The Girls' Guide To The Economy Part 5--The Shopping Edition

‘Tis the season and nothing says I commodify you like a girl’s so-called best friend…

H/T to Kentucky Health Justice Network’s M. Gabriela Alcalde for bringing our attention to this revolting billboard and pointing out that,

It is sadly nothing new to find commercials and marketing playing off of women’s sexuality to sell goods.  It is not unusual to see women objectified, their value and role in society minimized to “eye-candy” and sexual pleasers.  We also get trivialized as one-dimensional homemakers with not much more concerning us than having a clean house and clean children (stay-at-home moms and working moms have a LOT more on their plates and minds than that!).  These messages are absorbed by everyone– especially children.  It sends them messages (both boys and girls) about what they should aspire to be, how gendered expectations are, what society approves of, and very narrowly delineates what roles boys and girls can hope to fill.

As parents, we hope our children grow up to be compassionate, curious, and creative human beings.  We want them to succeed so we try not to limit their possibilities, but expand their horizons.  We want them to respect and learn from other people, not from caricatures of people.

By not holding companies and stores accountable for the images and messages they perpetuate, we allow them to influence our children in ways we would not normally allow total strangers to influence their minds and futures.  These messages reach our children even if we don’t choose to allow them into our homes; they are everywhere.

It is difficult to even start describing in how many ways and levels “Wife Insurance” is offensive and dangerous.  Some people say that jokes are funny because they are true.  In this case, I say this is not funny because it so closely resembles what is still held by many as true.  Just to cover a few of the obvious ways that this statement is offensive: Women are not property.  It was not too many decades ago (a very short time in historical terms) that women did not have the right to vote, to own property, to inherit property, to be a complete member of society.  Women suffer from violence at the hands of their intimate partners at a rate of one in four in the United States, and about 37% of women in Kentucky report being abused by their partner.  Even when accounting for educational attainment and work experience, women make only 77 cents on the dollar of what a man makes.  Mothers and single mothers (especially women of color) fare even worse.

Allowing anyone, especially a well-funded for-profit corporation that sells luxury items, to exploit the inequities that women and girls suffer and to make light of the tragedy that society still often treats women and girls as property and as less-than full human beings, is not acceptable.

If we are committed to living in a society where we are safe from violence, from prejudice, and oppression, then we have to call each other out when we speak dangerous lies, when we oppress, offend, and dehumanize each other.  We have made progress, that’s certain, but we still have a long journey ahead of us as we realize the type of society that is fair, just, and nonviolent.  This journey requires every one to be a leader in creating the reality we want for the next generations.  Speak out.

You can let Gumer & Co. know what you think of their billboard here.

Which brings us to this, regardless of how much you bought on Black Friday, it will not save the economy.  In fact, chances are your little shopping spree is contributing to our  economic and ecologic ruin and that dear readers, is something the old white guys who brought us to this point really don’t want you to know.

However Annie Leonard explains it all in The Story of Stuff, a video that traces those gift-wrapped goodies and just about everything else we own from “extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal.”  As Leonard points out, this is “a system in crisis. And the reason it is in crisis is that it is a linear system and we live on a finite planet and you can not run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely.  The website provides copious documentation of the points that Leonard makes and the video is sprinkled with understated humor. For instance, she defines extraction as,

“A fancy word for natural resource exploitation which is a fancy word
for trashing the planet. What this looks like is we chop down trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside, we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals.”

Doesn’t pull any punches, does she? One of the many key points to Leonard’s analysis is that she looks at  the impact our economic system has on women and children:

There are over 100,000 synthetic chemicals in commerce today. Only a handful of these have even been tested for human health impacts and NONE of them have been tested for synergistic health impacts, that means when they interact with all the other chemicals we’re exposed to every day.
So, we don’t know the full impact of these toxics on our health and environment of all these toxic chemicals. But we do know one thing: Toxics in, Toxics Out. As long as we keep putting toxics into our production system, we are going to keep getting toxics in the stuff that we bring into our homes, our workplaces, and schools. And, duh, our bodies.
Like BFRs, brominated flame retardants. They are a chemical that make things more fireproof but they are super toxic. They’re a neurotoxin—that means toxic to the brain. What are we even doing using a chemical like this?

Yet we put them in our computers, our appliances, couches, mattresses, even some pillows. In fact, we take our pillows, we douse them in a neurotoxin and then we bring them home and put our heads on them for 8 hours a night to sleep. Now, I don’t know, but it seems to me that in this country with so much potential, we could think of a better way to stop our heads from catching on fire at night.

These toxics build up in the food chain and concentrate in our bodies.

Do you know what is the food at the top of the food chain with the highest levels of many toxic con- taminants? Human breast milk.

That means that we have reached a point where the smallest members of our societies—our babies— are getting their highest lifetime dose of toxic chemicals from breastfeeding from their mothers. Is that not an incredible violation? Breastfeeding must be the most fundamental human act of nurturing; it should be sacred and safe. Now breastfeeding is still best and mothers should definitely keep breastfeeding, but we should protect it. They [government] should protect it. I thought they were looking
out for us.

And of course, the people who bear the biggest brunt of these toxic chemicals are the factory workers, many of whom are women of reproductive age. They’re working with reproductive toxics, carcinogens and more. Now, I ask you, what kind of woman of reproductive age would work in a job exposed to reproductive toxics, except one who had no other option?

Leonard makes it brutally clear that this system cannot be sustained but she is far from seeing the system as hopeless,

Remember that old way didn’t just happen by itself. It’s not like gravity that we just gotta live with. People created it. And we’re people too. So let’s create something new.

Click here for some things that you  can do, including such gems as, “Change your lightbulbs…and then, change your paradigm.”

And it is of course the paradigm that needs changing.  While it is far too early to tell whether Obama is bringing  the change needed to redefine the economic or indeed the political paradigm, his choices for his economic team are not particularly encouraging.  And thus far the Congressional debate on what to do about the economy seems to primarily be about how much  money to throw at which industries without any comprehensive analysis of what went wrong and what needs to be done to foster a healthy economy.  Until we have  that conversation, there will be no meaningful turnaround for the economy.