What Else Are You Trying to Sell Me? |
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First of a two-part series |
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| By TRISTAN AHTONE |
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| SANTA FE—On
March 26, as a part of the health fair held at the Institute of American
Indian Arts, Dr. Peter DeBenedittis spoke at the Hogan about the effect
media has on our lives. Curious about the media’s effect on society,
and more specifically, the role it has been playing in the war on terrorism
and Iraq, I attended in hopes of learning more. What I learned was fairly
astonishing. DeBenedittis is a national speaker focused mainly on
critical thinking in the media. His website, , gives information on
the workshops he holds and his ideas about how media has affected our
culture. He is an outspoken, sometimes awkward man, but truly a visionary
and fresh voice in today’s swirling world of media propaganda.
Despite that, I did not learn more about media influence on our decisions
politically, such as the war in Iraq. I was driven to research more
information on my own. In this first part of a two-part series, I will relate
some of the ideas that DeBenedittis put forth and continue next issue
with more about the mainstream media. Media’s Hidden Sale Media is all around us in magazines, television, Internet,
billboards, movies, posters, and music, always selling something. However,
it is not only products that media sells, according to DeBenedittis,
but also reality. “We are sold things. It is our reality. It is
how we look at things,” said DeBenedittis. “We have a whole
culture and a whole economy built on teaching you to hate yourself.”
According to DeBenedittis, a vivid example of how media
affects our lives and culture played out on the island of Fiji. In 1995,
the same year cable television hit the island, three percent of Fijian
girls reported vomiting to control their weight. Three years later,
the statistics rose dramatically. By 1998, 74 percent of Fijian girls
reported feeling too big or fat, 68 percent reported dieting within
the last month before being surveyed, and 15 percent reported vomiting
to control their weight. DeBenedittis cited statistics from other sources. In
the United States, by twelfth grade, only six percent of girls in high
school are actually overweight, while 36 percent think they are, according
to the Center for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance
study from 2001 posted on their website (). Selling Self-Hate Advertisers “need you to hate who you are, because
when they can get you to hate who you are, they can sell you more stuff,”
DeBenedittis stated. He pointed to another study by Laurie Mintz, associate
professor of educational and counseling psychology at University of
Missouri-Columbia. Researchers found that women showed more signs of
depression and dissatisfaction with their bodies after looking at advertisements
containing stereotypical thin and beautiful women for one to three minutes.
Women who already felt bad about their selves experienced an even larger
drop in self-image after viewing. According to DeBenedittis, selling self-hate helps
sell products. Cosmetics, clothing, shoes, and even cosmetic surgery
are all sold and help you fit in with what is marketed as beautiful. Yet this talk of how the media effects women was only
the first half of the lecture. Selling hate to men came next. Male Fantasies The way they sell it to men is to get them to fantasize
over women in the ads, those false images of femininebeauty. “They
get men to think that is beautiful,”said DeBenedittis. Not only do many women feel that they must fit the
mold, said DeBenedittis, but men believe women must fit it, too, and
consequently, fantasize about the type of women portrayed by media,
which is dangerous to women. In the ads and commercials DeBenedittis showed at his
presentation, women are seen as fulfillers of men’s sexual desires
and as conquests that any man can have if he just drinks a certain drink,
wears certain clothes or cologne, or drives a certain car. The women in the ads usually fit the stereotype of
being borderline anorexic and beautiful, but also act promiscuous and
love it. The idea for men said DeBenedittis, is “This could be
you”, and for women, “If you act a little slutty, you’ll
get ahead and feel better.” These ideas are carried to the extreme
of pornography sales, and men are taught to respond to these ideas,
and buy into them. According to DeBenedittis, there is no limit to what
the media will sell you, or what they will do to help you buy into their
reality. “They have to destroy your spirit. If they can
destroy your spirit, they can sell anything to you. They do it to women
by making you (women) hate your body. They do it to men by teaching
you (men) that this is what you sexually desire.” Media’s Happy Hour These ideas are especially prominent in ads selling
alcohol. Despite what appears in commercials, two-thirds of adults do
not drink or only drink a small amount, said DeBenedittis. Yet with the propaganda put forth, one might be led
to believe that everybody is drinking, and everybody is living the fantasy
seen on television. Advertisements for alcohol try to convince you that
“being a drunk is normal,” DeBenedittis said, and “you’ll
get to sleep with sexy women or men because you’re a drunk.” “They want you to believe that alcohol can fill
that emptiness in your life. If you’re a woman, they’re selling
you the emptiness because you don’t look right, and if you’re
a guy, they’re selling you the emptiness because you don’t
get the sex and love you feel you need,” said DeBenedittis. Beyond Corporation’s Candy Coated Messages After listening to DeBenedittis’ lecture, I began
to conclude that these types of ads merely promote the idea that sex
and alcohol are the only things that matter. Love, relationships, personalities,
and any other human emotion that we have been blessed enough to feel
is void to corporations. I began to feel that once you have bought into the idea that the woman or man that you pass on the street is worth nothing more than a night of sex, your spirit is destroyed, and the basic properties of what makes you human have been forgotten. When you realize that a void exists inside you from losing what makes you a unique human being, you fill it through consumption, and according to DeBenedittis, this void causes anger, too. During the lecture a series of television commercials
and print ads were shown, depicting women fighting with other women,
being shocked by electric dog collars, hung, beat up, and bludgeoned,
and even dead. Another television ad showed viewers how to stalk a woman:
A man throws a woman’s luggage away at an airport so that she becomes
stranded and then takes her to go drink with him. DeBenedittis touched on yet more statistics. With 70,000
rapes occurring to college women a year, this fantasy of wanting something
you can never have becomes dangerous, especially when violent behavior
is encouraged. This prompted me, however, to do a little research of
my own and what I found was shocking. According to estimates by the National Victim Center
and Crime Victims Research and Treatment center, in 1992, a woman was
raped every eighty seconds in the U.S. The Department of Justice estimates
that four out of five women who were raped knew their assailant, while
the American College Health Association estimates that 75 percent of
acquaintance rape cases involve alcohol. These figures do not even begin to scratch the surface
of the effect media has on people’s views of consensual sex. What’s For Sale in Mainstream Music? While DeBenedittis focused mainly on television, newspaper,
and magazine ads, I decided to take it a step further. Music is one of the most effective forms of social
change, and what is marketed are the same ideas in commercials: anorexic
standards of beauty, alcohol use, fast cars, money, sex, drugs, and
violence. I don't know what you heard about me/But
a b*tch can't get a dollar out of me/no Cadillac, no perms, you can't
see/That I'm a motherf*cking P-I-M-P Now shorty, she in the club, she dancing
for dollars/She got a thing for that Gucci, that Fendi, that Prada/That
BCBG, Burberry, Dolce and Gabana. I'm bout my money you see, girl you
can holla at me/If you f*cking with me, I'm a P-I-M-P/Not what you see
on TV, no Cadillac, no greasy/Head full of hair, bitch, I'm a P-I-M-P/Come
get money with me, if you curious to see/how it feels to be with a P-I-M-P. Despite what the record industry finds as novel, the
parallel between commercial music, and media selling points are undeniable.
I wanted to hear what other people had to say about commercial music.
Journalist and political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal,
had this to say about much of contemporary music today: “At its
heart, rap is a multi-billion dollar business, permeating America’s
commercial culture, and influencing millions of minds. It is that all-American
corporationism that transforms rap’s grittiness into the gutter
of materialism. A woman, a living being, reminds a man of a thing…This
is especially objectionable when one notes that in America, in the last
century, in the eyes of the law, blacks were property, chattel, things
like wagons owned by whites.” Selling Patriotism Commercialism crosses cultural and musical borders.
In his song, “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” Toby Keith
is glad to play the Joseph Goebbels of country music. American girls and American guys will
always stand up and salute/Will always recognize/When we see ol' glory
flying/There's a lot of men dead/So we can sleep in peace at night when
we lay down our head… Now this nation that I love has fallen
under attack/A mighty sucker punch came flying in from somewhere in
the back/Soon as we could see clearly through our big black eye/ Man
we lit up your world like the Fourth of July… Oh, Justice will be served and the battle
will rage/This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage/You'll be
sorry that you messed with the US of A/'Cuz we'll put a boot in your
ass/It's the American way… If you are not familiar with the work of Nazi propagandist
Joseph Goebbels, here is some of his work: This war of nations demands heavy sacrifice.
Still, those sacrifices do not begin to compare with those we would
be forced to bring if we lose. The enemy naturally wants to make his
battle against the Reich as easy and safe as possible, and hopes to
diminish our morale by seductive agitation. That is poison for weak
souls. He who falls for it proves he has learned nothing from the war.
He thinks it possible to take the easy road, when only the hard path
leads to freedom. This is, of course, business as usual. We never hear
“Rock the Nation” by Spear Head in which Micheal Franti urges
people to take control of the media by taking over television and radio
stations. Nor do we hear the new song, “March of Death,” by
Zach De la Rocha in which George Bush’s foreign policy is criticized,
and that, in terms of justice, there is a difference between a missile
and a gavel: What is a flag but a shroud out loud
and outside my window is a faceless crowd /'cause a covering child just
took her last breath /one snare in the march of death Who gonna chain this beast back on a
leash /this Texan furor, for sure, a compassionless con, who serve a
lethal needle to the poor. This seemingly lack of balance can only mean that media
has a distinct purpose and role in not only social and cultural areas,
but political as well. This is not surprising however when we see who controls
the media. A little bit of research reveals that just six corporations,
AOL-Time-Warner, Walt Disney, CBS-Viacom, Vivendi, News Corporation
(Rupert Murdoch), and General Electric, together own more than 200 media
outlets. DeBenedittis’ ideas can be applied to more than
just commercialization and the selling of products. Media’s effect
on society in the news and government is far more insidious in my opinion
than any of the ways their products are marketed. The media has an effect
on people’s lives, not just shaping the way we think, but also
putting us in harm’s way. For example, General Electric received a defense contract
worth $1.9 billion in 2002 for weapons parts. Do you think that this
has had an adverse effect on news coverage on any of their media outlets
such as NBC? Do you think their interests in supporting and promoting
the war through their news coverage has more to do with economic reasons
than patriotism? Find out next time in the final part of this two part series. (here)
Copyright © 2003 IAIA Chronicle Check out the original article at IAIACHRONICLE.ORG
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