Objectify This

We’ve long celebrated reinventions of billboards that advocate everything from pinching bottoms to sexual entitlement, so initially ObjectifyThis was thrilled to learn about the Be Yourself Movement. Flavorwire describes the Be Yourself Movement as “an Italian art collective with an agenda,” by which it means a political movement. The BYM, as they call themselves, is a group of [...]

The American Dream has great power. Merriam-Webster defines it as “an American social ideal that stresses egalitarianism and especially material prosperity”; but this is incomplete. The American Dream is also bound up in those four words, “the pursuit of happiness,” an “unalienable right” guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson and Franklin elided our right [...]

“. . . but that’ll be hard, because they’re attached,” deadpans Sarah Haskins. While Haskins not actually the same person as Olympic triathelete Sarah Haskins, she is nonetheless a superhero for our age. Haskin’s show Target Women on Current TV is an answer to ObviousMan. Here’s a lady who can dissect our news media’s obsession [...]

So you’ve probably heard about Ghostnet, the mysterious online spying network. But have you considered the degree to which your online activity is monitored by big business? I don’t just mean those ads on the side of your Gmail account that spontaneously advertise garden gnomes when you talk about your short hippie friend. I mean [...]

Are women’s magazines bad for women? It might seem like a stupid question. But when, as the New York Times reports, a University of Missouri study “found that looking at women’s magazines for 1-3 minutes had a negative impact on women’s self esteem. So imagine what happens if we’re bombarded by these images every day.” [...]

There’s something really awesome about parodies of our commercial culture, like the Don Hertzfeld video “Rejection” after the jump (nod, Nadia). Maybe it’s because it makes it easier to laugh at the consumerism and materialism that chronically infect up our lives, or because we get so many messages that assume that we’re consumer whores that [...]

Feministing’s Weekly Feminist reader alerted me to F Word’s recent posting “Har Har,” in which Sara Anderson holds advertising exec Gerdien responsible for making a visual joke about the abuse of women by beating them with keyboards. Gerdien argues that since the ad was made by three women, it can’t be sexist, and states, “Because [...]