Facebook
Sociological Images has a great post about Pepsi’s new “Pepsi Max,” a diet soda branded for men. The campaign is based on the inherent joke that real men don’t diet, that these pressures and concerns are only for women.
In searching around the links from this post, I found this video:
Now I have already commented on this campaign in some capacity here, but this video just makes me really angry. The ideas that fat=unhappy (but only for women), that the only thing worse for a woman to be fat is to be fat AND flat chested (the horror!) and that changes in your body will affect men’s pleasure, and that it ok are all pernicious. But what makes me angriest, is that women are supposed to strongly identify with this woman – to laugh along with being unhappy with our weight and worried that our bodies can’t please a man. These type of ads are trying to define what it means to be a woman.
My feminism is based on the idea of a community of women, one that is formed from common experiences and entails some sort of mutual responsibility and respect. What makes me so angry is when the “women’s experience” is defined for me rather than by me. That all these magazines, ads, and products tell us that dieting, feeling insecure, and trying to please men are a universal experience that we all relate to. I hate how the easiest way to strike up an amiable conversation with another woman is to talk about how you shouldn’t eat that cookie, count calories, or exchange body gripes. In many senses, a woman’s experiences is defined by the oppression we face, the many ways patriarchal society restrains us: physically, socially, politically. But I will not let self-inflicted body consciousness define what it means for me to be a women, define the common women’s experiences.
I’d really like it to be defined by our perseverance, strength, and beauty, rather than some community of people who hate our bodies.
Original here
kathleenmysistahs
| 1/19/10 05:37 PM
| Report
| Reply
