Don't Worry Darling, You Didn't Burn The Beer!
Welcome to another edition of the Fred & Dan Blog! Our mission with Fred&Dan Productions and this blog has always been to make people think in ways they’ve never done before - to spark creativity and facilitate conversation in unconventional ways. A place where you can open up your email and have a bit of creativity to take with you into your day or week!
During a women in film class in college, my professor asked after we watched the movie Thelma & Louise, “why is it that female friendships aren't featured heavily in the media?” I answered, “Because when women are friends, we build each other up, and that messes with their advertising dollars and ability to manipulate us.” Companies and products have spent millions of dollars making women hate each other and themselves all in the effort of us buying things. And what makes women not hate each other and themselves? Other women. The girls in line at the bathroom at the bar who are going to give you a hair tie and compliment your outfit.
It was a bit simplistic of an answer. Female friendships aren’t going to necessarily reclaim decades of damage from gross and sexist advertisements, but this year of “reclaimed girlhood” spurred by the record breaking Barbie movie and Taylor Swift Era’s Tour feels like some sort of healing. Although, of course, these are both still ways to sell us things. At least these things are marketed from us to us.
While preparing for our Zine Subliminal, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the effects of advertisements and media on our culture and on my own girlhood. I didn’t grow up in the age of these pop art advertisements where men console their wives because at least they “didn’t burn the beer!” As seen the the collage above. But I did grow up in an age where America’s Next Top Model made me believe a size 6 was considered overweight. Or that Britney Spears at the 2009 VMAs, who had two children and still had a VISIBLE SIX PACK, had let herself go.
I’m not saying anything new here by pointing out the way the media and society’s obsession with thinness has skewed the minds of many girls, now women, who grew up from the 90s to the early/mid-2000s. But Subliminal has helped me to closely examine even more these seemingly innocuous pop culture stories that permeated my childhood.
These are just one type of subliminal messaging that we receive every day in our lives. It’s transformed from being not subtle at all, i.e. “Is it always illegal to kill a woman?” (see above) to being dug deeper into the subconscious with hidden messages. Because we keep getting smarter, they keep trying to hide it better.
They are still selling us ways that we need to change ourselves, but it has been repackaged in the shiny words of “self care” to make us believe that now we aren’t doing it for men, but for ourselves! And largely, it is men telling us this.
It’s hard to fight back, but collectively I think we can do it. This wasn’t just the year of reclaimed girlhood, but of women saving the world by fully embracing what they love proudly, without the fear of being “basic.” Women turned out in droves this summer to movies and concerts and it literally turned around the U.S. economy. Look at what “girls supporting girls” means - when our girlfriend Taylor Swift went to her boyfriend’s football game, his jersey sales went up by 400%. It means we, women from the age of 18-34 who all like the same things, have power—purchasing or otherwise. It means the reclamation of the name basic bitch. Because as we like to say here at Fred&Dan, “basic bitch, but say it with your chest.”
As you go through your next week think about the current, every day subliminal messaging advertisers are trying to tell us in 2023. How are similar ideals and values from 70 years ago still being pushed on us today in a new form? How can we identify this and push back against it? What subliminal messaging might we bring to the table to confirm our humanity?
And stay tuned for how we cover the topic of subliminal in the next issue of our zine, out October 31st and available to pre-order right now!
