Packaged goods

You’ve come a long way, baby. Remember that catchphrase? If you do remember it, you know, really remember it, then you’ll remember what it was all about. Cigarettes. Virginia Slims cigarettes, to be precise. Pretty smokes just for pretty babes. Apparently, in the late 1960s women were just waiting for a stylin’ cigarette to show the world they’d come of age and graduated from being a frivolous business accessory to being a serious business suit. Obviously, cigarette smoking was the way to let the men of the business world know a woman’s time to compete had arrived in a cloud of cigarette smoke on the playing field. Advertisers knew they were targeting a maligned, neglected and vulnerable market—intelligent, educated young women between the ages of 18 and 35. Young women, who had been left behind the file cabinet or who had been hiding in the mailroom, were ready to be a force in the workforce. They could light up and make a statement. Those cigarettes became the symbol and the signal in a carefully crafted marketing and advertising campaign to let the whole world know, women wouldn’t be punished for being women anymore. Smoking implied liberation. In days gone by you could beat a woman for smoking a cigarette but in the sixties, y’all couldn’t beat that woman if she were smoking a Virginia Slim, baby. By the late 1980s cigarette advertising, in print and on television, was gone. Yet, the effect of those incredibly clever campaigns lingered. Young women are captivated by the glamour, independence, liberation and lifestyle offered by advertisers and directed toward them, alone. Goodbye cigarettes. Hello sexploitation.

Today, whenever I open a magazine or a newspaper, I’m struck by the number of advertisements crafted to prey on the minds of today’s young women. If the text were removed, the average person would have a very difficult time playing the “guess the product game” in much of today’s print advertising. Pages are adorned with women whose essentials are barely covered, all smokey eyed, pouty-lipped and schlepping everything from shampoo to automobiles. What’s changed? Why the H E double-takes is it necessary to kit out a teenaged female model in crotch-cozy-cover shots while wearing just a smattering of the sheerest of shirts? If less isn’t enough, when a male model is in the same ad, he’s often covered from neck to ankles. What kind of message is that? Have we really come a long way, baby? Has anything really changed from the 1960s? Apparently not.

In real life, right here on the cold wintery streets of the County, how often have you seen young women shuffling along, obviously dressed for sunnier climes— their bare bellies hanging out, flimsy-yet-stylish jackets unzipped and barely long enough to graze the waistband of their rocking-ripped jeans, without a hat to keep their brains from freezing, no mittens and their sock-less feet jammed into delicate flip-floppy slippers. I wonder if those young women wake up thinking “Hey, today, I’m gonna make a mean attempt to freeze my arse off in the name of fashion, cuz I saw it in a magazine.” Or, “Damn, it’s cold out there and I’m going to freeze my arse off because I dont want to be the only one of my friends who’s warm and I don’t want to look like a dork. And I will look like a dork.” Marketing and advertising campaigns are designed to exploit a social paradigm. Advertisers tell us their campaigns just reflect the values of the current culture and, generally speaking, that’s the truth. The current culture is one distorted and shaped by marketers and advertisers.

I, for one, let those businesses and those publishers know I’m not pleased whenever I see questionable or exploitative print advertising. It makes me wonder if we’ve really “come a long way baby” or if we’ve just been shoved along the way, baby.