Cross-posted from Tracee Sioux at Empowering Girls: So Sioux Me.

“Kids close your eyes!”

How many times do you find yourself trying to protect your children from harmful and destructive images while watching family television?

Two years ago, while watching television, I was assaulted with an image of a woman wearing a see-through nightgown, nipples protruding and visible, erotic soft lighting, floating in a bathtub. It was intentionally erotic, except that she had been violently and bloodily murdered and this erotic woman was, in fact, dead.

“What the heck is going on?” I thought. “Why are my children and I being subjected to this kind of sexually violent imagery in a commercial?”

So, I wrote the FCC. The Federal Communications Commission used to be the people who governed our airwaves. They used to control when and what was allowed to air during times when children were expected to be viewing television. Remember when they wouldn’t let radio stations play George Michael’s, I Want Your Sex?

Many months later they wrote back.

“Each network or television station has control over what it airs during commercials. You’ll have to write each network to complain about every commercial you feel is inappropriate,” they informed me.

“What? Who made that stupid rule?” I wanted to know.

And now that I’ve read So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids, by Diane Levin, Ph.D, and Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D, I know who made that stupid rule.

(more…)

On Mondays I feel like I have all the time in the world to read — not skim — anything and everything.

Even long, complicated articles.

You too? Here’s some recommended reading:

At Sea in a Marketing-Saturated World: The Eleventh Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends: 2007-2008. From the Commercialism in Education Research Unit at Arizona State University. Browse CERU’s other publications.

Monograph 19: The Role of the Media in Promoting and Reducing Tobacco Use. From the National Cancer Institute. Seems that tobacco marketing tactics are mimicked by the food industry.

Consumer Behavior: The Psychology of Marketing. From Dr. Lars Perner at the University of Southern California. This is how it’s done.

Blogger Daddy Types takes on the “baby industrial complex” and exposes one of its useless, expensive products sold to new parents:

When I started my investigative crusade against BabyPlus last year, I just figured exposing it was an entertaining diversion. BabyPlus was an outlier, an isolated example of one crazy, unaccountable huckster in Seattle who’s made a twenty year career peddling the most outrageous bullshit marketing that new parents are subjected to, the kind of stuff that pushes every insecurity and aspirational button a First-Time Expectant has. So someone is gullible enough to drop $150 and strap a piece of superstitious, nonsensical junk around her belly for a few hours? Where’s the harm?

But since then, the involvement of Mothers Work, the biggest maternity store company in the country, and now Dorel, the largest baby gear company in the world, changes the game. These companies are on the hook for BabyPlus’s manipulations and deceits, in large part because they fit perfectly into the companies’ core business model, which is to sell as much stuff as they possibly can to First-Time Expectants, even if that means teaming up with a complete quack to make completely unverifiable claims to sell completely useless products.

Ditch the Characters for the Classics, from the Tampa Tribune:

At a recent book fair in Hillsborough County, young readers could find plenty of books about Sponge Bob, Barbie, Transformers and Pokemon, but would have been hard pressed to turn up more than one Caldecott Award winner.

And the timeless classics of children’s literature? Forget about them.

. . . . (A) company committed to literacy ought to recognize that quality counts in the material children read. They should keep in mind that many families rely on Scholastic for affordable children’s books, and they don’t want a cheap imitation of what literature should be.

Scholastic would do a new generation of young readers a tremendous service by making the best of their titles readily available and minimizing overtly commercial works.

Need better books? Shop Unplug Your Kids Store which has a nice selection of Fall-themed, non-licensed-charactered books available now. It’s Babysitter Approved!

And today’s the last day to click over to MOMboTV and help PEM win $100. Check out Eco Cheap: Going Green on a Budget. And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to click this week!

CCFC is a getting some good press since Scholastic decided to drop the Bratz brand from their school offerings. I have to say, though, that I’m taken aback by all the people likening Scholastic’s decision to “censorship.”

We’re not talking about a public library here, or even a school library. Scholastic is a for-profit corporation.

This ain’t censorship.

(And if you really want to get your hands on some Bratz books, looks like Amazon only has about 250 titles to choose from.) 

Unfortunately, children in public schools are a captive audience who have no choice but to be the target of Scholastic’s product pitches.

It’s funny: I’m always hearing that it’s the parents’ responsibility to say no to their kids and to let the free market work. Isn’t that just what happened here? I took the responsibility to let my girls know that Bratz-branded products are not allowed in our  house. And as a Scholastic customer, I let Scholastic know that I would not be purchasing Bratz books from them. So did many other parents. Scholastic responded by dropping the Bratz books from their product line. How is this censorship? Isn’t Scholastic just responding to their market?

You can still help Parents for Ethical Marketing win $100 by clicking over to MOMboTV. Today’s suggested post: An interview with Ted Ning from Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS). LOHAS encourages business leaders to be more responsive to the needs of socially-conscious consumers.

A friend kindly alerted me to a new ad from the good-hearted social activists at Dove/Unilever.

The video, like Dove’s others, made my blood boil. Thinking that my friend understood my point — that Dove/Unilever cannot both decry and promote harmful media images of women – I shot a note back to him, expressing my contempt for the ad and thanking him for sending it.

He was confused. Rightly so. Here’s the ad:

Watching this, all I can think about is the hypocrisy of Dove/Unilever claiming that they created special workshops to help promote self-esteem in girls. (These are the same people who came up with this hysterical ad: If Barack Obama wore Axe, Hillary Clinton would vote for him.) And that by buying Dove/Unilever products, you can help girls get their self-esteem back.

But to my friend, this video was eye-opening. He said:

I was really struck by the ad content . . . because it actually made me more aware of the problem. It made me think about the young girls I know (cousins, daughters of friends, my about-to-be niece) and how they will encounter all that pressure. My reaction to that awareness was, “what positive messages can I send to the girls I love to counter some of this?”

Whoa. You mean, the ad was effective? 

Ouch.

I originally wrote about the Campaign for Real Beauty a couple of years ago.

I’ve also written about their hit video Onslaught and Dove/Unilever’s message: It’s a parent’s responsibility to make sure the damaging messages they themselves produce don’t reach your kids.

I need to remember that I’ve been working on these issues for quite a while. And not everyone is at the same place that I am when they see ads like these. 

And in that sense, this ad by Dove/Unilever is a good thing: It captured at least one person’s attention and brought the issue to light for him. It’s a start.  

However, I still believe that by continuing to market the products they do and by continuing to create the advertisements they do, Unilever assures that they will continue to have a captive audience for whatever they need, whether it’s consumers to buy products, donors for campaigns, or young girls for self-esteem workshops.

If the problem here really is media images, and if Dove/Unilever really wants to help girls, how about this: Stop producing the ads.

MOMboTV is giving $100 to the blog that refers the most readers to their site this week. Click on over to help PEM get the funds. With $100, we could send out more that 3,000 monthly newsletters including parenting strategies to raise healthy kids and fight the unwelcome corporate marketing directed at your kids, the latest research, and updates on PEM activities.

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The MOMbo team is comprised of stay at home moms, work at home moms and career moms.  We are married moms and single moms.  We are raising young children. We have raised adult children.  From our respective locations around the world, we bring our contributions to the MOMbo community. We come with an eye toward understanding and appreciation–and the desire to effectively model these values for our children.

News of Scholastic removing Bratz books from their school offerings has hit the big time: Read it from celebrity blogger Perez Hilton.

Reader Vaquera points us to the Heelarious high heels for infants. More on those from Feministing and Hoyden.

And Joe Kelley from Dads & Daughters reports on Parents, Kids, and the Media.