Yesterday was International Women’s Day
Celebrated on 8 March, International Women’s Day (IWD) is the global day connecting all women around the world and inspiring them to achieve their full potential.
Well, that’s a nice sentiment, but I for one believe that all people should be inspired to achieve their full potential.
Women don’t need to look to the UN for inspiration. Or to the government, or, least of all, to the thought police.
As it happened, yesterday morning I was discussing women with Spanish journalist Maria Blanco. Maria’s latest article (in Spanish) deals with a weird Dolce & Gabbana ad that has caused quite a furore in Europe, and the thought police are calling for more government intervention to protect us from ourselves.
Here’s the ad in question:
Considering D&G’s prior ads, this is pretty mild.
The ad has caused a huge controversy in Spain, France2 was scandalized into reporting on it, and now Amnesty International in Italy is asking that the ad be pulled from Italian magazines.
Think about that for a moment: millions of men, women, and children are opressed around the world, abused, enslaved, and executed, and AI/I finds time to protest an ad in a fashion magazine.
As Maria explains in her article, D&G’s ad features their characteristic
transgresion, provocation, the erotic wink, and as they themselves explain, the ad campaign is about images “that explore the thin border between morality and immorality, two parallel dimensions that coexist and divide the world”.
As it turns out, the Spanish government’s Instituto de la Mujer (IM) (Women’s Institute) is being pressured to ban the ad by the Green party, the leftlist Facua – a consumer organization affiliated with the University of Havana, that bastion of free thought – and others, because of a possible violation of section 3 of the Advertising Law (oh, yes, the Spanish have advertising laws) banning advertising that might exploit women, shows women as stereotypes, or promotes violence against women.
Maria Blanco looks at the ad and explains
In the first place, the woman in the ad is a model who has voluntarily agreed to the use of her body in a photographic composition
On the second issue, Maria explains that what raises the feminists’ hackles is the highlight on the woman’s desireable body.
So the feminazis [Maria’s word] that indoctrinate us for our own good and that penalize what they so unfortunately describe as the “objectifying of women”, are only rebroadcasting the idea that our bodies are shameful and shouldn’t be shown off as we will. We can show our other gifts, particularly those that make us like men… but not our sexual gifts.
Additionally, the Spanish Green party is also criticizing the ad because one of the guys is holding a glass (the photo above is cropped and doesn’t show it, not because I wanted to but because this is the one I could find), which would incite people to consume alcohol.
I kid you not: the Greens believe that showing a photograph of someone holding a glass is going to drive you to drink.
No wonder they think this overstylized picture will incite the masses into a frenzy.
Maria continues
The picture mainly portrays a woman’s sexual fantasy… She’s calmly offering herself to one or several, voluntarily, in front of other good looking men. There’s no violence at all, no pornography.
As Maria sees it,
What there is, is eroticism, fantasy and subtlety.
But there is a larger issue here:
In all, this preocupation with our well-being shows the immaturity of our female leaders. They didn’t get past the image of the neolithic man that kidnapped women from other tribes to rape and to replicate his genes. As a (male) friend said, they have remained in the ideological adolescence of the 1960s and 70s. By doing so, they have becomen women’s worst repressors, the worst agressors against the sexual freedom of each of us women.
The political comissariat indoctrinating us is missing out on a great deal of pleasures.
France2’s reporter in Italy interviewed several people on the street, and the one man they talked to said, “I don’t like it, but if you don’t want to look at the ad, don’t buy the magazine”. Of course, the ideologues would never ever think of that, because it’s all about the ideology. They know what’s good for you.
But, as Maria later asked in an email,
And what about us women who like tenderness, with imagination, fantasy, and dreams but without going too far beyond… are we stupid?
Hay que defenderse y dar la cara, la cara tierna, libre, imaginativa, femenina y, de nuevo, por si alguien tiene dudas… la libre, la cara libre de la mujer.
We must stand up for ourselves, and show our faces, the tender, free, imaginative, femenine face, and again, if anyone has any doubt, the free face of a woman.
Brava, Maria.
As a postscript, in the evening I was watching France2 news and they were talking about women in power while saying that Margaret Thatcher didn’t bring about progress and “was on the masculine side”.
That’s what happens when you are not popular with the bien pensant, even on International Women’s Day.
Update, Saturday 10 March: Atlas Shrugs and The Hill Chronicles are posting about it.
My friend Laura posed an interesting question,
In view that it’s leftist groups asking for censorship, I wonder what the reaction would have been if Christian groups or the Vatican had been doing the asking?
The Thatcher remark was telling.
The womens’ movement was never about choice- that was just the spin.
The only ‘choice’ that has ever been acceptable to the womens’ movement is the ‘choice’ that was acceptable to them and their ideology. Like leftists everywhere, they are deathly afraid of people thinking for themselves because every time populations were afforded the opportunity to choose for themselves, they chose to rid themselves of leftist ideologues and ideologies.
The IWD is a feel good bit of theater. If these women wanted to make a difference, they could. Instead, they are choosing to endorse ideologies and positions that are antithetical to the best interests of women and children.
The only thing they care about is themselves and like leftists everywhere, the only victims or potential victims they care about, are themselves.
First, let’s deal with the ad itself:
YOWZA!
Clearly the image connotes sex, promiscuity, domination, voyeurism, and complete abandonment on the part of the woman pictured (who is, dare I say it, a major hottie). There’s even a suggestion of a gang rape to come, an ambiguous conception because, while in practice it would be a degrading and possibly lethally injurious experience for the woman, there are women — possibly many women — who fantasize about being the sole object of desire of a sizable group of men.
But the ad strikes me as ineffective at what an ad is supposed to do: sell a product. What product does it promote? I can’t be sure. The emphasis is too strong; even the advertiser’s name tends to be lost in the overpowering eroticism of the image. But what do I know? I program computers for a living.
Second, the implications for women’s images of themselves, men’s attitudes toward them, what women believe those attitudes to be, and society’s overall attitudes toward women and sex:
Whatever damage was done to those things was done a long time ago. If women think of themselves excessively much as sexual objects, the past forty years have given them innumerable reasons to think so. If women think of men as being predatory in matters sexual, they’re more right than wrong; we’re designed to be the sexual aggressors, and have only recently in biological terms learned how to decouple our lusts from our innate tendencies to pursue what we desire by means of violence. Men have been as profoundly affected as women by the cultural transitions of the past four decades…perhaps more so. For while most women didn’t buy into the notion of a war between the sexes that would, if men got the upper hand, result in Friday night gang shaggings (poker game to follow) and being confined barefoot to the kitchen, quite a number of men took it as gospel that women did believe it. Their behavior has often been enough to finish the propagandization of women that the gender-war feminists started but couldn’t ram all the way home.
Society’s overall attitudes toward sex are in flux — and they’ve been in flux since the invention of language. The pendulum swung too far toward libertinism in the Seventies and Eighties, and we’ve paid a considerable price for it. However, in recent years it’s seemed to me that, with the exception of certain pockets of the entertainment industry, we’re moving a few steps back from the edge of the abyss, toward a sustainable equilibrium state that will be superior to both the anything-goes attitudes of the Disco era and the enforced prudery of the years before:
— Sex for pleasure is as valid as sex for reproduction;
— Everyone has a veto over the use of his own body;
— Everyone is entitled to enjoy it;
— As long as neither force, nor intimidation, nor deception plays a part, sex between unmarried persons is legally and socially tolerable, as is a greater degree of publicly expressed eroticism than was permissible before World War II.
— However, there are emotional and social consequences for being promiscuous, and neither contraception nor antibiotics can protect you from them;
— Keep your hands off your co-workers;
— Keep your hands off the kids;
— Own up to your responsibilities for your progeny, whether you intended them or not.
I think we can live with that, and I severely doubt that suggestive ads will have much effect on the stabilization of that consensus…even ads as provocative as the Dolce & Gabbana ad in this column.
(PS: My guess is that the ad is promoting the shoes. Nothing else is clearly visible.)
Hiya, honey! Ya come here often? What’s your sign?
Kinda freaks me out…but a law?
btw, For feminist depictions of rape by leftist men (or at least, women that the autobiographical main character, “Andrea,” trusts), read Andrea Dworkin’s Mercy.
The insult to Thatcher was in a report that highlighted how youthful and femenine is Segolene Royal, France2’s favorite politician of the day, who’s a socialist. So it was a triple insult.
The only ‘choice’ that has ever been acceptable to the womens’ movement is the ‘choice’ that was acceptable to them and their ideology.
That has been the case again, and again – and now it’s accompanied by the feminist nanny state.
Which, as Francis so well puts it, won’t be stabilizing any kind of consensus any time soon, unless it’s a consensus of coercion and victimology.
I don’t like the photo, and am glad beepless thought of a caption. Maybe I’ll do a caption contest – my entry would be,
“Are you pondering what I’m pondering, Pinky?”
“I think so, Brain, but maybe these back exercises don’t really work”.
It is a creepy picture, as Jane said, and the clamor for censorship is absurd.
Where is the clamor protesting gang rapes of women in banlieus?
What is it, an advertisement for body oil?
That’s the only product I noticed!
Absolutely disgustingly abhorring. I linked to this article here:
http://tinyurl.com/2gmagm
Well done! Excellent overview of a bizarre situation. While the left ostensibly “cares” about women’s rights, you don’t hear a chirp about the current slavery situation and the oppression of women by extremist religious bigots.
Layla, I think that you’ve misunderstood my article. In a rape situation, women scream, fight, suffer… but this picture just try to show a performance of a classical dreamy evocative situation, a sexual fantasy. And even if I don’t share this fantasy, I think that it’s a radical reaction to claim that this is degradating to women. The message (IMHO) is “some women like it, and some women don’t but… who is entitled to dictate what a woman should imagine?”.
Thanks for the mention Fausta. It galls me that women rights groups are not up in arms over this.
Parerea mea :
Barbie la gimnastica.
Layla, women’s rights groups in the EU are up in arms, but the absurd thing is that they’s up in arms about an ad in a magazina and not about the honor killings and rapes happening right in their own countries.
Vizitador,
La Barbie – ¡en clases de Pilates!
make that a magazine
I am deeply shocked and horrified that no one seems to be seeing the true dispickable meaning of this picture.
they all are wrong, it does not depict a gang rape, it indeed is far from it.
it may be a desperate attempt to open the brand for the heterosexual audience(who forseeably but falsely associates it with gang banging) but actually and much more disturbingly it is another display of how intolerant our society truly is.
the cool (wearing sunglasses) sexy elderly gentleman above the supposedly attractive female is actually
trying to educate the handsome young and therefor easliy impressable and sexually
confusable males around him that a woman is not only a human being but could also be seen as a sexual partner to start a family with. something the radical fractions of our society always proclaim to be the highest, only and true way of our species.
watch those poor boys closely how they are looking in slight disbelief yet curious about the female
gender which they never seen before in such a display.
still the state of not existing sexual arousal, their obvious uninterest in the girls primary or
secondary sexual attributes and slight boredom shows that they are unable to comprehend how someone could be sexually interested in a woman and not one of them has any thought of banging the girl yet alone as a gang.
this campaing shows that certain individuals in our world don’t even refrain from using women in what they
believe erotic postures to turn our fine young and absolutely normal homosexual boys of young age by “curing” them from their so called desease.
what this picture does not tell us is that not only two of the models but also their hair stylist and make up aritst
had to be ambulantly treated after they went into a state of shock following their severe puking attack before the end of the shoot because they actually saw a woman that close and in such a vulgar and repulsive naked way.
I never thought that even the designers could be corrupted into betraying homosexuality but obviously these days people do anything for money.