In June 2007, Randall Cosco wrote in Adbusters magazine that “the one group who is among the most harangued and injured by marketing, and whose lifelong loyalty is coveted and groomed by advertisers more than anyone else’s…is pre-teen and teenage girls.”
With two million young women reading Seventeen magazine, and about one million readers of CosmoGIRL and Teen Vogue each, advertisers are able to quickly and without challenge distribute their messages of shame, competition, insecurity and unattainable standards to American girls and women. Combating these messages with feminist, informed and accurate commentary is crucial if the 21st century is to see a new generation of healthy, empowered and media literate citizens.
Adbusting for Young Feminists
Feminist adbusting is a creative, constructive way to respond to damaging or unhealthy ideas in the media and reclaim ideas about women and femininity. Adbusting requires only two materials: advertisements and a way to respond to them.
One common form of adbusting is writing on printed advertisements with markers, but there are other ways to interact with advertising and the media. Written, filmed or visual parodies, verbal discussion and written analysis also work, depending on the situation and the advertisements being busted. Any form of discourse works as long as it provides young feminists with the voice to respond to misogynist, objectifying, shaming or other damaging media content.
Adbusting: Responding Constructively to Anti-Feminist Media
The goal of feminist adbusting is to empower all women, including the models. Though it is tempting to use the power of adbusting to lash back against the impossibly perfect models in magazines, ridiculing or demeaning women depicted in advertising is not constructive adbusting. In fact, anti-feminist advertising wants to foster competition between women, encouraging them to fight one another in a never-ending struggle to be "the most beautiful."
Feminist adbusting should give voice to the women in advertising and the media. Adding speech bubbles or captions, responding to the copy already in place and re-wording and adjusting advertisements to more accurately reflect their damaging subtexts or implications are all forms of productive adbusting. The goal of adbusting is to make the implicit explicit and expose advertisements as unhealthy or to change them into empowering expressions of feminist ideas.
Organizing a Feminist Adbusting Workshop Event
Ideally, adbusting should happen everywhere in the thoughts and conversations of all feminists, but organizing a structured event helps start the conversation and reveal stereotypes and ideas that may have gone unnoticed by young people constantly exposed to advertising. There are many different ways to organize a feminist adbusting event, as the only requirement is a productive way for young participants to respond to hurtful media.
One good model for an adbusting event is the interactive booth in a public area. Feminist activists at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland set up an adbusting workshop in a major campus building by making magazines and markers available to all students passing through, and encouraging participants to find an offensive ad, respond to it, and tape it up for passerby to read. Smaller workshops for after-school programs or middle and high school classes might include videos and structured discussions about media literacy as well.
Media literacy is extremely important for young people constantly exposed to advertising that contains damaging, unhealthy and sexist marketing tactics. Encouraging youth – especially young women – to engage with media and advertisements in a way that empowers them places them in control of their own thoughts and futures. Teaching feminist adbusting strategies is an easy but important way to improve media literacy and combat the harmful messages young people encounter every day.
Readers interested in empowering social commentary and media literacy might also enjoy: A Bechdel Test of One's Own: Modeling Media Literacy for Youth, Target Women, Adbusters, and the Sociological Images blog.
Lisa Dodge - I'm a college student studying creative writing in Baltimore, Maryland, where I serve as editor in chief of our lit mag, work as a peer ...
