Image Description: The bookmark-sized flyer is a coupon for a free one-week trial membership at Boston Sports Club, a local gym franchise. The text on the flyer is black on white reading “Reading Expands Your Mind. Sitting Expands Your Butt.”

It was something about the heady combination of  book hatred, body hatred, and invasion of my personal space (er, mailbox) that momentarily filled me with such rage that I had this vision of myself setting fire to the leaflet and letting the thing burn before dropping it in the toilet.

And filming the whole thing so I could email it to the BSC marketing department.

Just to let them know they’d lost a potential customer.

I haven’t done this yet, but as you can see I still have the flyer and every so often I consider actually following through on my evil plan.

Why, you may ask, do I have such pent-up animosity towards the neighborhood gym?

For the past few years, Hanna and I have been observing the marketing strategies of the various gyms around Boston (note: I have never lived in a place with such a high gym-to-population saturation level!), and Boston Sports Club is consistently the most in-your-face with their messaging. Other gyms might make flexible hours or convenience to work a selling point, their on-site-trainers, or the fact that they’re women only. But Boston Sports Club relies 100% on peddling shame and anxiety.

“Two-thirds of Americans are overweight,” reads another advertisement at the gym I walk passed on the way home from work, “come see how the other third lives.” As if people who are “overweight” and people who exercise are two completely different demographics.

Other ad campaigns have encouraged people to worry about their bodies in relation to bathing-suit season, and about food consumption during the holidays. None of this is particularly novel — lifestyle magazines for both women and men have been successfully selling these messages for the past hundred years, at least.

But the constant exposure to these ads on the street and in my freakin’ apartment building is grating and has started to provoke feelings of rage. After finding the flyer in our mailbox, I happened to walk by a BSC promo table outside the local CVS and was this close to stopping and reasonably explaining my rage:

“Excuse me,” I had the script all worked out in my head, “I just wanted to let you know that I find your advertising strategy so offensive that I will never, ever purchase any of your services, and I will strongly recommend to anyone that asks that they find a gym that doesn’t resort to body shame as a marketing strategy.”

It seemed a little rude to just dump all that on the two lackeys who were probably just college students working a $8/hour summer job. So I didn’t stop.

The next time I walked past the BSC with the “two-thirds” sign in the window I gave the establishment the finger.

With both hands.

(Much to the alarm of the man who happened to be exiting the building as I walked past.)

Hanna and I have talked about their approach and come to the conclusion that body shame must work to get people in the door buying memberships — but probably not much else. Certainly the best research on self-care is that self-hatred and shame is not a motivator in terms of changing harmful behavior. So even if the goal of the BSC is to encourage people to exercise, this is a piss-poor way of doing so. Even from a bottom-line standpoint, I doubt it’s going to do much by way of retaining customers. So they must be counting on a high and continuous turn-over in memberships to be sustainable.

Or they’re just convenient to where people live or work, and the convenience factor out-weighs the insult factor (which is actually, I think, the most likely scenario).

I haven’t torched the flyer yet. But it’s an option I’m still considering. Because if there’s one thing the world doesn’t need, it’s one more piece of paper telling us to hate our bodies — and the conflation of intellectual activity with getting FAT OMG.

tl; dr: Boston Sports Club = For The Lose.

Image Description: Image is a full-page magazine ad depicting a white, hetero couple in underwear only making out on a bed. Across the top third of the ad is the text “He’ll Scream Your Name. He’ll Forget His.” The images of the couple run across the middle third of the ad, in triptych form. Across the bottom third of the ad is the product information for something called “Masque: Sexual Flavors.” The information reads:

Masque (R) is first product proven to conceal any unpleasant flavors associated with pleasuring your man and his subsequent climax. These orally-dissolvable flavored gel strips will take the intimacy between you and your partner to the next level. Consider it a little extra magic while you work yours.

Hanna found this ad in a Marie Claire magazine at the hairdresser’s a couple of weeks ago, and insisted I tear it out and bring it home to share with a group of friends over dinner. Because, yes, this is the sort of thing we like to share with our friends.

A couple of things strike me about this product. The first is, obviously, the inherent amusement in all advertising around products that involve sex of some sort — they have to be explicit enough to get across that their product is about sex, but not explicit enough that they’re actually saying shit like: “If you don’t like the taste of your dude’s semen, we have the product for you!” Which, let’s face it, is what this Masque shit is all about: masking the taste of humans.

And, okay, stuff to make sexytimes smell and taste non-human has been around for a while. We’ve got scented douches to make our ladyparts more like flower gardens, and we’ve got chocolate you can paint on your breasts (yum!), and so on. So none of my observations here are particularly novel. But here’s what a room full of mostly queer gals observed about the marketing of this “sexual flavors” thing.

First, setting aside a small number of people for whom I imagine the taste of their love is a real and otherwise insuperable barrier to enjoying sex, I’d argue that coding the taste and smell of human sexuality as “unpleasant” in order to schill your product is not cool. Bodily fluids are not, it’s true, the sort of flavors you generally go looking for in your ice cream, but that’s not really the point. The point is that (most of the time) people think their lovers taste good because they associate the taste of their lovers with pleasure. It’s all one giant feedback loop. We like the scent and taste of our lovers when they’re aroused because that scent and taste tells us we’re doing things right, that it’s all going well. Over time, you get to learn what different scents and tastes tell you about a person’s stress levels, where they are in their hormone cycle, etc. All of this is valuable information, and pushing us to think it’s icky and that we should cover it up with artificial flavors means you lose the chance to learn how to read and respond to that data.

When you go to the website (yup, of course we did), you find out that this product is basically one of those little sheets of dissolvable gel you put on your tongue (like a breath mint strip), and it supposedly works to block your flavor receptors for bitter and salty tastes. The available flavors are mango, strawberry, watermelon, and chocolate — all with a slight menthol aftertaste, we’re told (ew!).

“So now you can have literal beer-flavored nipples!” One friend quipped (we all snorked into our chocolate stout).

“They should totally be making this shit in more earthy flavors — like beer and coffee,” another person suggested.

“Yeah,” I responded, “But do you seriously want a Pavlovian response to those flavors? Like, you’re standing in line at the coffee shop waiting for your morning latte and suddenly your panties are getting soaked?”

I don’t think I have a whole lot more to say about these sexual flavor strips, except that I feel sad that there’s a market for this product that’s being so explicitly marketed not as something that’s just a fun accessory — but something that will actually make the “unpleasant” parts of sex less icky. By purchasing a product to obscure what’s actually going on.

Image credit: LeClan McMillan with her baby (via Annie Urban). (via bluemilk.wordpress.com)

Image Description: The color photograph depicts a motorcross cyclist sitting astride a bike in full gear (including helmet) nursing a child, also in biking gear. Both appear to be Euro-American, with pale skin tones. The parent has long dark red-brown hair pulled back into a ponytail and the child has slightly curly white-blond hair in a bowl cut. The photograph is a close-up of the parent, child, and bike, but you can see the motorcross course in the background.

A few days after this image went live on Tumblr, I noticed a lot of people were liking and reblogging it (to-date the image has had over 300 “notes” since I posted it). Aside from the popularity of the image, what caught my attention was the additional commentary folks felt compelled to add when they re-blogged the photograph. I thought it was really telling what Tumblr folks felt necessary to criticize about the photograph (and about other peoples’ commentary). I share some of the comments below in a Q&A format, with my thoughts on each response.

To back-track each quotation to its original Tumblr blog, see the thread of notes below the original post.

Tumblr: “Except for that kid is like 3 and shouldn’t be breast feeding anymore.”

Anna: There were actually many people who had this concern, which I thought was really interesting as a response. I’m the eldest of three and my mother breastfed all of us until we were roughly 2 1/2-3 years old. Not exclusively, obviously, but alongside other forms of nourishment. LeLeche League International recommends that children be introduced to other forms of food in their first year, but affirms that “A mother and her baby should breastfeed for as long as they wish to breastfeed.”

Given that breastfeeding at “like 3″ is not medically contraindicated, that means that the perception that the child in the photograph “shouldn’t” be breastfeeding is a socially-conditioned determination – and one I think is kinda fascinating to observe and think about. Why have we decided that toddlers are “too old” to breastfeed?

T: “How about not gendering people nonconsensually. not everyone who breastfeeds is a ‘mama’”

A: While I take this person’s point, the original post a blue milk identifies LeClan McMillan as a “her” (see original caption reproduced above), so I assume that the cyclist identifies as a woman/uses female pronouns. I did do a bit of searching online to find outside confirmation of this, but nothing came up. If you follow motorcross and know McMillan feel free to chime in in comments on hir self-identity.

T: “Hello badass mom, hello badass babyboy. Thumbs up all around.”

A: I’ve already responded to the gendering of the cyclist above, but I thought it was interesting that this person (and, actually, a number of others) assumed the child was a boy, despite the fact nothing in the original post indicated the child’s gender. Is it the colors the child is wearing? The haircut?

T: “not being a concern troll – breastfeeding on a motorcycle makes absolutely no sense. that’s like….paying bills on a motorcycle, or playing monopoly, or eating. the logistics baffle me”

A: Mostly I just love this one. Because I bet the person who wrote this comment has, on occasion, eaten a snack while driving, or stopped while on a bicycle ride to down a power bar. Sometimes when you’re out doing shit you get hungry (even when you’re a kid!), and you just gotta eat. When I look at this picture, that’s what I see. And I’m not sure why that’s baffling.

What about you, Harpies? What does this photograph say to you — and what do you think of the Tumblr responses?

Web version of Boston Magazine's cover (Jan 2012)

Image Caption: The image is a full-color photograph of a young woman on a cheerful yellow background. The woman, on the left, is visible from mid-torso up, and is dressed in a black, form-fitting top. She’s slim, olive-skinned, brunette, with stylish glasses, long wavy hair, and large hoop earrings. She’s smiling broadly. The bold, black text to her left reads, “This is Terri. She’s successful, happy, and at 38, just fine with never getting married. Ever.”

To ring in the New Year, Boston Magazine ran a thoughtful piece about being an adult whose main purpose in life isn’t to get hitched. I know, right? When I saw the cover of the magazine while waiting in line at the grocery store a couple of weeks ago, my first thought was, “We’ve only just discovered this?” I mean, people have not been getting married since, well, forever. More or less.  But apparently, we need to keep re-discovering the fact that, as Samhita at Feministing puts it, “single women are not tragic, lonely were-witches.”

Regardless of article content, I’d like offer the image above (a web variation of the magazine cover) for analysis as part of the Let’s Talk Images series. Because after thinking to myself, “We’ve only just discovered this?” my second thought was, “Apparently we’re still waiting for the day when an article about not marrying isn’t illustrated by a woman.” Because of course, when we — as a culture — think “single people” we’re really thinking “single women.” Men, like women, often live into adulthood without marrying, or without a primary sexual relationship. Yet they are rarely the cause for concern single women are.

As Hanna pointed out, “never getting married” is not the same as “being single” or “not being in a relationship.” So it’s unclear from the text in the image whether the woman depicted is just unmarried or actually unattached to other person(s). However, it’s clear from the punctuation in the text (“NEVER GETTING MARRIED. EVER.” That the married/not-married dichotomy is the key one here.

I do think it’s a positive sign that the woman in the image looks confident and happy, and that the text reinforces the fact that “successful” people can also be unmarried. I’d argue, however, that this type of imagery reinforces on some level that it’s okay to be marked as weird in some way (in this case, unmarried) as long as you’re not too weird. Non-conformity in small doses is much less scary than non-conformity in multiple ways. The young woman depicted is youthful looking, conventionally beautiful, slim, feminine. Although it is legal to get married to someone of the same sex if you’re in Massachusetts, somehow I don’t think this article is about lesbians who’ve decided not to get hitched. The text also tells us that Terri is “successful,” presumably in terms of her career. On the one hand, it’s women like Terri who are assumed to a) be panting for marriage, and b) a “good catch,” so probably more likely to be constantly questioned about whom they’re dating, etc. Women who are seen as undesirable in one way or another are likely questioned less about their marital status, since people expect them to be losers when it comes to marriage.

I could be completely off on this, since I somehow escaped those questions from friends and relations alike, despite the fact I was single and not dating into my late twenties. If y’all have a story to tell about being harassed as a single person, do share in comments!

Join the conversation Harpies — what else does this image tell us about perceptions of singleness and relationships in America today?

A few weeks ago, I started seeing this advertisement for health insurance on the public transit system here in Boston:

Image Caption [provided by Sara in comments:

The image depicts a Black woman wearing business-like attire against a city backdrop. Text above her head reads “When I have my health, I can do anything.” The text at the bottom reveals that it is an ad for Boston Medical Center’s HealthNet Plan, which is apparently part of Massachusetts’ affordable health insurance system.

On a superficial level, there’s obviously nothing wrong with an insurance company advertising their products, or the message that access to medical care is a positive thing for people. HealthNet is one of the health insurance programs here in Boston designed to cater to people who are eligible for state-subsidized healthcare or not insured through their workplace.

What caught my eye, however, was the equation in the text of health with the ability to “do anything.”  Obviously illness and disability can be limiting in a lot of ways, but the flip-side of the poster’s argument is that without one’s “health” (defined how?), you can’t “do anything.” Which sidelines the many people who are living with chronic illness and disability yet engaged in an incredible amount of personally rewarding and socially productive activities.

The second message in this poster that bothered me is the argument being made when the text and image are read together: that a professional African-American woman who “has her health” faces no other impediments to personal success. This erasure of gender and race discrimination situates success in the private, rather than socio-political, sphere. If you have your health, the poster suggests, there are no excuses not to succeed. This poster depicts an individual whose ability to live the good life is constrained only by what happens inside her body, not the way embodied self is interpreted by others, interacted with on a daily basis, constrained by social institutions and political structures, or situation within an environment which may affect her physical and emotional well-being.

The floor’s all yours, Harpies: What strikes you about this image?