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Old Racism as New Fashion
Rachel Fudge / FALL 2004
 
 
 
TWO YEARS AGO, THE PREPPY MALL STAPLE ABERCROMBIE & Fitch released a line of T-shirts that paired early 1900s-style caricatures of Chinese men (complete with coolie hats, big grins, and slanted eyes) with slogans like “Wong Brothers Laundry Service—Two Wongs Can Make It White” and “Wok-N-Bowl—Let the Good Times Roll—Chinese Food & Bowling.” The clothing chain then professed great surprise when Asian-American activists cried foul; A&F’s PR flack Hampton Carney told the
San Francisco Chronicle,
“We personally thought Asians would love this T-shirt … We are truly and deeply sorry we’ve offended people.” The shirts were eventually pulled from stores.
Last year, Urban Outfitters played a similar game with a line of “Everybody Loves a [fill-in-the-blank] Girl/Boy” shirts; they had the poor taste and even poorer judgment to illustrate the “Everybody Loves a Jewish Girl” shirt with dollar signs. Absent those dollar signs, the Ts were little more than a retread of the silly “Kiss Me, I’m [an ethnic group]” T-shirts that have been around for decades. But unlike the shamrocks and rosaries that decorate the Irish and Catholic versions, respectively, the dollar signs evoke an especially nasty and persistent ethnic stereotype. In response to public protest, UO replaced the dollar signs with hearts but continues to sell the entire line, the range of which says some pretty interesting things about whom everyone loves: fat boys but not fat girls; Asian girls but not Asian boys.
It’s no coincidence that UO and A&F are sticking these dubious slogans on shirts that look like they were picked up at Thrift Town. By emblazoning retro-racist words and imagery on shirts that are brand-new yet look well worn, these purveyors of lifestyle culture are trying to have it both ways: stirring up a whole mess of racially charged hoopla (which has made for bad-but-good PR for both chains) while attempting to deflate accusations of racism by making the shirts “ironic” (a misuse of the term in the first place, but that’s another story). That is, A&F and UO are capitalizing on the vogue for retro kitsch by shilling not only faux-vintage T-shirts but faux-vintage bigotry as well. It’s a clever attempt to claim distance from a literal reading of the shirts, because the companies can always argue that they were trying to make fun of the idea of racism, not of a particular race.
In the big picture of racism in America, offensive T-shirts are neither the biggest nor the most blatant problem. But their sellers’ claims that these products are created with the intention of mocking, not encouraging, racism and bigotry rest on a false assumption that we are all beyond identity politics—and thus we are beyond any implications of hatefulness, so we can all have a good laugh at the very idea of, say, anti-Semitism or anti-Asian prejudice. In a sad sort of way, this post–politically correct “humor” is a measure of the success of the very identity politics it scorns.
It’s also notably different from defiantly politically incorrect humor, which revels in its flirting with racism and sexism in the name of free speech, but doesn’t argue or imply that we live in a postracist or postsexist world. All those knowingly crass “Bikini Inspector” and “Master Baiters Fly Fishing” T-shirts found at beach boardwalks and novelty shops across the country don’t lay claim to any ironic distance. There’s a difference between these cheesy souvenirs and the supposedly hip product being pushed by A&F and UO, and it’s not just in the price point (A&F and UO charge upward of $20 for their shirts, while the novelty shirts can be had for half that). This distinction may be extremely subtle, but it’s crucial: A&F and UO are shilling this stuff in a tongue-in-cheek manner to people they presume will get the joke.
Carney, A&F’s aptly named PR rep, defended the “Two Wongs” shirt by assuring the
Chronicle
that “We poke fun at everybody, from women to flight attendants to baggage handlers to football coaches to Irish-Americans to snow skiers. There’s really no group we haven’t teased.” Underlying
this equal-opportunity offensiveness is the notion that “teasing” an entire racial group by invoking some of its most pernicious stereotypes is no different from making fun of people who like to ski—a notion that willfully ignores the fact that racism and sexism are still very much a part of American culture. This line of defense—“We’re all treated equally now, so we had no idea people would be offended!”—is in some ways more insulting than outright bigotry, which at least doesn’t hide behind a pretense of equality. The companies can always dredge up an Asian-American or Jewish employee who “loved” the T-shirts, or point to the fact that some Asian Americans snatched up the “Wong” shirts for their kitsch factor, as proof that the gear isn’t offensive. But unlike whatever making-fun-of-skiers Ts Carney referred to, the “Two Wongs” shirts don’t intend to poke fun at the wearer—rather, they mock a population that is perceived to be the other.
The most recent entry in the pantheon of misguided egalitarian “teasing” came this spring, courtesy of
Details
magazine. For the past year,
Details
has been quietly running a one-page humor column, titled “Anthropology,” that compares stereotypes of gay men with stereotypes of nongay but supposedly effeminate men: Gay or guido? Gay or British? Gay or magician? Gay or preppy? Even “Gay or Jesus?” managed to slip under the radar. But when writer Whitney McNally dropped “Asian” into the nongay slot in the April 2004 issue and accompanied it with a random assortment of Chinese and Japanese stereotypes, she really got people’s attention. Straight and gay Asian-American activists staged protests outside the magazine’s headquarters and demanded an apology from
Details
editor in chief Dan Peres. He complied and apologized in the following issue’s editor’s note. Of course, that mea culpa—which included the half apology “I apologize … to anyone who was offended”—didn’t stop Peres from approving the “Gay or Country Singer?” bit that runs a mere five pages later. (“Whether you worship the Opry or wrestle to Oprah, a twangy set of tonsils will never be lonesome.”)
Details
, which has over the past fifteen years gone from being a very queer downtown rag to a self-consciously metrosexual style book, relies on its hipster legacy to deny that it’s being homophobic or offensive in running this series that trades on vapid imagery. Gay men are hairless! They like to groom themselves with fancy products! They work out! They wear clean, well-fitting clothes! These stereotypes could well stand to be deflated,
but
Details
doesn’t pull it off. The setup promises a clever deconstruction of stereotypes—and I’ll admit at first blush I found the concept funny—but the writing has a desperately grasping tone, the categories chosen are so dumb that they’re meaningless, and in the end
Details
reinforces the very clichés it purports to send up.
This brand of satire is increasingly popular these days, thanks to the mass-market saturation of cool-kid lifestyle culture. At the risk of sounding like a conservative, Bill Bennett—esque postmodernism hater, I blame this phenomenon on the triumph of hipster-misidentified irony, which demands that nothing be taken seriously and lets people feel immune from criticism because they’re being, you know, ironic. It’s all made possible by the winking insiderness, the self-congratulatory illusion that the trenddriving hipsters are educated and informed enough to know better or rise above racism or sexism. In fact, these folks claim to be so beyond any sort of prejudice that they can wield ordinarily offensive terms and imagery with impunity: “I’ve got lots of friends who are gay—not that there’s anything wrong with that!—so when I describe something stupid by calling it gay, you know I don’t mean it in a bad way.” But this style of usage—whether it’s exercised by a schoolyard bully or an urban hipster—still relies on a general consensus that things that are gay are not good.
By now, the progression of name-calling from forbidden to fashionable should be familiar: Disempowered groups, from immigrants to gays and lesbians to people with disabilities, begin to advocate for their full rights as American citizens. In the process, radical activists reclaim derogatory terms—gay, queer, dyke, bitch, cunt, homo, slut, crip, heeb, and so on—and brandish them defiantly in an attempt to dilute their power to harm. The names and identity labels start to be picked up by enlightened friends and allies, who feel privileged to use the terms in the reclaimed manner because they are in on the politics. But inevitably, the terminology dissipates to the broader population, who re-reclaim the phrases in a not-at-all ironic or knowing way—thereby completing the cycle. Of course, most of the folks who toss around words like “queer” or “F.O.B.” (fresh off the boat), or repopularized phrases like “that’s so gay,” are just as likely as activists and their allies to defend themselves from any accusation of hateful behavior.
And because, like everything else, the notion of “hip” is easily reducible to a commodity, this all-sarcasm-all-the-time lifestyle has become a mass-marketable
trend, available at malls from coast to coast. But when so-called irony becomes a tool of marketing—just look at all those goddamned trucker hats!—it loses any claim to edginess and becomes merely a set of quotation marks and a smirk.
In its original sense—as subversive humor that adopts a mode of expression that is the opposite of what is intended—irony can be a politicizing force, deliberately playing up the most ridiculous of stereotypes or ideas in order to point out how dumb they are.
Details
had the opportunity to do this with the “Gay or …” series, but either lacked the political edge and depth of critique to make it happen, or simply didn’t care to. In the current political climate, this kind of speech has enormous potential to upset the status quo:
The Onion
is one of few publications that has been quietly, consistently pulling off political critique through ironic humor for years. But it also has the potential to be widely misinterpreted or, worse, wielded as mere style devoid of content or context.
One of the most flamboyant exemplars of this irony-as-edgy-lifestyle product is Vice, which started out as a free paper catering to the punk/skater crowd in Montreal and has since expanded to become a glossy monthly available across the United States. It has also spawned a record label, several books, and a forthcoming TV show. A typical issue might include articles about what it’s like to be a “jizz mopper” in an adult video store and fashion spreads featuring hookers, trannies, and runaway teens. It publishes trademark guides to all of the races, on how to be a whore, and on how to golddig.
Vice’
s editors and writers are infamous for freely tossing around in print and in interviews slurs like “nigger,” “fag,” and “Paki,” claiming (as they did in one
New York
Press article) that because they rag on everyone—and because they are or are friends with blacks, gays, and Pakistanis—they can use these words with impunity. Given that Vice’s raison d’être is to push the edges of acceptability beyond any reasonable limit, it’s not all that surprising to hear them spout off like this.
The same attitude is espoused by comedians like Sarah Silverman, who most notably got into trouble four years ago when she told a joke on
Late Night with Conan O’Brien
about trying to get out of jury duty: “My friend is like, ‘Why don’t you write something inappropriate on the form, like”I hate chinks”?’ … I didn’t want them to think I was a racist, but I did want to get out of jury duty, so I wrote ‘I love chinks’—and who doesn’t?” In a subsequent
appearance on
Politically Incorrect
, after being chastised by watchdog groups like the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, she refused to apologize.
The difference between Silverman and, say, Abercrombie & Fitch is that Silverman’s act is an extreme form of satire intended to expand her audience’s comfort zones and to limn the very idea of racism, while
Vice
, A&F, UO, and their ilk are trying to sell us a range of products that add up to a lifestyle. One could argue that Silverman’s racially charged humor rests upon a general understanding that ethnic stereotypes and labels still hold great power; there is at least a hint of political substance behind it, and in some ways her use of ethnic slurs attempts to foreground the racism that often operates in the shadows. The lifestyle shillers, by contrast, try to hang their T-shirt slogans on the myth that those stereotypes are so passé that the very idea of them is laughable. But what A&F and company either can’t understand or willfully ignore is that if those stereotypes truly held no currency, the joke wouldn’t be funny. Multiple interpretations are what allow for the possibility of humor—yet they also sabotage any attempt to control its reception.
The line between humor and offense is slippery, of course, and no one likes being told what he or she can and can’t laugh at. That sense of transgression is a big part of “ironic” humor’s appeal. You know it’s wrong and maybe a bit mean, but you laugh anyway; that frisson of naughtiness can be addictive. But when that uncomfortable moment between laughter and outrage is sold as a hip lifestyle, it becomes impenetrable: What, exactly, are we laughing at here?
Talking Back
ACTIVISM AND POP CULTURE
 
 
 
RIGHT NOW WE’RE LIVING IN THE MOST INTENSELY MEDIATED world ever. Three decades ago there were four broadcast networks, just over a hundred women’s magazines (including feminist publications), and no Internet. Now there are hundreds of cable channels, over five hundred women’s magazines, and an online world teeming with publications and blogs. According to the book
Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut,
in 1971 the average U.S. resident encountered 560 advertising messages a day; a 2000
Advertising Age
article put the number at 5,000.
Content has shifted, too. Reagan-era deregulation and the resulting merger frenzy of the ’90s increased pressure on news divisions and newspapers to turn hefty profits, shifting newsroom missions from informing the public to just getting us to stay tuned for the next segment. Ownership of those same news producers by multinational conglomerates has also greatly damaged their capacity to bring us important stories and hold governments and corporations accountable. It’s only common sense that NBC will neglect to report on, say, parent company General Electric’s refusal to clean up the million pounds of toxic chemicals it has dumped into the Hudson River, or that cable giant Comcast, dependent as it is on favorable treatment from federal appointees at the FCC, would stifle criticism of the executive branch (as it did when it refused to air antiwar ads on its Washington, D.C., system during Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address).
Hand in hand with these changes have come others, most notably a rise in the embedding of commercial messages into narrative content. Sure, the ideas behind product placement have always been with us, from early broadcast-media sponsorships (how do you think daytime programming aimed at women in charge of the family laundry got to be called soap operas?) to the small type on
Glamallurelle
’s cover photo credit noting that Lindsay Lohan’s lip gloss is Buy Me Now! by Maybelline. But the practices’ meteoric rise and the nonstop extension of their reach are truly stunning. In 1982,
E.T.
made news by boosting sales of Reese’s Pieces after M&M’s declined to be featured; in 1991, the five top-grossing films of the year featured more than one hundred brand names. Another decade later, the entire genre of reality TV had sprung up around products to be placed:
Survivor
creator Mark Burnett told
Advertising Age
, “I’ve never understood why there has to be a separation between the advertising community and the creative television community.” In late summer 2005,
Madison & Vine
, an online newsletter covering the product placement industry, trumpeted the release of fall’s Cry
Wolf
with the headline “Chrysler’s Feature-Length Film Hits Theaters: Jon Bon Jovi, AOL and Current Model Vehicles Play Starring Roles.”
Political actions themselves can easily become commodified in this landscape—and because women are so often seen in terms of our consumer role, we’re an easy target. Witness the bizarre efforts to get young women to the polls in 2004: An organization called 1000 Flowers printed slogans like “Shape the Oval Office: Vote Nov. 2” on nail files that were packaged with voter registration forms and given away at salons; they raised money by selling “Vote! It’s a Beautiful Thing” lipsticks. Take, for example, the masses of pink-beribboned goodies that entice people to buy, buy, buy in the name of a paltry contribution to breast cancer research. (Meanwhile, corporations whose products and environmental practices may contribute to cancer—cars, bleached and dyed paper products, processed foods packaged in plastic—get good publicity, woman-friendly brownie points, and more profits.)
Given all this, responding to pop culture is an activist project vital to feminism, and responding through pop culture is a crucial tool. We need to ask: Whose interests are being served by—to name a few examples
Bitch
has consistently taken up over the years—the existence of an “ideal” female body, gender segregation from the toy store to the movie theater to the
magazine rack, female sexuality as emotionally driven? Who’s selling them, and why? Conversely, what are we
not
being told? How can we get our own views into the public debate?
Bitch
was founded on this activist impulse. It was no longer enough for Andi and me to sit in our living room, throwing imaginary rocks at the TV and discussing Tori Spelling’s fake boobs and
The Bridges of Madison County
(don’t make fun—it was 1995). It was no longer enough to discover a fantastic feminist artist, writer, or filmmaker and have only a few people to share her work with. We had to find people who shared our frustration and who wanted to add their own voices of dissent. We needed to take it outside.
As the media landscape becomes both increasingly corporatized and more chaotic—with more grassroots potential through phenomena like blogs, low-power radio, digital video, and podcasting but also more risk that those venues will be used to sideline our voices in favor of more and more advertising messages—we need to take it further still.—L.J.
A Day in the Life of an Urban Guerrilla
Kathy Bruin / FALL 1998
 
 
 
FEBRUARY 19, 1998.
8:00 a.m. We’re postering the city tonight and it’s raining like a son of a bitch. The forecast says we’re in the middle of a big storm with rain all day and seventy-mile-per-hour winds. One hundred percent chance of rain in all areas. Great.
The postering is a guerrilla effort on the part of About-Face, a San Francisco group dedicated to combating negative images of women through education, action, and humor. About-Face started a few years ago, when I was standing in line next to a family with several girls ranging from twelve to fifteen years of age. Their mother offered them some cookies and the girls took them, laughing, “Oh, I’ll have a cookie. I can start my diet tomorrow.” A few months later, I became obsessed with Calvin Klein’s Obsession perfume campaign. The ads had been around for a few years, but a particularly annoying new one put me over the edge. On the buses of San Francisco and huge billboards towering over the city were pictures of Kate Moss reclining nude, her bones so accentuated and her face so sunken and gray that she looked like she was starving.
I wanted to do something louder than just writing Calvin Klein a letter. I took a picture of the ad and changed the text to read, “Emaciation Stinks—Stop Starvation Imagery.” I made posters and conned friends and family
into helping me plaster the city with them. About-Face’s goal in postering is to use public space as a forum to challenge our culture’s messages and remind people that they too can make a stink.
Our new poster has a brightly colored circus cage and in it are fashion models lounging about in various poses. It says, “Please don’t feed the models.”
 
11:00 A.M. DROVE TO WORK IN A TORRENTIAL DOWNPOUR TO check my e-mail. Coworkers are giving me the ol’ “guess you can’t do it tonight, huh?” looks, with concerned eyebrows and squinched-up mouths. “Scattered showers by evening,” I tell them. I am in a total panic. If we cancel, we won’t have the number of people we need to really cover the city when we reschedule. If we don’t cancel, we risk people coming out and being sent home if it’s still too wet.
I think it’s illegal to poster the streets. I am not absolutely positive about this because I didn’t come right out and ask the police department about it. (“Excuse me, officer, I wonder if you would help me with something. If someone were to, hypothetically, hang posters in city streets with wallpaper paste …”) If you live in a city, it’s normal to see posters plastered all over pedestrian walkways. Everything from B movies to antiwar rallies is advertised through posters pasted to construction sites. We have postered San Francisco twice before and I have been tracked down and screamed at by construction managers both times. “We have seventeen posters on our brand-new pedestrian walkway,” one man rightfully yelled. “Ugh,” I thought as a knot formed in my stomach. I am a hyperresponsible person, the classic “good girl.” Do I do what I think in my gut is right even if I might get in trouble or piss someone off? I believe every individual ought to have the right to create imagery and put her ideas out in the public sphere, but without the resources to do it, you can’t reach many people. Without a lot of money to buy your own billboards, your ideas and images are relegated to photocopies stuck under windshield wipers and passed out at parades—hardly the great societal impact you were hoping for. We don’t set out to anger construction managers or create more work for them, but guerrilla tactics are a perfect way to reach people on the same level that billboards do.
 
1:00 P.M. SAN FRANCISCO BROKE THE RECORD FOR FEBRUARY rainfall: 12.7 inches. I fear that volunteers are already psychologically jumping ship and making other plans.
 
4:30 P.M. I CALL KT, OUR WEBMISTRESS, FOR A PEP TALK AND she thinks we should do it. So does my fiancé, Frank, who’s a weather fanatic. We figure we’ll just do as much as we can.
 
6:00 P.M. I GET A MILKSHAKE FOR MY NERVOUS STOMACH ON the way to the warehouse. Miftah and Marcella, two About-Face members, arrive first. We stand aghast as hail roars down. A few other volunteers arrive. We are all feeling excited and determined to go, regardless of the weather.
Postering is thrilling. It’s a rare event that can bring such kidlike excitement to a bunch of cynical city dwellers, but the combination of doing something that is potentially illegal and that we feel so strongly about is too compelling to resist. It makes you feel powerful and righteous and brave; it makes you think you can effect real change in the world if you just decide to do it.
 
7:00 P.M. TWENTY-THREE PEOPLE SHOW UP. WE DIVIDE INTO nine teams. Each team gets a map with a specific section of the city, a can of paste, two rollers, and a damp rag. It is lightly drizzling as we set out.
 
9:00 P.M. THE TEAMS COME BACK WITH PASTE IN THEIR HAIR and on their clothes, and stories to tell. “We totally plastered this site near the park.” “People were stopping and asking about the posters, so we gave them some.” “We ran out of paste and bought some flour to make more.” (To make your own wheat paste, mix three tablespoons of wheat flour with a small amount of cold water. Stir into one cup of very hot water. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens.) Frank and I collect the goopy rollers, rags, and cans and load up the cars. By tomorrow, many of the posters will already be torn down by annoyed construction workers, but some will stay up for months. In total, we hung about four hundred posters throughout the city. While they won’t be as noticed as a Calvin Klein billboard,
they will still produce a reaction in people. For those of us who went out postering tonight, there is an amazing experience still to come. In a month or so, you may find yourself on a crosstown bus. You’ll look out the window and see some of the posters hanging on a plywood wall. A sense of pride will well up in you. You participated in something big. You took a stand instead of being complacent. Thousands of other people will have seen the posters. Maybe someone will be inspired to make a loud statement of her own.
How to Counteract Ad Messages
Laura Barcella / WINTER 2001
 
 
 
JEAN KILBOURNE KNOWS ACTIVISM ALMOST AS WELL AS SHE knows advertising. Best known for the documentary
Killing Us Softly
(now in its third edition), Kilbourne is an expert in analyzing advertisers’ exploitation of female desires and insecurities for profit, and the ways corporate power has come to dominate our lives through marketing. “In this culture, the real authorities are huge corporations—the tobacco industry, the alcohol industry—and we tend to be unaware of that,” she says. “We have a great deal more to fear from corporate power than from the government, yet it’s kind of invisible because they’re so smooth. We have a lot of kids these days who are drinking and smoking because they think they’re rebelling, but what they’re really doing is following orders from these corporations.”
Her most recent book,
Can’t Buy My Love
, takes this analysis a step further, exploring the advertising industry’s inculcation of an addictive mentality—one that persuades us that low-fat cookies are a perfect substitute for self-love and that even if men don’t respect us, our ultraslim cigarettes always will. Kilbourne’s extensive experience with advertising’s psyche-invading images makes her the perfect woman to dole out a few handy antiadvertising tips to you. Here’s what she has to say:
 
• The first thing is to pay attention. We all believe we’re not influenced by advertising. The longer we believe we’re not influenced, the more likely
we are to be influenced, because we don’t pay conscious attention. We need to really focus and look at the TV commercials and the print ads, and ask ourselves, “What’s really being sold here?”
• We [must] get advertising out of our schools. There is no excuse for allowing corporations to control our kids’ attention and time at school. That means getting rid of Channel One and other media that encroach on education. Young kids don’t have the cognitive abilities to process advertising, so they’re sitting ducks. [We need] to have a comprehensive media-literacy program in our schools, to help kids become critical viewers starting in kindergarten. The United States is one of the few developed nations in the world that doesn’t do this.
• When you’re reading a magazine and those irritating subscription cards fall into your lap, write on the card something like “stop exploiting women” or “feed your models” and mail it. It costs them something like 30 cents for every one that’s sent back. It takes about 10 seconds, and it cleans up litter.
• Try not to buy products that are advertised in ways you find offensive. I try not to buy products from the tobacco industry, which doesn’t just include cigarettes (for example, Philip Morris owns Kraft). [Research the business practices of the companies you’re buying from] and you can put your money where your values are.
• Work for political measures. For example, the European Union will be debating a bill to ban all advertising directed at children—wouldn’t that be wonderful? Write to congressional representatives and take part in such activities as a protest of the Golden Marble Awards, which is what the advertisers give to each other for their success in targeting children.
• Counter-advertising can be extraordinarily effective, whether it’s an individual writing something on an ad, or a group such as the ones in Massachusetts, Florida, and California that have come out with phenomenally effective antitobacco advertising. The smoking rates in those states are way below the national average, and part of the reason is the counter-advertising. That’s very effective because it’s a way of getting us to look at advertising with new eyes.
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