. What a giant step backwards in the fight for female equality! That is why these types of messages need to be spread as far and wide as they can. While we cannot stop the harmful ideals perpetuated by profit-driven media, we can critically analyze and discuss them with everyone we know and love – especially those young girls growing up in a world saturated by this stuff. It might be a small step, but it’s a step in the right direction. Thanks for reading and sorry this post was a bit lengthy!!
goddess help Australia. i live in the U.S. and Victoria’s Secret makes me sick beyond words. i really pity you all if VS does come to Australia. you guys have enough problems with objectification as it is… sometimes i wonder who has it worse, Australia or the U.S. the last thing you need VS to exacerbate things.
I have been a VS shopper for a few years as I was delighted to finally discover a retailer whose clothing actually fitted a woman a discernable waist. Garments for the Australian market seem to have fallen prey to “vanity sizing” where apparel is cut large for thickening waistlines and then labelled with a small dress size label.
VS does not sell just lingerie but corporate attire, evening wear, cosmetics and accessories at a reasonable and competitive price. Their market is clearly sexy, sassy and confident women who prefer sleekness to frumpiness.
If anything, the so-called counter-movement against “women’s objectification” is anti-woman. To claim that this allows women to then redefine beauty for themselves” is really about giving a nod to denigrating any woman who dares to be thin or attractive. Because, yeah, chicks like me spend our days snorting cocaine and starving ourselves in our secret lair with the sole intention of undermining the self esteem of women who are lacking in confidence, right? Its all about you. Get over yourselves.
If the frumps wanna be frumpy, fine, I am not planning to stop them. And despite all the so called pressure to be thin, we are the close to being the fattest nation in the world, so clearly there has not been much success by these dark forces conspiring to make women want to be thin.
I refuse to be the victim of the Kites’ projected sexual insecurities and I am not going to take up their cudgels and whine like a pathetic little victim to whoever may care to listen.I will continue to shop at VS and welcome their plans to open a store in Australia. Those who do not like VS apparel can shop elsewhere but they can be damned if they want to stop me shopping at VS.
Oh yes and I am sleeping with your husbands. *eye roll*
Proudly Nullagradiva,
I’m glad you don’t like to take the victim role here. However, I think if you’d read or re-read this tiny blurb of a massive doctoral research project, you’d find that I never villify women here – not ideally beautiful ones and not anyone striving for it. I’m actually fighting FOR women here – to reclaim sexuality, desire, and empowerment for themselves instead of seeing it framed in terms of a male gaze that only serves to disempower them. I don’t think anyone would call me frumpy or anti-woman – probably just the opposite! I think if women like you and I work together, that would be a step in the right direction. I would never blame you for shopping at VS – I became interested in this company because I was a regular shopper there, too! Thanks for reading and have fun shopping!