Jennie Palmer, Ad-Buster Extraordinaire.

Ad-busting isn’t easy.  While we see many offensive advertisements by the time we get out of the car or are done watching tv during breakfast, it’s hard to go beyond “How offensive!” However, Jennie Palmer, creator and writer of the popular tumblr blog “Ad-Busting” found out that she just “kind of had a knack for it,” she says.  “It’s just a hobby I have,” she says about Ad-Busting. 

While the blog is something this Canadian Feminist does for fun, Jennie has translated her ad-busting skills to her real life.

“I decided I could start hosting my own workshops and I ran a bunch of them for university.  Since then, I’ve been asked to do them for some youth groups and last year I did one for the University of Ontario. It’s just like volunteer stuff or just a hobby that I do.”

Besides hosting ad-busting workshops, teaching young women to critically examine advertisements more than we normally would, Jennie hosts a Feminist talk show in Calgary, called “Yea, What She Said,” alongside three other women.  The show has interviewed a variety of people--from writers or artists to politicians and even fellow bloggers Jennie interacts with online.  “The topics are really wide-ranging to basically anything that relates to women in any way, shape, or form,” Jennie describes.   The talk show doesn’t focus solely on women, though, “Monday we interviewed two men who are working to involve more men in ending violence against women and just getting more men in on the conversation.” 

Jennie makes it clear that feminism isn’t just for women—feminism is for anyone.  Because the definition of a feminist is so wide-ranging and just slightly different for everyone, I asked Jennie to describe her personal definition of a feminist: 

“My definition is anyone who believes in the social, economic, and political equality of women.  I think a lot of more people are feminist than they would call a feminist.” 

Besides her radio show, Jennie has become increasingly involved with the feminist community in Calgary.  She is involved in Take Back the Night, a popular organization that raises awareness about violence against women.  While she describes the feminist community in Calgary to be pretty small, Jennie has made connections, not only with the feminist community, but also with other communities that are “just in arms length of the feminist community.” These could be communities for people such as lesbians, transgender, or the LGBTQA group as a whole. 

I prompted Jennie to remember back to her childhood, and think of the ways advertising had impacted her. 

“I mostly remember reading teen magazines when I was thirteen or fourteen and definitely wanting lipstick and wanting to have all the things that were shown in advertisements. I guess it definitely created pressure that you have to look a certain way and if you do look a certain way, you’ll be more accepted and have better opportunities.” 

While Jennie is Canadian, she says their media is heavily saturated with American media and advertising, so it’s safe to say that growing up, Jennie had experiences very similar to what we may have in the United States.  When asked if she’d seen any changes in advertising, Jennie replied with quickly with a “For sure.” She went on to describe how advertising is slowly changing:

“It kinda started with those Dove ads, which I know are problematic in the feminist community.  These ads were trying to celebrate real women—they used real women in their ads like older women or women who were a bit heavier…that was sort of the first time I had really seen that kind of thing happen, and since then I think its getting a lot more common."  

While the Dove beauty ads are often criticized for addressing the wrong issues that women face with beauty, they provided a diverse representation of women.

"I think there’s a huge appetite for women like you and me. We want to see regular women like us portrayed in the media.  Theres this collective outcry, like we’re seeing the same body type portrayed over and over—this tall, thin, usually blonde, usually white—and we’re sick of it.  I’ve seen quite a few ads recently that are using larger models or older models.  It’s awesome.”

While these advertisements are gaining popularity, stereotypical, sexualized advertising easily still overshadows them.  So what can we do to further equality when it comes to advertising? Jennie says we need to praise ads that represent diversity and the marketing companies behind the ads.  “I love it. I love seeing that that sort of news makes the headlines.” She also says we need to ignore the negative advertisements.  

“I mean sure, we can write to Calvin Klein and Buffalo Jeans and Guess Jeans and all those advertisers that are doing shitty things, but I’m not really convinced that writing to them and telling them what they’re doing is wrong is really going to change anything.” Jennie found that celebrating the good was more effective. 

A Calvin Klein advertisement, doing shitty things.

Jennie featured this ad in a post recently, praising it for it's more realistic representation of women.

Another piece of advice Jennie offers is to tailor our own social media and filter what we want to see. Personally, Jennie keeps her tumblr feed full of only body positive things, and refuses to follow things like fitspo or thinspo (one of the most disturbing tags, in my opinion).  She simply says “I just don’t want to see it.”  Jennie goes on to describe how we can take control of our own social media, following only positive messages: “You have to take control of your own destiny in that way. Right now, the media is still very much focused on that ideal body type.”  This wasn’t always possible, though. 

Teen magazines were often centered on how "hot" you were, pleasing boys, and being thinner.

“When I was a teenager, growing up all I had was magazines.  There was no way for me to filter out stuff I didn’t want to see…There was no way to get alternative messages, but now there is and it’s so accessible so, honestly, I just try to ignore other stuff.” 

As I’ve often wondered whether there is a way to realistically reduce the amount of sexist advertising actually produced, I offered the question to Jennie. “I think it’s going to take time.  I’ve been watching this movement for 10 years and changes are happening but they’re taking time.”  

Jennie gives an example about an eighth-grader, Julia Bluhm, who started a petition aimed at Seventeen Magazine and trying to get them to have more diversity in models in their magazines.  Seventeen Magazine eventually agreed to this and promised to no longer use airbrushing or photoshop on the models the magazine itself uses and to also include a more diverse range of models, ethnically and physically.  “The more women who take this on, that’s how its going to change,” says Jennie. 

Then-eighth-grader, Julia Bluhm, successfully petitioned Seventeen Magazine to change their modeling standards and techniques.

On a similar topic, I asked if Jennie had seen any effect come from the Miss Representation campaign, originally a film that has translated over to social media with users pointing out offensive advertisements and hashtagging them “#NotBuyingIt.”  Jennie says that, while she hasn’t seen an overwhelmingly direct effect on advertising, she describes how women have been affected by this campaign. 

The Miss Representation Campaign has been influencing women to stand up to advertisers and companies through social media, using the hashtag, #NotBuyingIt

“There’s women who I work with who…are not feminist or usually not even aware of the way advertising affects us…They watched Miss Representation and now they want to talk to me about it…I think it’s sort of awesome that Miss Representation became so popular and so many women who don’t really identify as feminist saw that movie…It opened a lot of people’s minds.” 

On the note of direct activism, Jennie describes a time when she took action herself against an advertisement.  While hosting an ad-busting workshop for a youth group, Jennie made about a hundred photocopies of a few American Apparel ads.  

While advertising the same article of clothing, this is typical of an American Apparel advertisement--the woman is over-sexualized while the guy just get's to wear the t-shirt in a normal pose. 

“I thought it would be a great opportunity to tackle one of the advertisers I hate the most, which is American Apparel…I brought all these crayons and markers and asked the girls to draw clothing on the models.”  

American Apparel advertisements are notorious for having their women models wear close to nothing while the male models (who may even be wearing the exact same clothing) appear fully clothed.  Once these girls had fully clothed the models, Jennie sent half of the ads to American Apparel Headquarters in Los Angeles and the other half to headquarters in Montreal, attaching a letter about why their advertising is offensive.  “I never heard back, and I guess I didn’t really expect to hear anything back but it would’ve been nice.  It kind of discouraged me a little bit.”  However, Jennie found humor in the situation, saying that she imagines someone’s office or cubicle walls plastered with these fully clothed models and “just thinks they’re really funny.”  “I like to think it had an effect somehow.”  Jennie says, and I’m sure it did at least affect the girls who participated. 

Getting back to her blog, and her contributions to the online feminists and advertising community, I asked Jennie to describe any negative feedback or criticisms she may have received on her blog.  “When I first started posting the blog—I didn’t realize I was doing this—but I was kind of skinny shaming.”  Jennie says she was posting pictures of really skinny models and instead of questioning why our society and the marketing companies see this as the ideal or average body type, she instead made fun of the models.  

Besides skinny-shaming at the beginning of her blogging experience, Jennie also says she was inadvertently shaming women who choose to wear makeup or get plastic surgery.  “At first I really got my back up…but then when I kept getting the same kind of emails, I had to admit that, okay, yea, I’ve actually kind of been shaming people for the choices they make or for having a body type that maybe they can’t control.”  Jennie has been making conscious efforts to not do this anymore in her more recent posts.  “It’s been really good to be actually called out on that kind of thing because nobody really calls me out on anything before…Looking back, some of the stuff I was saying was inappropriate. 

Jennie recalls when she feels like she’d made it on the internet when she received hate mail.  Some are about the blog, attacking her ad-busting posts, and others are more personal attacks.  However, Jennie says she hasn’t received many emails like this over the two years she’s been posting.  “I remember the first one I got—I was like, now this means that I’ve finally made it on the internet.  You haven’t made it until you get hate mail.”

Overwhelmingly, however, the responses to Jennie’s blog are positive.  People write to her, describing how Ad-Busting helps with self-esteem or recognizing sexualized or gendered advertising and the message behind these advertisements.  “That’s the ultimate “wow,” someone who I don’t even know, their life has been made a little bit better because of what I do just as a hobby.”  Jennie’s favorite part of blogging?  Seeing a post of hers go viral and the positive reactions she gets from the online community.  “The best part is seeing what posts are the most popular, what people dig.  And occasionally I’ll get one that goes viral and that’s a really cool feeling.”  

One of Jennie’s ads was, to her surprise, featured on a Facebook page she follows for an organization called About-Face.  Their mission states: “We equip women and girls with tools to understand and resist harmful media messages that affect self-esteem and body image.”  Jennie describes her shock when they posted one of her ads: “I was like, oh my god, that’s me! That’s like the ultimate compliment.”

 

About-Face focuses on informing girls and young women about the way they perceive media and advertising and how they may affect body image and self-esteem. 

Many contributors for the online community of feminists and advertising don’t stop online.  They, like Jennie, carry their talents over to the real world, where they strive to make an actual change in society.  Jennie and other online contributors, as well as the feminist community as a whole are hopeful for the changes we have yet to make.  “I think change is afloat for sure,” says Jennie, “We want to see women who reflect the diversity of what it means to be a woman today.” 

(Follow Jennie's tumblr, Ad-Busting, listen to her radio talk show, Yea, What She Said, or learn more about Take Back the Night, an organization focused on ending violence against women and the silences women are forced into after abuse.)