In 1968, I saw an ad that changed my life. It was typical—insulting to women, demeaning. Yet, at that moment, it somehow crystallized so many of my experiences—the sexist slights, the terrible jobs, the sexual harassment, the catcalls, the objectification. I thought, “This is atrocious … and it is not trivial.” I started collecting ads and lecturing on the topic. I made my first film, “Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women” in 1979 (and have remade it three times since). Eventually I wrote and made films about alcohol and tobacco advertising. In 2015, I was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
I wrote...
Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel
Many advertisements these days make us feel as if we have an intimate, even passionate relationship with a product. But the dreamlike promise of advertising always leaves us hungry for more. We can never be satisfied because the products we love cannot love us back.
A barrage of advertising drastically affects young people, especially girls, by offering false promises of rebellion, connection, and control. Advertising also creates and then feeds an addictive mentality that often continues throughout adulthood.
Berger introduced me to the concept of the male gaze. He explored it primarily in the world of art, but I realized it applied also to the world of advertising.
Among other things, it explained to me why nude and semi-nude women are often featured in women’s magazines. I learned that women carry within us a man who is looking at us, and we are socialized to want to attract and appeal to that man. This has been a key concept in my work.
"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.""But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled."John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" is one of the most stimulating and the most influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about…
This is one of the most brilliant and important books I have ever read!
Way ahead of his time, Postman described the increasing and detrimental role of entertainment in every aspect of American life. His predictions have been realized beyond his wildest nightmares.
Although not a book about advertising, it helped me understand that advertising has been a key player in the trivialization of American culture and the corruption of the way we think. I had the privilege of knowing Neil, which certainly added to my appreciation of his genius.
What happens when media and politics become forms of entertainment? As our world begins to look more and more like Orwell's 1984, Neil's Postman's essential guide to the modern media is more relevant than ever.
"It's unlikely that Trump has ever read Amusing Ourselves to Death, but his ascent would not have surprised Postman.” -CNN
Originally published in 1985, Neil Postman’s groundbreaking polemic about the corrosive effects of television on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century. Now, with television joined by more sophisticated electronic media—from the Internet to cell…
I read this classic, published in 1957 when I was in high school. It was perhaps the first critique of advertising, and I found it fascinating.
Packard identified eight “compelling needs” that advertisers promise products will fulfill. Years later, I recognized how some of these needs were used to sell addictive products.
Although he didn’t address the objectification of women, he opened my eyes to the manipulative power of advertisers and the subconscious meaning of ads.
"One of the best books around for demystifying the deliberately mysterious arts of advertising."--Salon
"Fascinating, entertaining and thought-stimulating."--The New York Times Book Review
"A brisk, authoritative and frightening report on how manufacturers, fundraisers and politicians are attempting to turn the American mind into a kind of catatonic dough that will buy, give or vote at their command--The New Yorker
Originally published in 1957 and now back in print to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, The Hidden Persuaders is Vance Packard’s pioneering and prescient work revealing how advertisers use psychological methods to tap into our unconscious desires in order to "persuade" us…
This was the first book to examine the tobacco industry’s role in exploiting women. Although this was important to me, even more interesting was Jacobson’s finding that women often use smoking to keep their emotions in check, especially to stifle anger. For this reason, women find it more difficult to quit smoking than men do.
As someone who had tried many times to quit smoking, I found this insight invaluable personally. Eventually, I incorporated this into my work. I also was finally able to quit!
Williamson was one of the first people (after me) to critique advertising from a feminist point of view. I could have chosen her earlier book, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising, which also had a big influence on me, but this one is less academic and more readable.
Her discussion of how advertising channels people’s desire for progressive change into a need for products was one of the themes of my doctoral dissertation (written before this book). There are many gems, such as the fact that the ideal body type for women in ads has sometimes been that of a teenage boy!
Writing with wit and charm and intelligence Judith Williamson explores the forces that channel our tastes and structure our lives: films, books, television, advertisements, photography, music, political movements, and even the royal family.
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of citations and interviews with more than 250 key protagonists, experts, and witnesses.
So far, the book is the main -- and only -- antidote to a slew of early partisan “Benghazi” polemics, and the first to put the attack in its longer term historical, political, and social context. If you want to understand some of the events that have shaped present-day America, from political polarization and the election of Donald Trump, to January 6, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russian expansionism, and the current Israel-Hamas war, I argue, you need to understand some of the twists and turns of America's most infamous "non-scandal, scandal.”
I was in Benghazi well before, during, and after the attack as a US diplomat and co-director of a medical NGO. I have written three books, and have been a contributor to The NYT, Foreign Affairs, Forbes, Salon, The Financial Times, Newsweek, and others.
On September 11, 2012, Al Qaeda proxies attacked and set fire to the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, killing a US Ambassador and three other Americans. The attack launched one of the longest and most consequential 'scandals' in US history, only to disappear from public view once its political value was spent.
Written in a highly engaging narrative style by one of a few Western experts on Libya, and decidely non-partisan, Benghazi!: A New History is the first to provide the full context for an event that divided, incited, and baffled most of America for more than three years, while silently reshaping…
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