misogyny in advertising and sexuality in language

Tonight I visited the TA Practicum that Sara Jameson runs. I briefly discussed Jim Berlin’s three types of rhetoric: formalist, expressionist, and social-epistemic, and then explained briefly that I use ads in the classroom as gateway into social-epistemic discussions: how texts are actually acts in our world, so how do they, echoing Burke, deflect, select, and reflect reality, and then, how does that change or perpetuate reality.

We looked at the following fashion spread from Elle magazine, which depicts this young sexualized woman as having eye makeup and fingernail polish on in a way that makes her look like the victim of battery or rape. It’s pretty graphic, if you ask me.

After discussing the ad briefly, I talked about using parady ads to think about real ads, because sometimes we need to defamiliarize the familiar in order to see it new. When we see sexism all the time, we often don’t recognize it as sexism (false consciousness), but when a parody or spoof points it out, sometimes it’s more obvious.

I showed the following AdBusters ad:

Overall, I think the discussion was fruitful for the 15-20 minutes it went on. It made me miss teaching drastically — I wish I were back in the classroom.

Sarah Burghauser also led a pretty cool discussion of gendered language and parallel construction, using this handout from Tolerance.org (pdf). I thought it was a really cool activity, but then I noticed something. The original example read:

Hillary’s Campaign Accelerates; McCain Withdraws from Presidential Race

I took this to be a newspaper headline, and the obvious correction is: Make both names full.

And someone else pointed out that the sentence construction makes McCain active as a person (withdraws) and Clinton not active as a person (her campaign accelerates).

Then, I noticed the word withdraw is a very sexual term. Extrapolating from that: his campaign is spent; he is spent; he withdraws. The two are put into relation with each other: As Hillary Clinton gains power, the man withdraws, pulls out, removes his sexual energy from the woman.

Perhaps I am reading too much into this. But perhaps it’s important. Why were these words chosen for this newspaper headline?