The comments on her post show the contempt a significant number of men pour on Mimi for speaking out. But perhaps the fact that General Pants would attract support like this is no surprise, when we look at the company’s long history of promoting women as objects and existing only for male gratification and pleasure, featuring juvenile references to women’s ‘coconuts’, and other blatant sexist referencing.
Mimi’s post caused us at Collective Shout to revist some of our past campaigns against this repeat corporate offender, which we compiled in this Storify:
We share in the Commons. This is a very old term that refers to public spaces inherited by, belonging to and affecting a community – the shared places in which we all live and move, work and play.
But our public spaces are contaminated, the commons mismanaged. No one has exclusive rights to these spaces, but advertisers too often engage in visual and psychological pollution, as if the commons belong exclusively to them.
This pollution happens most frequently in the presentation of women for gratification, consumption and profit. Corporate Social Responsibility, to which most companies now lay claim, is not reflected in images of women topless, having violence done to them, made submissive by fear, on their backs, up for it, adorning, adoring, decorative objects with nothing to offer but their sex. They are presented as passive, vulnerable, headless, short of clothing, as sex aids – and sometimes dead.
