That being said, I agree with Remittance Girl. I don’t believe they are that coordinated either.I do believe that the system as a whole evolved within this construct and the system has adapted in such ways as to protect itself. 

Pull the lens back and look at it from afar. (pick your poison, government, media, big business…)

Pulling back you can see the system as an organism and its desire to protect itself. Pick it apart and there will be no conspiracy to destroy the idea of a citizen and to mold people into perfect economic consumers, but the system as a whole demands it and so incrementally, bit by bit it adapts and evolves to get what it needs.

That is what scares me the most. It would be easier if you could point to a single person or group of people deliberately responsible for this. Certainly over time there are people who deliberately power monger (Dick Cheney). It is scary because it is an evolution that we have allowed to happen and now it is so entrenched with such strong defenses that to unseat it, to change it will be no small task.    

One thing worth noting, perhaps is that this fakeness, this plastic layer over both women and men in terms of attraction and behavior does have a biological origin. There have been numbers of studies, for example, across cultural and gender lines that point to an idealized set of facial and body features that the majority of humans consider attractive. We’re semi-hardwired to be attracted to health, youth, fecundity, virility, and pick up on the manifestations of those things (symmetry of features, smoothness and tone of skin, builds that convey strength and/or ability to bear children.

Television, consumerism, magazines, all those things hijack, co-opt and fetishize our evolutionary proclivities in the name of consumerism it’s an old story, but one we can at least begin to control if we understand it.

I have a slight question, though, about whether the homogenization we see on TV and other mass media is _quite_ as dangerous now as it was even ten years ago. The net continues to grow, and with it ways of getting specialized entertainment and information. The net is the lifeblood of amateur porn – and viral video, and a host of other types of information and entertainment that is far less controlled than mainstream media. It is at the point where some powerhouses put a lot of money and effort into mimicking that free style, in order to profit by it.

I know my view is skewed – I don’t watch TV, and I know it is still a dominant source of information and entertainment, but it is facing increasing competition from “new media” and “new new media”. Perhaps some of the “sex doll and glandular idiot” personifications of women and men we see is the result of TV (and old media like print mags) trying to carve out a niche/territory in a shrinking pool of eyes.

This did make me think of a study I read recently about women’s post-war consumption and tupperware asserted this: Popular historical narratives on women depict them as manipulated by the new era of mass-product marketing, a male- driven and dominated field. It is a superficial stereotype. Activities of women during this period are often parodied and vilified which shows a lack of understanding of the complexities of post-war feminism.

Women’s “private sphere” was considered diminished as corporate America moved into the household and diminished feminist sentiment. Clarke argues against this, using Tupperware as the expression of feminist sentiment and power. The motivation for creating Tupperware were a result of its designer tuning into the desires of the broader culture.

The Party Plan system, while trivialized, actually spoke of a “non-radical” feminism. The success of the Party Plan relied on women’s consumption, modernity and their gender. Material goods reflected choices and consumption reflected positive- self-determination ~ a complete opposite view of the reductionism theory of women as manipulated.

Reductionist approaches to consumption don’t acknowledge the complexity of the world in which the consumption takes place and superficial views of post-war women as manipulated consumers fail to acknowledge the power women yielded in designing their future. Tupperware sales were intimately part of post-war suburbia and were considered a part of social mobility. The economic freedom also benefited women who were establishing gender and social roles.

The success of Tupperware products was not about their function. It was about the party-plan that was embraced by women because of its social and participatory liberating nature that connected women with women.

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It was all very eye-opening and made me rethink previous notions I had about women as being manipulated by the white men sitting around board offices trying to think of ways to sell to them.

Sorry of off topic a bit. This is a great discussion.

Random thoughts. No even trying to make sense. Just what went through my head.

And yet as one who tries to think for myself and tried, really tried, to take part in the happenings of my village, where I live, to contribute thoughtfully and as part of the process, I feel powerless and beat down by the mechanisms put in place that are now designed to prevent us from easily making a real difference in what happens around us.

Beaten, I withdrew and I constantly ask myself what *I* can do, and the answer is I don’t know…

Being viewed (and molded) into a spending machine in the all-important economy has stripped us of our voices and meaning as citizens. In the American media you only hear talk of the consumer and how the consumer is acting and how that impacts the economy. You never hear about what citizens are doing, or how citizens feel about anything in society.

Nowhere was this more apparent when President Bush told the American public to spend and keep on consuming to support the war.

And where was the thought, the protest and the (American) citizenry in reaction to the most ill-conceived and poorly executed war since Vietnam?

It was there, (barely!) and it was drowned out in the din of cash registers ringing and the simple-minded shouting of the “pro-war patriots” against the “anti-war (and anti-American by implication) left wing radicals”

One of the few attempts I’ve seen trying to bring this debate to the public forum is Michael Moore in his documentary “Capitalism, A love story”, which is about this exactly. Unfortunately as such a polarizing lightning rod I think Michael Moore is no longer effective in the debate. People either drink his Kool-aid or disbelieve everything he says without actually pausing to listen or discuss it, but then again, that’s kind of the whole problem in general isn’t it.

I agree with Remittance Girl and think the media equally distorts, warps and manipulates the idea of the men and think your statement could be expanded to say, “real women or men”.

The “idea” of men that is purported in the media is just as ridiculous and unattainable as that of a woman. It is an idea that I have never been comfortable with, and have never been able to fit myself into.

The easiest (and most ridiculous) caricatures are those that are offered in the so called, “men’s” and “women’s” magazines they publish. It was in looking at these magazines, and most publications out there that I realized the media is spoon feeding us regurgitated shit to wear us down and fit us into their “idea” of what a consumer should be.

One of the comments earlier suggested there was perhaps some intent, I think the control is more insidious. Precisely because there’s no direct leadership for capitalism’s consumerist hegemony, it’s impossible to pin down in the way the other isms have allowed themselves to be. There’s no great conspiracy, except by default; and any change, in men’s ability to engage emotionally, in women’s shunning of the industrialisation of ‘beauty’, or any of the other liberations necessary for contented enlightenment, won’t come from leadership, but from internal thought, dialogue and self-realisation. On which point we return to the industrialisation of Gradgrind’s education system…

However, I have to tell you that I have come to believe that most of the movements you mention – feminism, ecology, socialism … have been, in my opinion, subsumed by the same sickness – a desire for power first. I will never forgive with what relish the feminist movement embraced and fed a culture of male-hating. I’ll never forgive the ecologists for skewing and manufacturing data to serve their own agenda. And I’ll never forgive the socialists for putting their personal power before the people they were, by ideology, obliged to serve.

In my lifetime I have seen the whoring and perversion of every good cause under the sun. In my lifetime I’ve seen people turn feminism into something resembling the Spanish Inquisition. I’ve seen the ecologists eagerly embrace appalling scientific methodology to bolster their cause. I’ve seen socialists….well…ha… look where I live.

Our hope is in our ability, as individuals, to be critical thinkers about what is presented to us as fact, as necessary, as right.