Feminism and Media Communication

Posted by Colin Harvey Nov 3, 2009

That's the lecture I've just attended.

It finished 40 minutes early, which allowed me a chance to blog, since it's pissed me off so badly I just *had* to get it out of my system.

This week's guest lecturer admitted up-front that she's inclined to rant, and promptly showed us that yes, she is...

The downside of ranting is that it alienates your audience and undermines your authority -- it's why politicians are drilled in not losing their cool until they resemble blocks of Emmenthal-- and as one of the implicit enemy(!) after a while my ears ached with the mosquito whine of outrage.

Actually, I --as a man-- wasn't being criticized; rather, it was 'the media,' that amorphous entity that we were warned as Media Communications students to avoid generalizing about in the first week. Clearly there's a 'Do as we say, not as we do' policy at work here.

Third, it's easy to rant. I felt like putting my hand up and asking "What would you change?" But that might only have encouraged her to go on for even longer.

But where I got really pissed off was when she dismissed the Dove team's use of 'real women' in their ads as tokenism. "What, they pick a size sixteen, and claims it makes them representative?'

Full disclosure: I worked for Unilever, so I have an insight that she doesn't, and as I was involved --however distantly-- I'm clearly biased.

But no, they didn't pick a size sixteen. The team deliberately picked larger models, including apple and pear shaped ones, as well as older and black women. Yes, they were mostly ex-agency, but by the time they auditioned they were off the books as too old, too large, too...

The point was that they were deliberately picked as non-size zero (so surely this muppet should have appluded, not criticized them?) and to be as wide-ranging a sub-set as possible.

If her impression of the Dove Real Women campaign was so horribly wide of the mark, what other misleading bollocks did she talk for 80 minutes?