I cannot help but think that the advertising we see literally everywhere in the city is a large factor that, whether subconsciously or not, maintains the general misogynistic attitudes of New York. Lately I have been noticing more and more just how drastically these patriarchal values shine through in our city’s advertising, especially ads having to do with fashion or alcohol..hmm…
These are some pictures I found displaying exactly what is described above. Some can be found in New York City…others have been used in random cities either in the US or in Europe. It’s scary to realize that one of the biggest selling factors of popular commodities today is the objectification of women’s bodies.
So this is one of the first images I found. Pretty straight forward…I’m sure we have all seen ads like these before. Reminds me of some bourbon advertisement that was around in NYC subway trains for awhile. The ad consisted of an image of two females, dressed as if they were out at a bar, laughing and pulling at each others necklaces. The text next to them said “Things Are Getting Interesting.” So basically if you buy some random hot girl and her friend this brand of bourbon the next time your out on the town they’ll feel so great and crazy and drunk that they’ll start making out with each other.
This next Dolce & Gabbana ad I actually found on the blog Feministing.com. I’ll just post for you what Feministing blogger “Jessica” wrote about it:
Dolce & Gabbana “fantasy rape” ad pulled
After protests in Spain, and Italy outright banning the ad, Dolce & Gabbana are pulling a controversial print advertisement that some say glamourizes rape.
NOW President of the National Organization for Women, Kim Gandy, called the ad a “stylized gang rape.” Dolce says the ad was meant to “recall an erotic dream, a sexual game.”
What do you think?
For those of you who know Houston Street, this American Apparel ad was above the Sugar Cafe, a little coffee/pastry shop facing oncoming traffic on a main road that brings drivers back and forth from Manhattan’s West to East side. If you haven’t seen American Apparel’s advertisements before, you should. Go to their website and you’ll experience the quite perturbing quintessential American Apparel style. The photography has basically become soft-core porn and sells clothes on sex appeal, almost always the sex appeal of women. This attribute, now the main feature of AA clothes, has become more prevalent the past few years, in my opinion in order to sell more. If sales are slow, why not amp up the sensuality of your promotions and see what that does? The words “American Apparel” induce more controversial issues than just extreme forms of advertising for me, though.
Excerpt from “Eminem, Misogyny, and the Sounds of Silence,” written by Jackson Katz of The Huffington Post, June 5, 2009.
“No thoughtful person would argue that music lyrics themselves cause men to be violent; that is the sort of simplistic argument which defenders of Eminem and other misogynous rappers and rockers raise and then ridicule whenever anyone mentions the possible ‘real world’ effects of artistic portrayals. But just as it is reductive and problematic to draw a causal link between lyrics and actual behavior, it is similarly nonsensical to deny that the production and reception of art always has a social dimension. Popular art succeeds, at least commercially, precisely because it resonates with a certain audience - for whatever reason - in a given cultural and historical context.”
Even if the lyrics of Eminem and others, often labeled “misogynistic” and “violent”, do not directly cause listeners to follow the actions of the song, popularity of music and writing such as this is popular because of its resonation with certain audiences…If people were against the things rappers like Eminem write about, would they buy and listen to his music?
This is a sort of case-study I found from Temple University’s news website (they surprisingly have many pieces addressing gender relations on the street!). Here, Samantha Krotzer takes a typical catcall, street experience and turns it around. What would happen if a female were to stand on the sidewalk whistling at men?
September 23, 2009 by Samantha Krotzer
Filed under Commentary, Opinion
A vocal form of sexual harrassment, catcalls are an offensive way for men to feel empowered without bothering to follow through on their shouted words.
There is nothing sexy about a hung-over stagger to the bus stop at 10 a.m. Wearing last night’s outfit, sporting greasy hair and smeared makeup, I was certain absolutely no one would find me attractive.
My personal train of thought crashed when, as I headed down the street, a garbage truck cruised past me. The driver, who was probably my father’s age, took his eyes off the road for moment, to shout a slur of sexually fueled comments at my friend and me.
It was at that moment I decided this: I have had it. I am a female, not a feline, and the “catcalls” men make are offensive and a form of sexual harassment.
Even if I had a thing for garbage-truck drivers and decided to hop on the back of that truck, I doubt we would ride off into the sunset toward a happy future. These men openly harass women expecting no consequence.
“What they say is meaningless,” said Laura Levitt, director of the women’s studies program at Temple. “They use the power of the anonymous guy to make comments to you.”
Of course, not all men disrespect women in this manner, but Levitt said some men feel they have a heterosexual masculinity privilege that gives them the right to say offensive things to women.
“It is some sort of entitlement for men,” Levitt said. “It is really not OK.”
After enduring my share of whistles and “I-wanna-get-wit-chu” comments, it was my turn to dish out some harassment.
Working at the Reading Terminal Market served as the perfect place for people watching and prowling.
As men walked by, I held nothing back. I whistled at a middle-aged man, made indecent grunts at teenage boys and even snuck in a “nice butt” to a man in a business suit.
Guess how many positive reactions I received. Zero. Instead, I received looks that screamed, “Are you insane?” And a couple of men even told me I was being rude and immature.
Reverting to my original role as receiver of the catcalls, I decided to take a different approach.
Standing on a sidewalk, chatting with a couple of friends, I watched two men slide past us, pointing out how “sexy” they thought we were. It was a hit-and-run catcall, if you will.
Once I proceeded to ask one of the men where we’d be going for dinner, the confusion on his face was priceless. Is it wrong for a woman to assume that if a man is making advances toward her, he may actually be interested in dating her? Apparently, it is.
After moments of stuttering, the man suggested he’d take me to Olive Garden, a clear indication that he had no intention of asking me out on a real date. Come on, we live in Philadelphia. Saying you’ll take me to Olive Garden is nearly as offensive as talking about my rear end before finding out my first name.
“If you actually wanted to ask someone out,” Levitt said, “you would never do it in this way.”
Lindsay Ward, a junior anthropology major, said she simply ignores men if they make suggestive comments to her in public areas.
Sometimes, the best way to stand up for oneself is to ignore the offender.
“It would be great to think that if you told them the truth, they would stop,” Levitt said. “These things are always situational. We live in a violent culture. It is scary, you never know if someone who says something to you has a gun or not.”
Levitt suggested a new tactic, whistling.
“Don’t say anything, just make noise,” she said.
Maybe blowing a whistle in these guys’ faces will help them realize how annoying their comments are.
Samantha Krotzer can be reached at samantha.krotzer@temple.edu.
“I was walking towards school yesterday and two guys were standing on the street. They started to look at me and said ‘Hey mammi..you lookin’ goooood.’ When I looked at them, I realized that they were young…In their twenties. And not bad looking either. So then I really wanted to ask if this little technique of theirs worked or if it was just a stupid joke they pull on women to entertain themselves. I cant imagine sitting on the street and hollering at every cute guy that walks by, like they’re a fluffy dog on the sidewalk and I’m marveling at them. If I were to hit on a guy walking down the street, he would either laugh at me or ignore me because he thought I was crazy…No matter how attractive I am.
I dont understand this. Really…Does this work for them? Do girls actually stop and say ‘Hi’ to someone critiquing them like a magazine ad in the middle of the street? Instead of getting really mad because these men make me feel like a piece of meat, I smile right back at them. I can take it as a complement. Hey, if you want to call me hot, why should i be mad? Doesn’t mean you’ll get ass, just means your fooling youself, not me, boys.”
By Melanie Lledos
This clip of Obama is about two years old. I found it interesting that he tells us that the degradation of women in our country is not something the government can fix, but it is something we must find a way to overcome, both in public spaces and in our homes. He tells us that “All of us have been complicit in diminishing ourselves and engaging in a kind of self-hatred.” I hadn’t thought of this situation in this way before, but it makes a lot of sense. Ultimately we are destroying ourselves through the way we treat others, especially in this generation. If more of us can stand up and speak out against our drawbacks, perhaps those responsible will feel less supported when they put down a woman because of her gender. The clip ends with Obama connecting these problems to educational funding. Would better schools and a challenging education for our generation and those to come eventually reduce misogyny in the United States? Where is Obama’s stance on the situation now, a year into his presidency?
G2: Women: Let’s make some noise: Sian Norris charts the rise of the new feminist networks - groups of women from all over the UK who meet to share their experiences and fight for changeSian Norris. The Guardian. London (UK): Nov 26, 2008.
A bustling atmosphere fills the community centre in Bristol as a group of women busily collate statistics, create collages and chat about their findings. They are compiling the results of a month-long project exploring why women feature so rarely in serious news stories - yet turn up so regularly in naked pictures. They have gathered a huge pile of information from newspapers and magazines, and some group members have also been carrying out a subversive flyer campaign, going into newsagents and replacing the sexualised images found on lads’ magazine covers with a photograph of a man. To this they have added the words, “Lads’ mags present a one-dimensional view of sexuality”.
These women are members of the Bristol Feminist Network (BFN), a discussion and activism group set up last year by Sally Cosgrove. The network brings together people of all ages to talk about feminist issues and plan direct action, which has so far included a pro-choice demo and an equal pay protest. It acts as a natural extension of the consciousness-raising groups that sprang up during the 1970s and 1980s, offering a space where women can talk freely about how discrimination affects their daily lives, and work out how to change this.
Cosgrove started the group in 2007, after volunteering to help organise the feminist festival, Ladyfest Bristol. Inspired by meeting so many political women, she sounded out interest in holding a regular discussion group, and on receiving a positive response, quickly set up a Facebook and Yahoo group. Since then, the network has gone from strength to strength, and now has 120 members.
Pro-choice activist Katy Ladbrook is one of them, and she says that an essential benefit of the group is being able to organise around an incredibly broad range of issues. She first became involved “as a way to reach more activists. It was a great resource to disseminate information about abortion rights and pro-choice events. But then I continued to be involved as I really enjoyed having the space to talk about all the issues I care about.” She says that it is easy to feel politically isolated in an age in which feminism is often regarded as a dirty word, but an organisation such as the BFN offers the chance to meet a large group of like-minded, progressive people.
Bristol isn’t the only city with such a popular group - there are new feminist networks forming around the UK, providing a stark riposte to the notion that feminist thought and activism has long since snuffed it. The Glasgow Feminist Network (GFN), for instance, has around 250 members, ranging in age from 16 to 60, and other groups include The Waves in Cardiff, and the Edinburgh Feminist Network. Then there’s the London Feminist Network (LFN), one of the largest women’s rights groups in the country, which numbers around 600 members.
One of the founders of the GFN is Charlotte Cameron, who says that what spurred her to start the group was a growing frustration with “the sexism and misogyny I experienced and observed on a daily basis. I couldn’t find any groups in the city that were trying to counter it, so myself and a few other women set up the network. It’s wonderful to see how inspired older women are to meet young feminists, after they’ve been told for so long that feminism is irrelevant and young feminists don’t exist. We’ve organised lots of events - workshops, film screenings, direct actions - and one of the most important things we’ve done in the last year was the vigil we held after the murders of [local women] Eleni Pachou and Moira Jones, and a string of sexual assaults. That was attended by around 200 people and was really moving.”
The LFN proved its might last weekend, when 2,000 women marched through London for Reclaim the Night, an annual protest against rape and violence, which is organised by the network. The group was started by feminist activist Finn MacKay in 2004, and it has set up feminist conferences, film festivals, and a protest outside the Playboy shop in London.
While Mackay’s prime focus as a campaigner is addressing “male violence against women - pornography, prostitution, domestic abuse, female genital mutilation, forced marriage and so-called ‘honour’ crimes” - LFN members campaign on these and many other feminist issues besides. One of its members is the comedian Kate Smurthwaite, who points out that a key advantage of these groups is the sheer strength of numbers. “The power of being in touch with over 600 feminists means that if we want something to happen, we can spread the word about an event or an issue, and make it happen,” she says. Referring to the parliamentary challenge to the time limit on abortion which took place earlier this year, Smurthwaite says that she believes that the pro-choice demos which were organised through the network “really made a difference to the way politicians were prepared to look at the issue”.
The power of these groups is also in the alliances that they build; both between individual members, and with long-standing single-issue feminist organisations. The GFN works in tandem with groups including Glasgow Women’s Aid, the Glasgow Rape Crisis Centre and the Women’s Support Centre, while members of the LFN are involved with a huge range of organisations. “I do a lot of work with the Fawcett Society, Abortion Rights and Object [a group that challenges the objectification of women],
as well as activism with Stop the Strip Pub,” says Smurthwaite. She points out that by forming these connections “we can create a much bigger noise”, which is the essential aim.
Sue Tate is a member of the BFN and an art lecturer at the University of the West of England, and has been involved in feminist activism since the 1970s. She says that the BFN represents a new generation for her, and that she’ll only believe that we’re living in a post-feminist age when discrimination against women is entirely a thing of the past. “Until then,” she says, “these networks are vital to effect change and to bring women together to discuss what really matters.”
I found this while searching for websites addressing issues of misogyny and violence women are so often confronted with in public spaces, especially in the city. I came across an interesting entry about this problem and where it may stem from.
Suzannah B. Troy is an artist in New York City who creates a lot of work focusing on women’s issues and politics. She writes letters that have been published in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the NY Post and other newspapers. She creates REALLY interesting and funky art, like these “Activist Panties” from 2006:
Anyway, I agreed with what Suzannah had to say about all this and wanted to share her thoughts:
Have you ever noticed the men that tend to “weigh” women, judge them, rate them, pick on them tend to be the most unattractive, often grossly over weight men…even the men that come in pretty packages that tend to be very judgmental of women are like teapots filled to the brim under a hot fire but what is steaming out is their own self rejection that they artfully project on to women….
what a release of tension to dump on a woman when they feel so out of control of some very unpleasant feelings they happen t have….uh huh…about themselves and they don’t want to confront those feelings so it is easier to project them forward on an outside object usually a woman and “beat her up” try and control her put her down…it is a down right vacation from their own self hate.
Same with these kids and young men running around with guns shooting them and if they did not have guns, it is knives, razors — bottom line — they are tuned in to the “hate” channel and better to hate and blame anyone than get to the root of what is really their own discontent…and that is putting it mildly.
Women fall in to this category as well but guess what — they would rather dump on women or girls just like misogynist men go figure.
There is something wrong with the “men-tality” machismo you find in NYC these days and it’s male and females members and they can be found in offices as easily as in the streets….
the entire city needs conscious raising….
POSTED BY SUZANNAH B. TROY ARTIST AT 11:21
Suzannah is currently working on finding submissions pertaining to men and transgenders who are upset with violence towards women, which is a very interesting idea to explore. Any material on the topic? Email me at sharnabrzycki@gmail.com and I can pass it along. Or check out her website:
This is a conversation given to me by my roommate. Her friend was assaulted over Thanksgiving break in Soho. I have to say I’m quite shocked. This is the first time that someone I know has been abused in this way…and in such an unsuspecting place as Soho. It’s a reminder that stuff like this does happen. Even though the abuse may seemed limited to cat calls or verbal abuse on the street, that is not always so.
Is Boston just now catching up to New York with sexual harassment prevention ad’s in the subway?
I came across this website after having gone through two advanced google searches in hopes to find SOME sort of website focusing on issues of public harassment. After awhile I came across this—not the most advanced website but at least something. You’ll see on the homepage a clip-art image of a stop sign displayed with dramatic red white and black font stating “Stop Street Harassment”. In a completely unintentional way, I am sure, the stop sign (for me at least) brings about a sort of vexation. It reminds me of the D.A.R.E programs we all were once forced to take in elementary school, or something like that. It’s really not that important of an issue but something about the logo doesn’t do it for me. The image connotes ideas that challenge the importance of the problems we are in need of fixing.
Despite the layout of the homepage, the website does have many links to news articles dealing with all of these issues and even blogs and support groups for anyone who wants to share their story. It’s a shame there isn’t a more developed and well known site for women to unite under. How can this issue, at least on the web, be so uncharted?
