fuck the system.

For a WMST paper on advertisement, I have been collecting advertisements that I find wrong, for one reason or another. Very rarely have I stumbled upon one that is incredibly and obviously devaluing, but I have come to realize that is precisely the point.

In our culture, hegemony is not enforced by Big Brother over the tv-screens every morning, it is enforced almost unknowingly through advertisements, media outlets, and entire industries.

I have always thought of the most busy places in the world, like Times Square or Rodeo Drive to be emblems of the advertising overdose I am talking about. But I'm realizing, that is largely irrelevant. Walking into places like that, we are prepared to be overwhelmed by billboards and signs and whatnot. At that point, we are almost immune to the advertising, because we are so aware of it.

The more serious problem is the hidden politics in the facets of our day to day existence. The messages on the sides of buses, the magazine advertisements we don't look twice at, the commercials we breeze through, the signs we walk past, and so on. Advertisers realize they only have a couple seconds to catch our attention (even if we are unaware of it) and ram their message down our throats. It is these seconds, that we never think twice about, that I think subconsciously shape our ideas about accepted norms and values.

The more of these advertisements I notice, the more pissed off I get. It's not about degrading women. I'm not saying all of them are doing that. It's just these little snippets of ideas that they give us periodically, and all of these ideas add up to bigger ideas. Not just about women, but about race and class and beauty and morals...

I am really outraged. Have you seen that bumper sticker: "If you aren't outraged, you aren't paying attention."? I always read that and said, "you need to relax and calm down...", but god dammit, I am really freaking outraged. What pisses me off the most is, it's feels almost futile to fight it. This hegemony being indoctrinated into our lives exists world-wide, culture to culture, almost inescapably.

I am just going to do my part to be aware of it and stop pretending that I am not affected and I do not pay attention to advertising.