Enough with the boob avatars, or, aren’t there special sites for that on the world wide web?
I had to pull this post out of the draft folder as Jay the Zero Boss scooped me. (Note to Jay: seriously, I’m not linking to you all the time on purpose.)
Jay writes about the sad state of men using ”hot female” avatars to gain clicks. I like to call them “the boobs.”
Initially, I was just mildly annoyed with the boobs plastered all over MyBlogLog. I knew I wasn’t the only one when I read one of the comments made by Eric from MyBlogLog in the midst of the Shoemoney mess:
But recently, I’ve seen a load of people complaining about all the “join my community” spam and all the pictures of busty women being used as a lure to bring people to their pages. I’m comfortable saying this is not behavior we want because it’s ultimately a lose / lose game.
But what really got me going was the recent report from APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. Their definition of sexualization includes when a person is “objectified — that is, made into a thing for other’s sexual use . . . .” They go on to report that studies show that women are more often “objectified (e.g., used as a decorative object, or as body parts rather than a whole person).” Emphasis mine.
Now, this isn’t news to me, and probably not to you either. But I thought we were making some progress in this area. But we’re not. As Mike Macgirvin comments:
As far as the boobs go, it’s the oldest marketing trick in the world. They get ten times as many clicks. It’s a sad fact of life. I put a cute girl on my splash image as an experiment and guess what? Ten times as many clicks as my other pages. Sometimes more.
I’ll spare you from my smug rantings about indifferent marketers. But how can we continue to pretend that the boob avatars — and media images and advertising, etc. — having nothing to do with the mental, physical, and sexual health of girls and women? Even worse – why don’t we care?
February 25th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
My nude boobs wouldn’t sell anything. They’d send the customers SCREAMING.
February 25th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
Very interesting, but kinda stupid. Of course, I have fallen victim to “the boobs” myself… I feel dirty…
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:16 am
I’ve ranted about this in my own weblog more times than I’d like to count. American society on the whole has a curious attraction to the perverse, the sexual and the taboo. It is a cultural phenomenon I like to call the ‘forbidden fruit complex’. The media glorify Anna Nicole to the extent that it completely drowns out real world news. Why? She had a big chest. So what if people are dying in the middle east. Anna Nicole this, Anna Nicole that. Did you know that ‘b__bs’ is the number 10 search term of all time? The way to protect our young from these trends is to educate them on the realities of our sick culture; explain how it came to be and why it is what it is. My daughter gave up Barbie dolls once told that she couldn’t exist in real life. She loved the Bratz. No, not the dolls. She fell in love with the car with the working radio. The dolls have been buried in the closet for months. This is all healthy. If I were to tell her that Bratz are forbidden because they wear eyeliner and fishnet, she would fall prey to the forbidden fruit complex and start to glorify them and find reasons to justify having them or being like them. And then the cycle repeats.
March 4th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
Personally I think we, as a North American society have made far too much of nudity, boobs etc. If we didn’t make these normal human body parts such a big deal, with such a stigma attached to them then our unnatural attraction to images depicting them would cease to be, and they would no longer be the “Frbidden Fruit” and the commercial use of these images would be unprofitable. Right now if we see a hint of nudity, and OMG a nipple on a female, most males fall prey to this sort of marketing ploy (at Time I have been caught in that trap myself) However if we adapted our society to accept nudity as a natural and acceptable state and we were exposed to nudity in our parks via suntanning, swimming, etc of both sexes then the image of boobs, genitals, etc would lose it’s attractiveness. Nudity and sexuality are two different things in my opinion, and our society has corrupted nudity into something dirty and forbidden making it usable to create capital gain.
March 4th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
George, I could not agree with you more. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it is here.
March 5th, 2007 at 8:55 am
Art lies in the mind of the beholder. It’s false advertisement if you ask me.
June 26th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
I believe that if you have a problem with “the boobs”, don’t click on the link.
It’s as easy as that.
October 3rd, 2007 at 11:21 pm
Kate–
Not that easy. Especially when I didn’t ask to be directed to boobs in the first place. Unwilling people–including impressionable children–get caught in this backsplash.
Even with monitoring children’s internet usage, these images are out there in the most seemingly innocuous of contexts.