“I’ve never been fired before. It feels really awkward, like unresolved. I wish I had organized my own exit strategy. My biggest regret is that when I started, I thought I would be working for a mom and pop establishment with a pro-sex feminist morality and an emphasis on tongue-in-cheek sexuality and pin-up playfulness. In reality, the woman owner is present only in the press, and so I was working for the Man, her husband.With a name like “McMillion”, how could I have been so duped? Everything about him screams capitalist, heteronormative hegemony. In a place of business where female bodies are openly commodified, submitting and reporting to a father figure fond of scolding one minute and then flirting the next is a recipe fordegradation. I knew all this and continued working there anyway, because the money was good and I could express my agency in my creative costume choices and have some fun feeling attractive. But when the male management expressed dislike for my costume choices, preferring that I “conform at least to some degree to the preconceived notions that customers have when they drive up to the coffeeshop”, as in, “Fantasy Tuesday means bedroom fantasy”, not MY fantasy, that’s when I knew I had to leave. Don’t think you can take away the one thing that made entertaining boring, leering men worth it and expect me to happily do my job. I am a creative female with a love of costumes and performativity. I am not a fembot with a duty to entertain only on the terms of Mr. Bill McMillion. So that’s why I thank you for firing me. Maybe you thought I’d post this on your FB Group, which is why you blocked me. It’s probably a good thing you did.

But yeah, sorry I left the window unlocked. Too bad I wasn’t fired for something more scandalous than that.”

This pisses me off so much.

Exactly. I teach Communication and Women’s Studies, and you would not believe how many university students – male and female – are willing to dismiss sexist advertising with this platitude.

I always make them deconstruct it (first, I tell them it’s not worthy of a communication major (I rarely get it from a women’s studies major)). I ask what they mean by “sex” in that statement, and keep probing until we come around to “sexual objectification of women” sells.

Then I love to spring this little number on them: it doesn’t really sell. This little study,
conducted by MediaAnalyzer for AdWeek, shows that both sales and brand recall are poorer when ads use sexual objectification of women. (I’ve highlighted the relevant statistics in the PDF.)