Sunday, January 03, 2010

Suckers, were...."Selling products, not values"

Average Female Mannequin:
Size: 2, Height: 6′0, 32A-23-33

Average North American Woman:
Size: 14, Height: 5′4, 41-35-43

Anyone whose a regular reader of Crowbar Massage, knows that I've got a particular loathing for the Barbie Brigade and thier lucrative and oppressive Beauty Business. As a former youth pastor and now a senior pastor, as well as a father of a teenage girl...I've witnessed first hand, the damage upon the psyche and pocket books of American girls and women. It's scandalous in my opinion. So..when I've seen the Dove Beauty Campaings like the one below or this one...I find some hope.
But as usual that hope is dashed to the ground in a landslide of corporate hypocrisy, when I found out that...Dove is part of the same company (Unilever) that produces the AXE commercials.

Here is a mash up of the dove commercial with Axe commercials...showing the marketing manipulation that is going on in the Beauty industry (Warning: sexually charged images ahead)

In an op-ed titled “A Company’s Ugly Contradiction” in The Boston Globe...contributor Michelle Gillett said, “Viewers are struggling to make sense of how Dove can promise to educate girls on a wider definition of beauty while other Unilever ads [for Axe] exhort boys to make ‘nice girls naughty.’ …Unilever is in the business of selling products, not values, and that means we, the consumers, are being manipulated, no matter how socially responsible an ad seems.”

Once again, I am reminded by the inextricable nature of nonmoral, and unguided capitalism and whatever it touches. Consumerism is the gnawing appetite of a people who have been seduced, deceived and plundered by a soul eroding system of worldliness.

As Saint Augustine said in his autobiography "Confessions":...we are in love with our own ruin, in love with our own decay.

I look forward to the liberating day when all of creations sings:

"Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great!
She has become a home for demons
and a haunt for every evil spirit,
a haunt for every unclean and detestable bird.
For all the nations have drunk
the maddening wine of her adulteries.
The kings of the earth committed adultery with her,
and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries."
-Revelations 18:1-3

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