Ostensibly this 4-minute video is about the way publishing corporations design women’s magazines to damage the psyches of half the population. These magazines’ content, most of it formally advertising and the rest of it advertising in all but name, has one aim in mind: to make women neurotic about their appearance and life choices – and then offer a way to temporarily and partially alleviate those feelings of inadequacy through compulsive material consumption.
Bad as that is, this video actually offers much more than that. It provides a stark look at how all corporate media work – women’s magazines are just ordinary, advertising-driven media on speed.
By taking an extreme example, this short film also sheds light on the more subtle but continual and cumulative brainwashing we have all been subjected to since childhood. The corporate media’s goal is to persuade us that the current western model – of rampant consumption at home and resource wars abroad, a model that has proved so profitable for big business – is inevitable and just.
It isn’t, of course. But we will each need to work hard on deprogramming ourselves if there is to be any hope of breaking out of the cycle of self, communal and global harm we in the west have been persuaded is normal.
