Screw you media, and the horse you rode in on...

If there's one thing that all women know, it's that the media sucks.  It sucks like a five dollar hooker ... badly.

Now I could give you any number of reasons why it sucks so badly, but we all know what irks us the most, what affects us the most, what they spend the most time and effort controlling.

Body image.

But recently I found this series of old newspaper ads showing that while the media has always controlled the way women see themselves and how they want to look, the victims used to be a wee bit different.

It would seem that back in the day it wasn't popular to be skinny.  Who knew!  If these ads are anything to go on, women didn't want to be thin, they wanted to be curvy.  And why?  

Because the media told them to.

I guess it's nothing new.  We've always been able to see through art what people of any particular time considered to be the ideal feminine shape.  All you have to do is look at paintings of Elizabethan women to know they liked them back then with no eyebrows and high foreheads, or in the Renaissance period they liked them on the plump side and usually holding a naked chubby baby or being ravaged by a couple of soldiers.

But those images, while interesting and probably important, I'm pretty sure didn't have as much of an impact on the common woman.  After all, what did it matter what the women in those expensive paintings looked like if you were a normal person?  You had a living to make and a family to feed.  Besides, it wasn't like you'd see pictures like that very often.

But in the last hundred years our methods of communication have improved, which has allowed the media to become more powerful and more invasive.  We can't escape them anymore.  They're everywhere and, whether we like to admit it or not, we pay attention to and value what they tell us.  It's seriously fucked up.

I think that's why I find these old ads so interesting.  As a curvy girl myself, I find it fascinating to think that back in the day there were ads offering to help women put on weight.  Ads actually telling women that men wouldn't find them attractive if they were too skinny.  My first thought was "Right on!" followed by a fist pump, but it only took me a few minutes to realise the reality of it.

These ads aren't any better than ours.  They're just another way of telling women that they're not good enough the way that they are, and should change to suit some all knowing social opinion.

Isn't it interesting how, generation after generation, we just keep letting ourselves be victims of this emotionally manipulative abuse.  Makes you wonder what in fifty years time the media will be telling our daughters and granddaughters they should look like, doesn't it.

I am woman, hear me meow...

I am, like most women of my generation, a feminist.  A post feminist?  A humanist?  I'm not even sure what the acceptable expression is anymore, feminism has gotten a pretty bad rap and most people avoid the phrase if they can.

I hate having to admit it ... but I can see why it's gotten such a bad reputation.  Feminists are pretty much believed to be a bunch of angry, bitter women who want to be treated better than men because in the past women were treated worse, like it'll even out the cosmic scales.  There's something inherently unlikeable about people who try to counter injustice by swinging things in the other direction.  Rather than striving to fix the problem, it like they're trying to punish people for what happened.  Bad, bad things were done in the past, so now we demand preferential treatment to make up for it!  That'll show ya!  It's even worse when the people demanding and the people being demanded of weren't even the ones involved in the original injustice.  I guess I just don't get that whole "Sins of the Father" mentality.

Having said that, and as someone who did a major in Ancient History in university, I am a strong believer in the whole learning from history or you'll be doomed to repeat it concept.  Knowledge is power.  It's important that we know what the injustices were in the past, and how they came to be, so we can make sure we don't walk down that path again.  I just don't think that past wrongs necessarily translate to future preferential treatment or the right to be douchebaggy.   There's far too much douchebaggery in this day and age, in my opinion.

Of course, I have the highest level of respect, awe and gratitude for the women who in the past fought so I could do whatever I wanted with my career and would earn the same amount, could vote (even if last time I voted for Donald Duck), could own property, and a billion and one other things that men already had the right to do.  Those women deserve all the praise and reverence the rest of us can muster.  I just can't help thinking that when women (and I've seen many of them do it) take their fight and what they accomplished, and then use to to somehow gain preferential treatment, it's spitting in the face of what those women were trying to accomplish!  Using a struggle for equality to force inequality onto others ... oh, the irony.

I suppose you're wondering why I'm rambling on about this topic.  It's pretty much out of left field.  The reason is I stumbled across this youtube video and I couldn't help but be appalled.  Feminists protesting at a forum that was promoting support for abused husbands.  Seriously?  It's things like this that have made feminism such a controversial term.

I suppose I'm lucky.  I'm old enough to vaguely remember when women weren't necessarily treated equally, but young enough that it didn't really affect me.  I guess I'm part of that generation that they all talk about when they say that a social injustice won't truly disappear until everyone who remembers it is dead and gone.

But I heard someone use an expression the other day that got me thinking.  Feminazi.  I suppose I can understand where they're coming from.  Committing mass genocide while trying to take over most of Europe ... wanting equal rights regardless of what's between your legs ... they're totally the same thing.