November 17, 2008 Christ on a bike
So, any of you lurkers wrinkling your nose or rolling your eyes at my objection to the ad depicting a young “HAWT CHICK” with the tagline “Organ donation is probably your only chance to get inside her” is over-reaction? That it’s “just an ad”, that guys don’t really think like that? That it’s just fun and games?
Well, go read this. I got hold of this link thanks to Mindy, guest posting over at Hoyden About Town.
While I don’t know the details of how the study was conducted, it found that one in seven boys thought it was ok to foce a girl to have sex if she’d been flirting.
The ads aren’t produced in a vacuum. I’m not going to spend forever pondering chicken and egg, suffice to say there are connections. You have teenage boys exposed to violence towards women in their home, boys having attitudes like this, you have advertising that plays into it, you have a culture of disrespect for women…and the result? That one in four women will be raped, women will be held responsible for ‘preventing’ themselves being raped, as if the onus is on us, men will do jackshit, and society will continue to perpetuate disrespectful shit about women and not take rape seriously.
Go on, tell me I don’t have a sense of humour, I dare you.
Tags: fuck off
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Fuck Politeness 
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apublicblogging
said
I spend so much of my valuable time trying to convince people that there is no such thing as “just an ad” or “just a tv show” or “just a joke”. It’s called cultural hegemony people.
One strategy that seems to resonate with people is the “advertising works” line.
Advertising is a multi-billion buck industry because It Works. The images and narrative we get bombarded with actually do shape our ideas and attitudes.
I don’t know if it’s just my tolerance level decreasing, but lately the media seem to be cranking up the misogyny. I can’t watch tv for one night without going to bed in despair.
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fuckpoliteness
said
Yeah, I hear you on the despair front. Sometimes I get so tired, and so SICK of hearing myself say the same things over and over and the ridicule these ideas get met with by the Just A Common Sense Bloke crowd that I start wondering AM I insane? AM I tedious/boring/fun-ruining/stupid/a whiner? AM I just making life hard for myself and everyone else.
And then we get the white ribbon report in question (which I may link to and write on properly in a future post) assesses the top cause of violence against women as being
Gender roles and relations:
Men’s agreement with sexist, patriarchal, and sexually
hostile attitudes
Violence-supportive social norms regarding gender and
sexuality
Male-dominated power relations in relationships and
families
Sexist and violence-supportive contexts and cultures
Exactly the sort of stuff we irritating/idiotic/fun-spoiling stuff we feminists bang on about. The research supports us in our insistence that this shit matters – hell, they listed it first in their list of causes of violence against women.
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fuckpoliteness
said
Sorry, the link for the full report is:
http://www.whiteribbonday.org.au/, then follow the link to the full report included on the main page.