In the latest outbreak of idiocy among our European cousins, the Women’s Rights Committee of the European Union has proposed banning any advertising “deemed to portray women as sex objects or reinforce gender stereotypes.
Speaking in the European parliament in favor of the proposal, Swedish member Eva-Britt Svensson urged European nations to use existing equality, sexism and discrimination laws to control advertising, and to create new regulatory bodies to monitor ads and introduce a “zero-tolerance” policy against “sexist insults or degrading images”.
It’s no wonder so many Europeans think the EU is a waste of space if this is what they spend their time and money on. I mean, is this really the biggest problem facing Europe today? Heck, most Europeans have a far less Puritan attitude toward sexuality than we Americans do anyway. Britain already has something called the Advertising Standards Authority, and even they said “Although the ASA supports the overall objectives of the report… the approach suggested is inflexible and impractical.”
It would be easy enough to dismiss this silliness, if it weren’t for the absolute *certainty* that there are morons in the US who would not hesitate to propose the same idiocy here. Speaking for myself, I often am disgusted by TV and print advertising that I find pointlessly sexualized. It would be nice if they would hold themselves to a higher standard, just as it would be nice if magazines like Vanity Fair actually considered whether it was appropriate to feature 15-year old Miley Cyrus gratuitously naked, regardless of the artistic pedigree of the photographer. However, the tastelessness of these materials does not even come close to rising to the level of warranting government censorship of the media.
I agree that the over-sexualization of teenage girls is a bad thing, but if those girls’ parents were doing their jobs properly, there would be no problem. If we want to criminalize this behavior, I would suggest the focus should be not on the media but on those parents who, like Billy Ray Cyrus in the case mentioned above, shamelessly pimp out their daughters’ bodies in the media. On the other hand, you can’t reasonably prohibit a lingerie brand like Victoria’s Secret from advertising their product with an image of an adult model actually wearing it, provided the images are not blatantly obscene. There is a difference between being sexy to sell a perfume and being sexy to sell children’s toothpaste.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/2686538/EU-wants-to-ban-sexist-TV-commercials.html
