The conscience of the staff-owned retailer and the apathy of the shareholder-owned media

What a tragic and gloomy week it was; the unspeakable tragedy that the right-wing hatred of decent control allowed to happen. Then an NASA engineer was shot dead, few days after Nagasaki mayor was shot and killed during an election campaign. A right-wing "effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this court" (Justice Ginsburg) called "Partial Birth Abortion" Ban Act ended up successful, endangering the Roe in future. On Friday Hitler's birthday was celebrated; in Wellington, of all places.

But in the end, there is also a brighter side in the world; I found a piece of a lovely, inspiring article that I would love to share with you. Britain's staff-owned department store, John Lewis, decided to combat "Beauty Myth" from the retail places, the bastion of commercialism. According to the Observer article, "John Lewis set to revolutionise the way high street stores use models to sell clothes". They are "by pledging to use a diversity of women in all its advertising in a deliberate attempt to convey a 'realistic' image of what British women really look like. While the average British woman is a size 16, most models are a size 8, 10 or even 6."

If you live in Britain or visit Britain, buy everything you need at John Lewis (or grocery store Waitrose, owned by John Lewis) as much as you can. If you have a friend in Britain, recommend him/her to shop at John Lewis to commend and reward the effort with spending money, your vote in the capitalist market. You can find location of your local John Lewis store at here and Waitrose supermarket at here. Write a letter of support to them.

Amid the news that makes me smile, however, one thing concerns me; the Observer is the only media that's reporting John Lewis's progressive spirit and action. I googled "John Lewis"; I could find no other article on this topic. The media's report on company's ethical standards is crucial for the public to be able to choose to shop with socially conscious business. When the public is well-informed about which retailer cares about women's self-esteem, it prompts other retailers to follow them for the sake of profit; after all, this is the strongest motive to do something for most commercial operations. If such a commitment to social justice is ignored by the media, it diminishes the commercial attractiveness for businesses to behave ethically.

I believe that John Lewis's nature as staff-owned company enabled or encouraged it to happen. I had never heard of the trust-owned retailer before, but what a fantastic idea! Then news stories on their efforts are only told by the non-profit media (the Observer and the Guardian are owned by non-profit Scott Trust). Welcome to the world of alternative capitalism.

When Patriarchy marries to Reality TV in Italy

Italian public broadcaster has purchased and aired the obnoxious Turkish reality TV programme. For details of the programme read the Independent article above; basically the show asserts that the extreme form of partiarchy that dictate women are birth-giving machines or household slaves, as "reality". The producer, intentionally or unconsciously, professes his misogyny; according to him, the programme deals with "relationships that are eternal". Wow, I can see his desire that he wants partiarchy to be an eternal reality like the gravity, (by the way the latter's not really eternal!) but as you know it's a mere social construction that is to be smashed.

The whole story is a perfect example and evidence of the harm commercialism in the media does to the social justice. It proves that the conflict between the values of public service broadcaster and commercialism is inevitable in any country. It seems that the president of RAI perfectly understands the nature of the programme, as he commented it was to "put people into environments that are both unrealistic and coercive, leading inevitably to unreasonable if not degrading behaviour" and the public broadcaster shouldn't be providing such nonsense to the audience. Commercialist reality TV itself is evil enough. But when it marries to patriarchy, the child fathered by patriarchy and borne by a birth-giving machine called the media commercialism is certain to be horrendous and grotesque.

Ahmadinejad-like Conservative's attack on Faye Turney

Polly Toynbee at Guardian did the brilliant analysis on the British conservative media's report on the Leading Seaman Faye Turney, who was kidnapped by Iran. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,2051499,00.html Citing plenty of examples of misogynistic comments about Turney written in the papers, Toynbee concludes that "the Daily Mail believes pretty much the same as President Ahmadinejad".

This fundamentalist misogynist sentiment is not only disseminated by "trashy" tabloid papers; also by Murdoch-owned "quality" broadsheet paper, the Times. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article1596699.ece What a nonsense... Ms. Turney deserves warm support in Britain, not kind of hostilities she was forced to endure in Iran. It is ironic that those who are most vocal in support of the 'War on Terror' and love to condemn the "Islamic fascism" support the backward, bigoted Iranian agendas... Conservatives in the West and the Middle East seem to hate each other but they indeed share values that subjugate women into femininity, domesticity and maternity. We must be united against both of them.

Conception Day

Pro-life campaigners in the United States are confident and aggressive than ever before with the real prospect of Roe v. Wade being overturned in a near future by a new conservative Supreme Court, and they have extended the target of their fight to protect the right to live of unborn babies, or zygotes. They have started to launch an attack on a birthday party, rejecting it as based on pro-choice ideology.

Kerry Galwell, a founder of the conservative religious group Moral Minority, started the campaign last year; “A birthday party is a vast left-wing liberal conspiracy to brainwash our young and innocent children that life begins at birth not conception. It is a particularly subtle form of anti-life propaganda that the first nine months of life of a man he spends in his mother’s womb is not meaningful or worthy and should be ignored and forgotten”, Galwell said.

Several conservative commentators have expressed their support for Galwell’s crusade against a birthday party. “We have to protect our children from mentally insane liberals and their secret weapon called a birthday party”, Michael Brutal said in OX News’ The Preilly Influence. “Godless faggots who celebrate birthday shall suffer in the Hell eternally”, Annie Doulter wrote in her column. Several movie stars and celebrities received a threatening letter demanding to cancel their birthday party or “we would bomb you under the God’s name, to punish the heresy called a birthday party and to cleanse the modern Gomorrah called Hollywood”.

As a family-friendly leader of the Religious Right, Galwell is not just depriving an important occasion of the nation’s families. Galwell devised a concept of “a conception day” party and has vigorously promoted it in his rallies across the country. Conception day party has already gained certain popularity among evangelist parents; 8% of the parents surveyed already substituted a conception day party for a birthday party, reaching 17% high in South Carolina. “It is a great way to teach our children the proper values based on our Faith. A decade ago today my son was conceived, and that’s what really matters”, says George Wade, 33, (he insists he is 34) who is holding a conception day party for his son George X. “I like the idea of the conception day party because it’s cool and I feel nine months older”, said George X, 9 (he has just turned 10, counted from the conception day). Currently a date 270 days before birthday is used as an estimate, but “we are currently working with faithful doctors and God-fearing scientists to develop technology to evaluate the exact date of conception, the date one’s life has truly begun”, says Galwell. Galwell himself celebrated his ‘conception day party’ last November, just after the Republican’s election defeat.

He expresses his ultimate aim of his campaign as the “total elimination of the concept of ‘birthday’ from our society”. Moral Minority is lobbying the conservative Republicans in the Congress to legislate to calculate the legal age of a person from the date of conception not birth. Senator Sam Brownforward (R-Dorothy’s Homeland) has indicated his support and is planning to submit the Elimination of the Date of Birth from Official Registrations Act 2007 to the Congress. However, this proposal met some opposition by his fellow Republicans and Alcoholics Anonymous, as it would effectively lower the drinking age.

Businesses are not missing the golden opportunities to appeal to the conservative customers. Val-Mart, the biggest retail chain in the country, has started to sell “conception day card” and “conception day present”. “We have started to cater the needs of religious customers, and we are proud of it“, says Benedict Rudolph, a retail manager for Val-Mart. He also stated that Val-Mart was considering stopping the sales of all products with “birthday” references, following intensive lobbying campaign to the company by conservative groups.

The anti-birthday movement has also been spread to conservatives in other countries. In New Zealand, Brian Panmure of the evangelist Fate Church has prohibited a birthday party for his followers, and declared ‘enough is enough, enough of this birthday nonsense”, in his conception day party.

Is she scientifically beautiful?

There are some researchers who claim that Naomi Campbell is the world's most beautiful woman scientifically. And there is a respected, liberal newspaper that reports the research. I am sure that the Independent has better stories to tell, considering it is owned neither by Rupert Murdoch nor by Larry Flynt.

Beauty is subjective. The researchers would have probably thought of the Platonic 'form' of beauty, the absolute criteria of beauty to which everything can be compared. Well, this 'standard' of beauty is based on winners of a beauty competition (the article doesn't even mention which country, it is possible that it is a Polish one, considering that the research was conducted by the University of Gdansk). It is so obvious that the concept of beauty depends on culture and is shaped by culture; no matter if you agree with postmodernism or not, we all know that Peruvians or Samoans have different standards of beauty from the Polish or Americans. And it goes without saying that every individual has different views on beauty.

If the research were only flawed and useless I could have just ignored it, but this kind of research on beauty promotes ugly ideas, such as that beauty only stems from physical appearance. 'Beauty' is a deep concept, and it is certainly not something that can be measured by number; the beautiful mind, not pretty face, sexy legs or 19.5% calf girth to height percentage, is the real beauty. I don't think anyone is beautiful unless s/he has a beautiful soul. The ideology behind this research reduces real, living human beings to numbers, things, objects.

This research isn't only targeting women, so it may not be explicitly sexist, but the comment of the leading researcher's "Attractiveness of a woman's body is one of the most important factors in mate selection" is outrageous and outright misogynistic. This poisonous view that women's virtue is attractiveness, and 'unattractive' (from men's point of view, only based on physical appearances) women are not as worth as 'attractive' women, sickens me to the core of my heart. Placing utmost values on physical attractiveness is objectification (it is same for men too, objectification of both women and men is hardly better than objectification of women, but objectification of women is more serious because it is entrenched in the society).

I am annoyed, saddened and exasperated to see that this sort of nonsense is coming out from the academia, which ought to be the beacon of society to guide the public to the path of wisdom and justice, not the servant of the beauty industry. The holy grail of the fashion and beauty industries? Measuring a person's (especially a women's) worth and beauty only by BMI or waist-to-chest-ration is holy? It is nothing more than inane, it is ugly, and nothing less than unholy.

Blog Against Sexism Day: Objectification of Women and Media

In her masterpiece 'the Second Sex', Simone de Beauvoir, a French feminist, analysed women's roles and positions in the society from an existentialist point of view. "She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other", she perceptively wrote. "Now, woman has always been man’s dependant, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality", she wrote in 1949, heralding the age of second-wave feminism. Fifty-eight years later, are the two sexes sharing the world in equality today?

The progress feminism has made in last sixty years, at least in the Western world, has been nothing less than phenomenal; feminist thinkers and activists, such as Betty Friedan and Kate Millet, transformed our thinking and started to shift the very basic paradigm of the society. We had Roe v. Wade. And now, in 2007, I'm writing this from a country where the Prime Minister, the Speaker of the Parliament, and the Chief Justice are all women.

However, we shouldn't get too illuminated and blinded by the brightness of feminism's success; it would be wrong to assert that feminism has achieved its goals, even in the West. The two sexes have never shared the world in equality, and aren't sharing the world in equality, in 2007. Women haven't even achieved the equal political representation (if you doubt it, try to name a country that has 50% representation of women in Parliament, or a female Prime Minister of Sweden, which is undoubtedly one of the most feminist countries in the world), and this fundamental structure of the society which de Beauvoir depicted, designation of women as the Other, is yet to be broken down.

"She appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex – absolute sex, no less", she wrote in 1949. Her account has never been more relevant than in now. As you can see, women are depicted as sex objects, everywhere, in media. Everywhere. Sexualisation of women, and recently young girls, gravely harms their mental health and self-esteem, the crucial factor in their Mind and well-being. (I recommend you to read a full report of the American Psychological Association on this topic, at here.) This dogma that the main source of a woman's worth is her sexual or physical attractiveness. This ideology that the kindness and intelligence are less important for women; Body above Mind. The indoctorination that women should pursue the 'ideal' body image that is digitally enhanced and a total illusion, or otherwise she is not as worthy. This relationship between the One and the Other.

It is ironic that sexual liberation was one of the main themes of the sixties, and one of the main goals of feminism. Feminists fought to break the old, hypocritical sexual chastity imposed only on women, virginity worship, and constraints that deprived women of sexual pleasure. Now, the sexual revolution seems to have been successful; and women are still treated as the Other and the Object. Why has this happened? I think one of the answers is that the sexual revolution ended up far more successful than feminism. When sexual freedom is introduced into a society that hasn't deconstructed the patriarchy, the outcome would be a grim one; from this unholy union of sexual freedom and patriarchy, it is natural that pornography and sexist advertising are born. I am not saying depicting sex or naked bodies is inherently sexist or objectifying; the real problem is how we treat them, how we depict them. Or rather, how the media depict them.

Why was the sexual revolution so successful, then? Because the sex revolution met the needs of the capitalist society; businesses loved it. The commercial media loved it. Sex sells. In a capitalist society, what contributes to the interests of business-owners survives. In a society where the media is privately owned by a company whose sole motive is the profit, anything serves the profit-maximising crusade of the media owners flourishes. Rupert Murdoch must love the sexual revolution because that's why he could make millions or billions of pounds from the Sun, which shamefully has the highest circulation of any English-language paper in the world. Obviously, no matter how just it is, the commercial media isn't interested in shifting the paradigm of the patriarchal system. And how can an agenda be successful when it isn't even reported well by the dominant media (which is mostly dominated by men)?

In this society, masculinity is tied to men, and femininity is tied to women (as names suggest). It is important to dismantle these gender roles so that we don't stigmatise 'feminine' men or 'masculine' women. Also equally important is to value qualities that are considered 'feminine' at the moment. Childcare shouldn't be considered as a job for women, and the pay for childcare staff should be higher than the Wall Street traders.