In the name of a flawless face and a perfectly packaged product, Photoshop comes to the rescue. But in the process the picture is altered and unrecognizable from the original. In one (now famous) ad, Julia Roberts no longer looks like the woman we know and love despite the age lines that now appear on ...
Blood is finally being referred to in feminine product ads as the substance that leaks from our lady-parts. In the US especially, there has always been a fear of acknowledging that women actually bleed during their periods. In every ad since the dawn of televising pad and tampon commercials, our monthly bloody mess has been ...
Would you show teens something that could kill them? Would you make it appear sexy and fun? Alcohol companies do it every day. We all know the Four Loko insanity story: the lethal combination of alcohol and stimulants that allowed teens to keep drinking for longer. The company was forced to remove the caffeine from ...
Dads are dumb. We know this because commercials show us how they can’t clean anything, do laundry or cook without making a big mess. Mom rules the house, and Dad is just her hapless sidekick. But wait! What’s that there in the distance? Is it? Yes, it appears to be a competent man. Some of ...
The job of a parent is to nurture their kids without spoiling them. Or at least, that was the old job description. The new goal of parenthood is to create a kid so cool, they notice just how lame you really are. A child never forgets the day she looks up at her Dad and ...
Every day we are surrounded by the specter of beauty. With perfect faces and effortless hair, they offer to sell us cars or gum and part of us believes that we are seeing is real. We are told that the images are retouched, as if a painter popped in to correct the shading, but much ...
Sometimes it is hard for us to remember how far feminism has come, and how much has changed, until we take a look at the past. Watching Mad Men with my Mom is interesting, because it rekindles so many forgotten memories about that time. Sometimes my Dad won’t believe it, so he’ll turn to my ...
Christmas is in the air and ads are on the airwaves with ideas about how we want to fill our Santa’s Wish List. The most insidious ones are aimed at children. They work hard at getting kids to manipulate, cajole and whine their way to filled stockings, but what other messages are hidden in these ...
I would not have sex with a giant spider — would you? For most people, a requirement in a sexual partner is that they are not scary, yet most safe sex adverts continue to tell us to wrap up because sex is dangerous. The problem with this tactic is that sex is generally the opposite of scary ...
Imagine this scene. Your gorgeous, talented and sensitive boyfriend invites you over and then — oops! — he spills something on his shirt. He slowly strips it off revealing his taunt body, then he begins to demonstrate the effectiveness of Stayfree maxi pads.
Dear Madame X, I have just started seeing this girl. She seems great, but she recently told me she...
Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved arrived in my hands via a public library, when I was a broke teenager with...
My attention was drawn this week to an article about the reaction at a Canadian university to proposals to...
Airport security. Bloody nuisance. Also a conspiracy designed to subjugate women. Allow me to elaborate. Despite flying quite a...
The Cannes film festival has kicked off this week with controversy over the lack of films made by women...
Dear Madame X, I seem to be only attracted to men who are macho assholes. I like them at...
When A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962, the term sexualized violence wasn’t in use. The distinction between sexualized...
Skincare. Not so very long ago, a man would have been mocked mercilessly for using just the word, never...
