The Debate and the Hate
I was invited to talk on MTV the other day.
They have a show called Debate MTV, where 6 people share their points of view about controversial subjects with the audience nationwide.
So they invited an ad creative (the one who’s writing), a photographer and an art director of a masculine magazine to talk with a feminist, a psychologist and a guy who runs a blog about anti-advertising or something.
The starting point was a simple question:
“Does the media treat women as objects?”
Curiously, the feminist, the psychologist and the blogger were sure about one thing: the advertising is responsible for the anorexic girls, the boom of silicone prosthetics, the rapes in the poor communities and a significant part of the evil in the world.
According to them, we seduce people everyday and define the standards of beauty, fashion and behavior, forcing the audience to buy our stuff otherwise they will feel depressed or revolted because they can’t do it.
Wow. Goebbels wouldn’t do better.
It’s our fault. Not the decades of movies, soap operas, musicians and artists, culture and history who have designed the world’s standards as they are, good or bad.
This whole conspiracy theory was obviously easy to dismantle.
I answered: “No. It’s the women who use the media as an object. And men too.”
Not every human being, of course.
But advertising didn’t create Megan, Pamela or Marilyn – and I would be very proud of myself if I could create a creature like Megan Fox. God is getting better and better.
It’s exactly the opposite. People use the spotlights to build their characters and to sell their attributes. Just like the feminist, the psychologist and the blogger were doing right there, in broadcast television.
We, the ad guys, just use the celebrities that people love and buy as one way – not the only one – to make our client’s products known and relevant.
We don’t create the trend. Actually, most of the times, we just surf the hype after the wave is already formed.
The three left the show agreeing with some of my points, but also showing that they will never forgive me for a guilt that doesn’t belong to me.
Ok, that’s democracy, no surprise.
Except that I didn’t realize that some people not only dislike advertising.
They hate us.
- Fabio Seidl
I once watched a documentary in which they researched the “ideal female body” with a tribe of extremely remote Indians in South America. Interestingly, their version of what was attractive very closely mirrored Western culture. It’s really an issue of proportion. The things we find attractive are fairly universal. So if someone wants to blame advertising for the objectification of women, I would suggest that they blame the designer of the swastika for Nazism. Extreme? Perhaps. But real insight is really only found when you look deeper. Human nature is at the core of almost all motivations.
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