I think by this point we all know I think feminism is absolutely fantastic- I mean, women’s empowerment is human empowerment! And I think we should all celebrate it and praise it to everyone we meet and be super excited and scream it from rooftops and shout it on radio stations and paste it like literally everywhere and just feminism out everything…

But some people take it too far- and you know based on that last statement that it really is too far– by capitalizing on that and using feminism to make themselves money. Female empowerment should not be a gimmick for your company to sell more shampoo or makeup or chocolate or whatever you’re actually advertising.

As much as I like Pantene’s #ShineStrong movement and the videos they have put out for it, I feel it detracts from the message to end all the “feel good and be brave and you and more power to you” with “and then come buy our shampoo and make your hair look gorgeous so all the men in your life can see you powerfully whip your hair.” Excuse me; what?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOjNcZvwjxI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzL-vdQ3ObA

Ditto, Covergirl’s #GirlsCan and Nike Women’s Voices

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ighxU1vYw

I guess Verizon is slightly better for not advertising makeup or shampoo or other make yourself beautiful for the guys products, but still, Verizon isn’t “Inspiring Her Mind” with their phones, so they shouldn’t be advertising feminism as a product they’re selling.

Ditto Always’ #LikeAGirl

Don’t get me wrong, I think all the videos are absolutely fantabulous. I love that Verizon wants more women in STEM fields; that Always wants “‘run like a girl’ to also win the race;” that Pantene wants women to stop apologizing for who they are and for the world to stop double standards and labels that demean women; that Nike wants women to not fear the criticism of their male colleagues; that Covergirl wants to show that women can do anything and everything they want. I just don’t think it should all be in the name of “help us make us money.”

On the other hand, Snickers tried (maybe) to empower women with this commercial, but fell terribly far from the mark. Really? Are you (Snickers) saying men, when normal, could never shout empowering and positive things to women- that men, in their natural state, are actually just degrading catcallers? Well great job, then, Snickers, for demeaning men and women in just one minute.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSO_525Cuzw

At the same time, at least they’re trying. Hardee’s obviously isn’t. It looooves objectifying women. And Axe, too. Axe’s entire campaign for its body spray is that if men wear Axe, they’ll get hundreds of scantily clad women flocking to them from across oceans.

So thank you, companies celebrating feminism, even if you’re doing it in a slightly flawed manner. And companies that treat women like pieces of meat (with breasts), up yours..

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This full-page ad appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this morning  [May 11, 2014].  They’re kidding, right? They lifted this from The Onion, right? They can’t be serious! Who came up with the brilliant idea that a knife holder depicting a person being stabbed in the head, the heart, the stomach and the legs would make a lovely addition to one’s highly stylish kitchen as a way of making it “more interesting?”

And I’m not about to give it a pass because the product is made in oh-so-chic, design-savvy Italia, either.

Are we so inured to violence in the media that it’s okay–or actually effective–to market a product using such a violent image? I guess we are, because the manufacturer’s ricsb.com website features the same knife holder in a slew of designer colors–pink, orange, black, white,  plus gold [sorry, sold out]  and chrome [also sold out], for the low-low price of $159 [reduced from $169]. But wait, there’s more: You can also buy a pen holder depicting the same unfortunate stick man being similarly pierced by sharp-ended writing implements. That one costs only $99.

I get that whoever designed these things probably thought they were whimsical. But he or she was wrong. Call me a fuddy-duddy, but I fail to see the humor.

Somewhere along the line, someone needed to just say no. It’s just awful, and the New York Times Magazine should have used better judgment and refused to run it. But I suppose that, in an era of declining revenue and a much skinnier than ever publication–a full-page ad is a full-page ad. And it did, of course, catch my attention, driving me to write about it and even promote it by including the website address in my post. I can only hope that the whole thing is a hoax, and that my outrage is part of the joke.

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A new ad campaign by Betabrand—a retailer of casual clothing—has a positive message for women: You don’t have to choose between brains and beauty. The new ads feature models who have PhD’s. Following in the footsteps of ad campaigns like Dove’s “Real Beauty,” Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In,” and Aerie’s “#AerieReal,” Betabrand is adding its name to a sadly short list of companies working to counteract the media’s objectification of women.

This video shows how models’ bodies are manipulated for advertising:

And that means that today’s girls are growing up with negative self-images. The rate of eating disorders has continued to increase dramatically since 1950; twenty million women now suffer from a severe eating disorder. We no longer advertise “healthy” as beautiful; we advertise emaciated. This chart shows the declining body mass index of Miss America to the point of being starved—so underweight that their BMIs resemble the impoverished, famished children of Africa.

See that one little outlier dot from a few years ago? The one that’s normal, healthy weight? The commentary after she won was something to the effect of: “Did we just pick a fat Miss America?” No. You picked a healthy Miss America. There’s a difference.

That’s why campaigns like those from Betabrand, Aerie, Leanin, and Dove’s are so important. Betabrand’s attempts to show women—especially young women who are the most vulnerable to the media’s pathetic portrayals of women’s bodies—that there is more to beauty than big hips, big butts, and big breasts—that a big brain is a big deal, too. The messages may not be the most effective, but they’re certainly inspirational.

Aerie’s models are unretouched- completely un-Photoshopped, hoping to show that “the real you is sexy.”

Leanin has partnered with Getty Images to create stock photos showing empowered women- women, a departure from images of the stereotypical mother trying to balance work responsibilities with family obligations. or the woman stuck being paid less than her male counterpart.

Dove paved the way for these new portrayals. Dove’s Real Beauty Campaign sparked a “global conversation about the need for a wider definition of beauty, after the study proved the hypothesis that the definition of beauty had become limiting and unattainable. Among the study’s findings was the statistic that only 2% of women around the world would describe themselves as beautiful. Since 2004, Dove has employed various communications vehicles to challenge beauty stereotypes and invite women to join a discussion about beauty. In 2010, Dove launched an unprecedented effort to make beauty a source of confidence, not anxiety, with the Dove® Movement for Self-Esteem.”[2]

There is one problem, though. No matter how much Betabrand tries to boost self-image by showing brainy and beautiful women, it still pushes thin women. Aerie faces the same issue. The models may be unretouched, may be less emaciated than other models, but they’re not the typical, every-day woman. The push to show women of all cup sizes when shopping for bras, to try to show that all shapes and sizes are beautiful, still feature slender women.Yes, they can keep trying to promote the idea that dress sizes don’t define us, but then they should show women with more realistic dress-sizes, women with wrinkles, women who aren’t as able-bodied or athletic as every model out there, PhD or not. As great an idea as it is, it could use improving. It’s definitely a step in the right direction, though.

You are beautiful.

For more disturbing Photoshop transformations feeding women’s unattainable view of beauty, see here.

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Here’s a riddle: What’s big, bright, and yellow, rides on four wheels, and markets junk food to kids five days a week?

If you guessed a school bus, you’d be right.  That’s because in many states a school bus is no longer just an old-fashioned, box-on-wheels transporting kids from home to school and back again. From one coast to the other, school buses are now rolling billboards.

 Gone are the days when a school bus was just a mode of transportation.  Gone too are the days when Johnny and Sue hopped off the bus and raced into classrooms to learn the basic curriculum of “readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic.”  All that started to change in 1993 when Colorado passed legislation allowing advertising on school buses.

To date, nine states –Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Tennessee—allow advertising on the exterior of school buses.   Today when Jamie and Sophie take their seats on the bus, they become a captive audience for sophisticated, corporate messaging that aims to encourage early-childhood brand-name recognition and budding consumer loyalty.

Eight more states—New York, Rhode Island, California, Washington, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, and Kentucky—hoping to jump on the corporate bandwagon considered, but failed to pass, legislation in 2012 legalizing advertising on buses.

Who sent out the invitation?

So who’s responsible for inviting corporations into our educational system?  It’s easy to lay the blame for commercial creep solely on the corporate world and its quest for ever-younger consumers.  After all, there’s a reason why many of America’s largest corporations have seized the opportunity. McDonald’s, Nestle, Staples, and CVS pharmacy are just a few competing for kids’ attention, both inside and outside the classroom. Small businesses are climbing onboard as well. They’re taking advantage of advertising opportunities on school buses to sell their brand to kids on the bus as well as adults sharing the road with the yellow fleet.

Corporations, however, are not the sole players, nor the most culpable, in the new, competitive world of free-market solutions to funding education.  Taxpayers and elected officials at the local, state, and federal levels share the responsibility—and blame—for the perfect storm that has pushed many cash-strapped school districts into the waiting arms of the corporate world.

The truth is when curriculum, staffing, benefits, and administrative costs outpace funding revenues, when federal and state funding are flat or falling, and the financial and philosophical commitment to public education is on the wane, what’s a cash-strapped school district to do?  When infrastructure–buildings, classrooms, computer and science labs, athletic programs and facilities–is substandard or needs refurbishment, where does the money come from? When property owners, state legislators, and governors declare “no more” to property-tax increases that stagnant wages and fixed incomes cannot possibly keep pace with, where does a school district turn for help?

The corporate world and privatization interests were primed to pounce on a new avenue for marketing to school-age kids. And pounce they did.

 How can school districts say “no”?

In states where advertising, promotion,  and sponsorships are allowed in and around schools, the revenue stream can be significant and hard to resist. In New Jersey, ads are expected to generate an annual $1,000 per bus.  According to Alpha Media, a company selling and managing ads on school buses in Texas and Arizona, districts with two hundred fifty buses could generate $1 million in revenue each year.

In Pennsylvania, where state law prohibits advertising on the exterior of school buses, in September 2012, five districts voted to allow advertising in the interior of their buses.  One district, although limiting advertising to health, safety, wellness, recreational and educational topics, estimates it will still generate $150,000 in revenue from advertising on the inside of the district’s forty-six buses.

 Give marketing interests an inch, and they’ll take a mile

Nothing in the school experience seems to be beyond the pale anymore.  In Newton, Massachusetts, schools are considering selling naming rights to the school buildings themselves.  In Peabody, Massachusetts, district regulations permit business-card-sized ads to be printed on the backs of notes to parents sent home with elementary schoolchildren. (Pretty darn clever.  Why worry about finding minimum-wage workers to hand out promotional flyers? Just use the kids instead.)

In Los Angeles, the largest school district in the country, administrators have agreed to sell the naming rights to cafeterias, football fields, and other extra-curricular teams—with potential revenue of up to $18 million. Four Albuquerque, New Mexico, high schools located on highly trafficked streets now lease out space for electronic billboards.  And how much is that space worth?  A tidy $40,000 annually.

And that’s not all. Corporate advertising has made inroads onto the backs of report cards and back-to-school supply lists (courtesy of Staples, coupons gratis), into interior hallways, on school rooftops, in sports stadiums, and—the most insidious of all—into the curriculum itself.

Disguising ads as learning opportunities

If you want to see just how much kids have been sold out to corporate interests, look no further than to the big daddy of children’s publishing: Scholastic, Inc. (publisher of the Harry Potter series and the largest publisher of children’s books in the world).  Just how deep is the reach and influence of this publishing giant? The publisher has books and educational materials in nine out of ten classrooms in the U.S., and the company has admitted that, of those materials, up to 10% come from corporate sponsors.

Scholastic’s lofty mission, according to their own website, is “to encourage the intellectual and personal growth of children” and to “help inspire a love of literacy.”  Those are laudable goals, indeed.  And Scholastic has some powerful and surprising helpers working with them to meet those benchmarks.  Some of Scholastic’s major corporate partners “helping to inspire literacy” are Nestle, Dreamworks/Paramount, the American Coal Foundation, Sunny Delight, Dairy Queen, and the pharmaceutical manufacturer Schering-Plough.

Working in partnership with Scholastic’s InSchool Marketing division, these helper corporations provide sponsored content that the marketing division then packages and distributes.  These promotional materials are then branded by the Scholastic sales team as “learning opportunities” to improve reading and math skills.

And what are some of those learning opportunities?  Nestle’s “Creativity Power Push” promotes the company’s push-up ice cream.  The “Sunny D Book Spree” encourages classroom parties serving the corn-syrupy and sugar-laden Sunny Delight juice drink. Dreamworks/Paramount uses characters and story lines from their films in teaching and reading materials (including branded worksheets) to promote their films, such as “Megamind.”  And Dairy Queen sponsors “DQ Tycoon,” a video game distributed by the Scholastic Book Club that teaches kids the vital skill of learning to “help Emily manage a local Dairy Queen.”

Surely the most outrageous of these corporate-sponsored programs should be called out for how inappropriate they are in an educational setting.  To that end, I nominate pharmaceutical manufacturer Schering-Plough for a Golden Marble Award for Chutzpah. Believe it or not, Schering-Plough’s Children’s Claritin, in partnership with Scholastic, distributed materials to in-school programs promoting their over-the-counter allergy medication. Who could have imagined when we were kids that you could go to school and learn not just your multiplication tables but what medications your parents should “ask your doctor” about as well?

I also nominate the partnership between Scholastic and the American Coal Foundation for the Bottom-of-the-Heap Award. Together these two produced a free, pro-coal curriculum for fourth graders called “The United States of Energy.”  The so-called facts in the curriculum downplayed the scientifically proven health and environmental impacts of coal-powered energy.  After protests from parents, children’s educational-advocacy organizations, and environmental groups, the curriculum was pulled from distribution in 2011.

Score one victory for objective, non-commercialized education for kids.  But what about all the rest of the messaging garbage kids are seeing on their buses and in their schools everyday?  Can’t we do better than this?

The post Corporate advertising on the school bus and in your kid’s backpack appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I always loved book fairs as a child. My mother served as school librarian for a few years so I had the privilege of helping her set up these magical affairs. And there was something magical about seeing all of those Scholastic boxes filled to the brim with new books. The smell of the paper, the bright colors of all the bookmarks and erasers, the excitement of my peers as we’d scour the racks looking for the next book in a series. (I was a Goosebumps fan myself.) So imagine how disheartened I was to receive a petition from Change.org telling me that Scholastic (the king of the bookfairs) had sold out and was letting corporations write curriculum and lesson plans.

It’s true though. The company I know and loved as a child is now using its position in schools as a middle man for big business. A well paid middle man. Scholastic has a program called InSchool Marketing. It’s exactly as it sounds. A company gives Scholastic money and that company gets face time in lesson plans, educational maps, and worksheets all given freely to teachers. Only it’s not called marketing when it’s given to the teachers. They throw out phrases like “increases reading comprehension” and “improves general awareness”.  It’s appalling.

I don’t know how much Wet Ones paid, but Scholastic did a fantastic job writing up a unit plan for them. As you can see here it includes a free classroom poster, various classroom activities including sing-along songs that mention Wet Ones, a school supply list, and other worksheets brazenly displaying the Wet Ones logo. Their targeted audience? Kindergarten classes learning about germs.

That’s just one of many companies paying top dollar to have access to your kids. The reason why the petition I received got so much attention was a program called the United States of Energy. It included a map that showed what type of energy was used and where. It was quite helpful in listing all the benefits of using coal. Curiously it listed none of the problems of coal, like pollution and the risks to public health. If you haven’t already guessed it was paid for by the American Coal Foundation.  The ACF was terribly proud of the curriculum. It’s been in circulation for 3 years and has reached 62,000 teachers in the classroom and 82,000 teachers online. This time the materials were for 4^th graders.

Those are just two examples. Scholastic has partnered with various corporations including Sunny D, McDonalds, Nintendo, Mint.com, Shell, Bing, even doctor directories. The reasons why this is wrong are numerous. Kids see enough advertisements outside of school, they don’t need to be bombarded with them in class. We trusted Scholastic. They provide books to students; books that are meant to inspire creativity not inspire shopping trips. If you haven’t seen it already, I advise you to check out the petition. Scholastic has agreed to drop the coal sponsored lesson plans but the InSchool program remains. As long as education is for sale in America, free thought isn’t safe.

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