Why do we have a Gallery of Offenders?
Our Gallery of Offenders is the most popular and controversial page on the About-Face web site, alongside our blog. Here, we illustrate the negative ways that women and girls are depicted in popular culture and to give YOU the power to tell the media-makers what you think by contacting them, decide not to buy from advertisers with troublesome advertising, and educate others using the media-literacy questions we provide.
The images here may be really offensive to many of us, but they are by no means unique. It takes a ridiculously short time to collect a dozen annoying images from any fashion or women’s “sport” magazine. It’s a big part of what we do at the About-Face office. Conversely, and sadly, it is very, very difficult to find an image of a woman that looks confident, competent or even content in a magazine directed at women and nearly impossible to find any woman larger than a size six. (Newsflash: size six is tiny! Showing a size eight would not be a radical move!)
Some of the images here are advertisements, but many of the worst ones are actually fashion spreads produced by the fashion magazines themselves. And a lot of them are commercials, clips from TV shows, or music videos. (We try not to completely villanize hip-hop videos, but they can be pretty awful.)
Our goal is NOT to find the absolute worst imagery in all creation, but to look at the most popular magazines and watch the most talked-about shows and videos to “let them come to us.” Again, it’s really not difficult, because the harmful messages are everywhere. (If you find something to send us, please send them to us via e-mail, with the source of the image and date you found it.)
This isn’t about Media being evil…
We encourage everyone — adults and teenagers alike — to take part in our media culture, to watch and look at and use all the “bad” stuff, but know how to look at it critically and have skills to separate fake from real.
Our society is extremely appearance-conscious and in fact, pretty darn superficial, but we might also seek to create some balance in the cultural messages we send to young women, and to young men. A society that continues to emphasize a women’s body and appearance over her other traits is destined to produce generations of women who don’t feel good about themselves. And that’s not good for anybody.
Seeing the Light
While we believe these issues to be vitally important, our approach is pretty light. We are having fun with this and have purposely used a lot of humor and sarcasm to illustrate the ideas. Please note that if you find yourself getting upset, you have probably missed our point. Or, perhaps you need to question your own assumptions about gender, morality, etc. Our goal is to show you some of what’s out there and suggest that you look more critically at what you see. It is not to censor, not to demand that ads be pulled, not to stamp our feet and have a hissy fit. (Well, not in an unproductive way, anyway…)
And for balance, we have our Gallery of Winners, which we highly suggest you check out. There’s some GOOD stuff out there, but it’s MUCH harder to find. Have a look to understand what we’d like to see on the flip side.
We want to remind you that there is inherent power in a culture’s images and remind you that you have a say about that. If you want some.
– Kathy Bruin, with revisions by Jennifer Berger