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UNIVERSITY O ' PR ‘ " 7 I" A " It V

The Women Market

By VICTORIA SMITH AND JUDY FITZGERALD Canadian University Press/Liberation News Service

Women may serve a variety of functions in American society, but a function that all women serve is that of a domestic market.

And they serve it faithfully, almost eagerly, it would seem.

American women, perhaps more than any oth— er women in the world, must fulfill their role as heavy consumer. If they don’t, their whole identity — an identity createdl primarily by business and advertising — will be shattered.

When a woman reads in her favorite woman’s magazine that “Unfortunately, the trickiest deod- orant problem a girl has isn’t under her pretty little arms,” she starts to worry. Is my vaginal area (“the most girl part of you,” the ad gurgles) giving off offensive odors? she wonders. .

“Could you be the last woman to be using just one deordorant ?” an ad! for another vaginal deod- orant queries.

She may not smell all that bad, but just to make sure, she picks up a container of FDS (fem- inine deodorant spray) and Albertao-Culver Co. scores another point.

Alberto-Culver and other companies in the woman market understand the American woman. They know she’s insecure, often unhappy with the narrow perimeters of her life, desperate in her efforts to catch and/0r keep a man.

So the company anticipates a female insecurity that can be turned into a need, and creates a pro- duct to fulfill the newly discovered need. If the product is successful, the company’s profits in- crease. If not, there’s always another “need”.

“The only advantage of my small bo- som is that I can wear see-through fashions without looking obscene! (Next to me, Mia Farrow is buxom!) What cosmetics can I use to make my breasts prettier?”

Kenneth has a brand-new bosom- makeup kit, Nude . . . holds three pro- ducts: Bosom Highlighter for top slope of breast; Cleavage Delineator to brush between breasts for contouring; and! Tip Blush—rosy, transparent liquid—for the nipples. (Kit is $7.50; products can also be used on other areas of your anatomy.) You could use regular face makeup —- foundation, rouge, or blusher—but it might rub off on your clothes—or his.

Basically, there are two problems with corpor- ate America’s approach towomen—-—w‘hich can apply to its approach to all people.

First, business can hold no real concern for women as human beings. It must objectify all women as a “market” in order to increase growth and profits. Business is concerned only with the ways in which it can get women to buy. Whether the products sold are of any real use, or meet real needs, is unimportant. ‘ .

Second, American business creates excessive waste of resources, particularly through products made for women. People do not need 50 different kinds of soap to choose among, or 100 different types of lipstick. But Amerlcan companies contlnue

to produce dozens on variations on the same useless themes, and thus divert energy, resources and money from more productive human goals.

In 1968, for instan e, $3.1 billion was spent on television advertising, twice the amount spent on the poverty program in the same year.

The advanced technological era that America has recently entered should make for greater free- dom for Americans.

But American technology has generally grant- ed the opposite effect, and American women are the most alienated from and enslaved by it. As a group, women have little control over production and planning. They relate to the technological so- cietyprimarily as a consumer market.

Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with consumption. But in American society, women are forced to consume large quantities of goods and services they really don’t need or want.

Advertising is the mouthpiece for the compan- ies that create products for the woman market.

On a very basic level, the advertising and edi- torial content of women’s magazines like McCall’s, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan and Mademoiselle are in- sults to women as human beings. So are the wom- en’s sections in newspapers and daytime TV.

Let’s look at some of these insults and the

, ways in which they are used to keep women in

their place as a domestic market.

Teenage girls are a market in training.

The people who run Seventeen magazine, the slick, top-selling teenage publication, understand the importance of the youth market.

An ad in the New York Times, June 18, 1969, reads:

“The Seventeen award to American industry for its investment in the country’s young women under 20.

“Once again advertisers have demonstrated their realization that youth sets the pace.

And once again Seventeen, their magazine, has- broken all publishing records for a single issue.

The “strength of Seventeen” is not that is informs or educates young women, but that it sells advertiser’s products.

This August is a new high, carrying 357 ad- vertising pages, 245 in 4—color . . . Seventeen is the biggest circulation magazine in the young women’s field — for 16 consecutive years, it has carried more advertisingrthan any other woman’s monthly magazine.

That’s the strength of Seventeen.”

The “strength of Seventeen” is not that it in- forms or educates young women, but that is sells advertisers’ products.

The ad congratulates American industry for “investing” in these young women, much as if in- dustry were investing in some kind of new auto- mobile or hairspray.

The focust of the advertising and editorial in Seventeen is fashion — clothes and cosmetics.

The projected image is young, super—slim, tall, carefully made-up to look “natura ”, tastefully (and not inexpensively)) dressed and (despite an occa- sional angle-looking black model) white. The im- possible teenager.

And the youth market booms. Young American girls move into young woman-

hood with a number of insecurities, mostly about

sex and boys. g (

Seventeen and the youth marketers have a beautiful answer. It lies in the right kind of clothes and makeup. You “pamper” your skin, “cultivate the flowery look that becomes you,” and “highlight your hair, especially if (it’s brown on the sahdy side,” (Seventeen, June, 1969).

In America, a young woman’s buying habits and personality develop side-lby-side. Corporate

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America insures that the two will not be separated. What she. wears and what she puts on her face be? come as Important to her as what she studies in school how she relates to other people.

If the advertisers play it right, a girl will no' more abandon her Revlon blusher or her clairol SBorn Blonde” than she would abandon her fondest

reams.

And” industry can even help formulate her dreams for her: Wallace Sterling, DeBeers Diam- onds, Lenox china, Spring-maid linen. The make-up, the clothes, the diets, the hair pieces and hair-_ colorings for an individual girl all point to one goal — to catch and keep a man. This typecasting of women, is so obvious in the women’s magazines that is never has to be made explicit.

As long as technology is controlled by men pursuing profit and corporate expansmn, human beings, especially women, cannot participate except as Investments and markets.

As the young female consumer grows so does .her spending power. Industry summons its resour- ces to meet her new “needs”. ’

Whether she s gomg to college or working in an office, she is told that she must maintain, even amplify the Image created for her as a teenager.

Her _magazines are Glamour, Mademoiselle (iosmopohtan, especially if she’s white and middle: c ass.

. Glamour calls her “the breakaway girl,”

Independent, energetic, strongwilled, and, of course, chic. The breakaway girl is an important market Glamour tells advertisers. . ’

In fact, she has broken away from nothing. She may not rush out of high school directly into marriage, but she still fits herself into whatever image industry creates for her in a given year.

_ A fashion article in the June issue of Made- mmselle begins: “During the big jump from High School grad to free-wheeling college frosh, the look changes. Adapts, chameleonlike, to the college spirit. Not only clothes — hair and faces too.”

Mademoiselle tells her she’s “freewheeling,” so she can flatter herself that she’s independent while bin-g told What sh must wear to college.

With Glamour and Mademoiselle hitting the college market, Cosmopolitan, perhaps the closest thing to the girl’s version of Playboy, confronts the working girl. \ ~ '

The magazine’s editorial policies and advertis- ers use the image of the sexually—liberated young woman to sell products. ' ‘

American women are far from sexually liber- ated, _a fact that publications like Cosmopolitan effectlvely betray. For instance, the lead} article in the July Cosmopolitan is “39 Men Tell‘ a Nice 'Girl Like You What Turns Them On.” Another article discusses the best tactics to use in seducing ‘ married men. The magazine never talks about gen— uine love among human beings.

Sex is just another sales gimmick. The “break- away girl” provides an excellent market, but she herself is a product, packaged and sold with the hfilp of industry and advertising, to the man of her c oxce. , ' \ ' r