Here are my ideas for opening day in my Violence course:
Show scenes from "Bowling for Columbine" -- whether my students (mainly
from blue collar families) love him or hate him, Michael Moore will get
them thinking and talking.
I also will open with the surprising statistics that violence has been on
a 30-year decline. (Who would know, given what we see on cablenews:
abductions, drive bys, terrorism, pedophiles.) I'll tell them while the
murder rate has declined 20%, news coverage of violent crime has
increased 600%! I'll also ask them to guess which poses more danger in
south central LA: gangs or pollution? This will set them up for a
semester-long exploration of structural violence in America. (Several
students are future cops expecting to learn police academy stuff).
To further emphasize that "crime" (in its traditional interpretation) is
not the problem, at semester's end we're going on a scavenger hunt for
evidence of a structurally violent culture at a local suburban mall --
sings of insensitivity, chauvinism,exclusion, aggression etc. in the
consumer marketplace.
Hope to grab their attention!
Sarah Murray
William Paterson U. of NJ
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andi Stepnick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "Jason Maki" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Karen Loeb" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>;
<[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2005 11:55 AM
Subject: TEACHSOC: Re: Dove soap--Real Beauty
How funny, Karen. Glad it worked out. LOL!
Here's the Times piece...Slate, Salon, Today, etc have all been talking
about the campaigns. But they *are* rare. Still.
Now...how about other first day ideas?
August 17, 2005
For Everyday Products, Ads Using the Everyday Woman
By STUART ELLIOTT
Madison Avenue is increasingly interested in using everyday women in
advertising instead of just waifish supermodels.
The change comes after the Dove line of personal-care products sold by
Unilever introduced what it called a "campaign for real beauty," which
presents women in advertisements as they are rather than as some
believe they ought to be.
If the fad becomes a trend and shows legs, so to speak, it has the
potential to fundamentally change decades of image-making on Madison
Avenue. But that is a big if indeed. There have been many previous
instances of ads that showed so-called real women in place of
professional models, which receded as the allure of glamour again
reared its beautiful head.
This week, Nike is introducing a humorous print and online campaign for
exercise gear, frankly glorifying body parts that until now were almost
never seen in ads, much less celebrated. One ad, which begins
boldly, "My butt is big," features an oversize photograph of the
derrière in question.
Another Nike ad declares, "I have thunder thighs," while a third
asserts: "My shoulders aren't dainty or proportional to my hips. Some
say they are like a man's. I say, leave men out of it."
The Nike ads, by Wieden & Kennedy in Portland, Ore., are arriving days
after the Chicken of the Sea brand of tuna introduced a television
commercial showing a gorgeous young woman being ogled by the men in her
office. She can escape their wolfish ways only in the elevator, which
she enters alone, then breathes a sigh of relief - revealing that she
really has a more-than-ample stomach, which she had been holding in.
The Nike campaign was in the works, executives say, well before the
much-publicized arrival last month of Dove print and outdoor ads
showing six women, none of them models, sizes 4 to 12, smiling in their
underwear. (The first of the Dove "real beauty" ads, showing older,
wrinkled women, started appearing last fall.)
The Chicken of the Sea commercial is adapted from a spot that its
parent, Thai Union Frozen Products, began running in Asia in 2001.
Even so, the arrival of all the ads at the same time suggests that
change may be in the air. "We've gotten tired of airbrushed pictures
none of us can relate to or recognize," said Linda Kaplan Thaler, one
of the most prominent women in advertising, whose agency, the Kaplan
Thaler Group in New York, was not involved in creating any of the
campaigns.
Advertisers are "loosening the reins," said Ms. Kaplan Thaler, who is
chief executive and chief creative officer at her agency, which is
owned by the Publicis Groupe, in recognition of the reality that "women
are the majority of consumers and are buying most of the products."
But those facts have been evident for years. Why the new style of ads
now?
One reason, said Nathan Coyle, senior strategist at Brain Reserve in
New York, a consulting company, is the advent of reality television.
"Your neighbors, everyday people, are the new celebrities," Mr. Coyle
said, which feeds the desire for marketers "to shift from depicting
women who are unattainable to women who are attainable."
Kelly Simmons, president of a brand consulting company in Philadelphia
named Bubble, offered another reason: the aging of the baby-boom
generation - the 76 million Americans born from 1946 to 1964 - who have
long set the pace for marketers and advertising agencies. The first
baby boomers will start turning 60 on Jan. 1.
"There's no question baby boomers feel better about their bodies," Ms.
Simmons said, "and are determined to age beautifully," adding, "It
feels there are real voices of women coming through" in the Dove and
Nike ads. "I applaud the trend."
Nancy Monsarrat, United States director for advertising at Nike in
Beaverton, Ore., said that in addition to the different attitudes about
body image among boomer women, "younger women have a different
perspective" from that of their counterparts a decade or two ago.
"They're more personally independent about who they can and should be,"
Ms. Monsarrat said, which is also reflected in the campaign's approach.
"One of the things we've noticed is if you go to an exercise class, if
you go to a marathon, active women come in a lot of shapes and sizes,"
she added. "This can be a great celebration of that."
Fitness and health are also the focus of the Chicken of the Sea
commercial, said John Signorino, the company's president and chief
executive, in San Diego.
He imported the spot to the United States after consumers - including,
he said, his wife - received overseas versions of it from friends by e-
mail.
"It's an effort to show consumers, in an attention-getting way, that
tuna, and Chicken of the Sea, fit into a healthy lifestyle," Mr.
Signorino said.
The commercial is being shown, or soon will be, on networks like ABC,
CBS, HGTV and Oxygen, he added, and will be circulated through e-mail.
The spot is adapted from the original version created by an agency in
Bangkok named Chaiyo.
Ms. Monsarrat said the Nike campaign, which is also scheduled to appear
on a Web site (www.nikewomen.com), is in keeping with her company's
efforts, dating back more than a decade, to address issues about
women's self-images in a positive way, without stereotypes.
She cited campaigns that carried themes like "This is not a goddess"
and "If you let me play," all of which were intended, she said, to
be "honest in how we communicate with our target consumer."
Nike was not alone in the 1990's in running ads meant to question the
conventional wisdom about images of women in advertising.
In 1997, the Body Shop gained international attention for a campaign
carrying the theme "Love your body," which featured a Rubenesque
plastic doll named Ruby.
The print ads and posters showed the voluptuous, even zaftig, Ruby
reclining on a sofa under this headline: "There are 3 billion women who
don't look like supermodels and only 8 who do."
And since 1997, the Advertising Women of New York club has presented
awards to campaigns that its members deem to be breaking ground by
portraying women in realistic, nonstereotypical ways.
In addition to Nike, winners of such awards have included Adidas, Avon,
Gatorade, John Hancock and Reebok.
The waxing and waning of so-called real women in advertising comes as
marketers and agencies embrace the idea, then revert to traditional
images when they believe it is time for a new direction as consumers
lose interest.
"Advertising sometimes starts trends and sometimes it follows trends,"
Ms. Kaplan Thaler said.
Even if they do not turn up in ads, "real women have always been here,
are here and continue to be here," she added. "I'm always happy to see
advertising that does not dictate a norm none of us can achieve."
Still, said Ms. Simmons of Bubble, who studies sex issues in marketing,
more remains to be done before the stereotypes are banished.
"The emphasis is still on women's bodies" in the new ads, Ms. Simmons
said. "It's not like we're looking at their irises."
Andi
--------------
Every object, every being,
Is a jar of delight.
Be a connoisseur.
~Rumi~
Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our existence into
something beautiful, or debase it into ugliness. It's in our hands.
~Cathy Better~
Things which matter most should never be at the mercy of things which
matter least.
~Johann von Goethe~
Dr. Andi Stepnick
Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology
300-C Wheeler Humanities Building
Belmont University
Nashville TN 37212-3757
Direct Line: (615) 460-6249
Office Manager: (615) 460-5505
Sociology Fax: (615) 460-6997
----- Original Message -----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Wednesday, August 17, 2005 10:53 am
Subject: TEACHSOC: Re: Dove soap--Real Beauty
I heard on the radio this morning that Nike is apparently taking
on a similar
campaign of celebrating women's bodies with odes to large rear-
ends, hips, and
ugly knees? i think they feature women athletes. It's not quite
the same as
Dove and I haven't seen the ads yet, but it sounds promising.
Adair
Quoting Jason Maki <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
> Dear Karen, Andi, and others-
>
> Sorry to throw a wrench in the works of good teaching examples, but
> here's another twist:
>
> Dove soap has a new campaign to feature "real women" in their
ads and
> even has a website to celebrate this:
>
> http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/
>
> Gotta love the URL, too!
>
> I am not a reader (I suppose I would fall into the category of
> "ogler") of fashion magazines, but I imagine Dove is an advertiser.
>
> I think this statement by Dove would provide another good
teaching-
> moment...what statement is Dove making by going against the
grain of
> "normal" advertisers? By commencing the "Campaign for Real Beauty"
> will the social definition of "Real Beauty" change? Dove is staging
> a campaign...is the campaign to change our definition of "real
> beauty" or is the campaign to sell more soap?
>
> Jason
>
>
> On Aug 17, 2005, at 9:28 AM, Karen Loeb wrote:
>
> >
> > Yeah, you know, I think I got the Merchants idea from you, Andi.
> > Oh, when I
> > present the scenario of the high school girl starving herself,
etc.> > I get a
> > little dramatic and thrust a recent fashion magazine picked up
from a
> > doctor's office or (sob!) my daughters, and challenge a (female)
> > student to
> > find a model in it that isn't pencil-thin. Then I ask the student
> > at the end
> > of the class to show us any non-thin models she found, which, of
> > course, she
> > hasn't, but one student a few years ago told the class she didn't
> > bother to
> > look because she knew she wouldn't find any. I don't recommend
> > giving the
> > fashion magazine to the guys--they just end up ogling the scantily
> > clad
> > models--defeats the whole purpose of the exercise.
> >
> > Karen
>
