OK Got to get my .02 in Here...
"How has the use of models in fashion magazines, Victoria Secret ads, etc. affected you personally and how you assess others?"
Well, in all honesty and my Bro can back me on this I was born with a lustful eye. So in the most basic way Victoria’s Secret, Cosmo, etc...Have been items I appreciate. I mean here you a go, a catalog of beautiful women free! What more could a man ask for? I usually am not even aware that the sexy model is actually there to sell me a product, that doesn't even come up.
Now let’s talk about the underlying psychology that motivates big business to slather our beer, car, clothing, and Soda ads with yummy lil trollops. This is where I start to get kind of irritated. I mean peer into the mind of the people behind the corporations, the add men, the marketing monkeys, and those bastions of "Common Man Knowledge" the CEOs. Do they really believe that American Males are so shallow, so completely hormonally driven that by simply trotting out their latest "body By DuPont Babe" with her vacuous, airbrushed eyes and big hair that we will just start snatching the product off the shelf? Look at the add campaigns and the answer is obvious, YES.
The SuperBowl had a commercial featuring the "Cat Fight" girls...WTF? To Sell Beer? What’s disturbing is this little 60 second spot has made a star out of the girls, and has placed their product in the fridges of Football and NASCAR fans nationwide (I have no idea what the product was), this out of an idea that Larry Flynt could have scribbled out for his next photo shoot. We are constantly spoon fed images of the unattainable, through television, movies, newspapers, magazines, and hell even our news is littered with empty headed (But Blonde and Perky) reporters to keep the viewer enthralled. We are constantly being hammered to consume, to spend, to go in debt, led by a carrot of dreams, beautiful women, and bullsh*t strapped to our heads to match the blinders.
I will go to the International Plaza Mall here in Tampa and sit and watch the beautiful women. A lot of these women I find pretty, honestly naturally beautiful, but there is a large number who have been surgically …uh…enhanced, I believe is the popular term. I sit and look and these women and I want to scream, yell, and I imagine heaping my most venomous insults upon them for prancing around with all their plastic bolted rigidly to their ribcage and injected lips… looking as though they just lost a fight. I want to wake them from their mindless self centered, little consumer world. A world where they really think they look “Great.†Where their husbands or boyfriends have encouraged or supported this self mutilation in search of a non-existent ideal.
This is where the fashion magazines and the media blitz we face every day have led me I'm pissed. If you step back and look around a little, it’s not to hard to see everyday where some company or Magazine has applied just a little more pressure to a beautiful woman to go out and get lipo-suctioned and “Augmented†so maybe she can feel good about herself. This makes me furious, I get angry at the machine that grinds this idea of beauty into the heads of the people. I get even a little more angry at the woman who are so stunted, so programmed, and so completely freakin owned by their desire for an image that they will pay money to be modified to fit a mold created by marketing.
Let me summarize here. Women in magazines make me feel good, so long as they have the appearance or semblance of natural health and beauty. The Men, who believe that putting this “Eye Candy†in front of me will motivate me to purchase their products are misguided, and are the kind of guys I used to slap the crap out of in High School. Now the woman who buy into the image presented by men…These poor creatures, I don’t know, I am angry at them and I pity them at the same time.
Hell this is depressing….
maybe Americans really are consumer cattle.
Rev...