Who needs sociopolitical equality when you have YOGHURT?

Posted by Goblin

So, the swimming pool was busy today and I retreated – uncharacteristically these days – to the gym. Because I am a skint student, my gym doesn’t boast its own continuous music channel, so I had to make do with my walkman and some unnamed terrestrial channel.

And, God help me, I started watching the adverts. Has anyone else ever noticed the sheer proportion of adverts that attempt to sell women products – usually food or domestic products – as emotional fulfilment? They’re all over the show. The two I’m going to talk about are very different – Mr Muscle bathroom and Rachel’s Organic Yoghurt.

In scenario A, Mr Muscle, a woman’s family mess up her bathroom, enjoying themselves, then she wanders in and says ‘Everyone enjoys the bathroom except me!’ Cue Mr Muscle jumping in and praising his new product, while the woman (apparently) tries it out and says ‘Thanks, Mr Muscle!’ in admiring tones. Here’s a list of things wrong with scenario A:

1)      The assumption cleaning is woman’s work

2)      The assumption a woman can’t (shdn’t) ask her family to clean up *their* mess

3)      The assumption a husband will go out, presumably to work, while the woman is at home

4)      The offer of a product rather than querying or challenging 1), 2) or 3)

5)      The assumption Mr Muscle – a bathroom cleaner – will look after or help the woman, that it is a product’s job, not her family’s, to provide emotional succour as well as physical help

6)      The assumption that (domesticised) unfulfilment is a woman’s lot

7)      The assumption that challenging this status quo is unusual

8)      The assumption that even if a woman works, the bathroom is still her problem

Let’s compare and contrast this to scenario B, Rachel’s Organic Yoghurt (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TbkkhFv5Zw). In this advert, a woman comes home from work, ‘slips off her heels’ (as the v/o coos), ‘slips’ into slippers, and heads straight to the kitchen to eat yoghurt and raspberries that the cooing voiceover assures us ‘slips down a treat’. ‘Find your Rachel’s moment’, we are invited. This woman isn’t seen in the context of family, but as (presumably, from the heels and that she’s arriving home at 6pm) a working woman. Her home is empty. So we are encouraged to see her encounter with this yoghurt as both her way of emotionally nourishing herself and her source of sensual, almost sexualised enjoyment. It’s an old, old story – cf the Flake ads, cf every advert that features a woman doing a Saint Theresa as soon as a particular foodstuff enters her mouth. It’s more pernicious than that, though. Whilst women are shown food as a source of emotional nourishment in a world where (as with Mr Muscle) they are expected to serve others’ needs rather than their own, they are *also* - and sometimes in the same ad break – held up to unrealistic body ideals that for the vast majority of people involve restricting their food intake. Women especially are encouraged to diet and exercise not just to ‘feel good’ but to ‘look good’. (*spits at ridiculous and unrealistic set of assumptions here*).  I haven’t tasted Rachel’s yoghurt, what with being dairy-intolerant and all, and have no idea whether it really is as pleasurable to consume as chocolate mousse (for example). But with these food ads, either women are being sold a low-calorie product whose value lies in its ability to simulate the body’s responses to a high-calorie product whilst serving the ‘thinner=better’ ideological system, or it’s a high-calorie product that women are invited to consume in service of short-term pleasure so that their guilt can later be used to induce them to buy diet and exercise-products. To use the technical term, it’s *fucked up*.

Yeah, yeah, I know – this is capitalism. But the fact that our entire financial and political and social system is apparently based on encouraging women to substitute product purchase for healthy relationships, equality in domestic and gender politics, an entitlement to bodily comfort or integrity, or a voice PISSES ME OFF.