Girls For A Change is a national non-profit dedicated to empowering young women to create social change in their community.
Last week in response to VOCO’s extremely sexist and sexually objectifying advertisements, MissRepresentation.org launched a new #NotBuyingIt campaign against the company.
As displayed above, the ads used various female body parts and sexually suggestive language to promote their line of products. Need a refreseher in sexual objectification? Here you go!
The phrase “sexual objectification” has been around since the 1970s, but the phenomenon is more rampant than ever in popular culture–and we now know that it causes real harm.
What exactly is it, though? If objectification is the process of representing or treating a person like an object, then sexual objectification is the process of representing or treating a person like a sex object, one that serves another’s sexual pleasure.
How do we know sexual objectification when we see it? Building on the work of Nussbaum and Langton, I’ve devised the Sex Object Test (SOT) to measure the presence of sexual objectification in images. In it, I propose that sexual objectification is present if the answer to any of the following seven questions is “yes”:
1) Does the image show only part(s) of a sexualized person’s body?
Headless women, for example, make it easy to see them as only a body by erasing the individuality communicated through faces, eyes and eye contact.
2) Does the image present a sexualized person as a stand-in for an object?
3) Does the image show sexualized persons as interchangeable?
Interchangeability is a common advertising theme that reinforces the idea that women, like objects, are fungible. And like objects, “more is better,” a market sentiment that erases the worth of individual women.
(Caroline Heldman via MsMagazine.org)
Dozens of comments from MissRep and the organization’s Social Action Reps flooded the company’s Facebook page, which were promptly censored by VOCO. Eventually the company had to completely pull down their Facebook page due to the bombardment of incoming comments and messages from people protesting the objectifying nature of the ads.
The page is now back up and running and MissRepresentation.org has informed us that they are in contact with Dirk Marketing, the agency behind the ad campaign. Hopefully we will see some real change as a result of this successful #NotBuyingIt campaign!
Read updates about the campaign here: #NotBuyigIt: VOCO
Ann Cotton comments on gender equality and education here saying, “Action is really what’s going to count for this generation of girls.” Cotton is the founder and executive director of Camfed, an international non-profit organization that fights poverty and HIV/AIDS in Africa by educating girls and empowering women. Support Camfed and join the Half the Sky Movement.
Check out GFC staff member Rachel’s contribution to MissRepresentation.org’s most recent action alert
Social Action Representative Rachel took this week’s Rep Action to the streets of Santa Cruz. Check it out. #SARep
