There are some big things going on in the world. European finances melting down. Exotic animals gunned down in Ohio. The city of Honolulu doing its best to repress protest in advance of the APEC meetings.
Meanwhile, I’m just going to look at a little tale of simple citizen activism.
Apparently Halloween isn’t quite what it was when I was younger, at least judging by this promotion for an evening at Apartment 3, a restaurant-lounge across from the convention center.
The ad pitches a Friday night “Apartment of Whore-R” and a “sexy pin-up boudoir” to go with a $5 happy hour.
Not everyone is happy about the depiction of women as whores, including some residents and apartment owners in Century Center, the hi-rise condominium where Apartment 3 is located.
It’s not just an issue of prudishness. The problem is that the building has been hurt by its reputation as home to a number of “massage” businesses of “ill-repute”, so to speak, despite efforts by its owners’ association to stamp out illegal activities. And this Whore-R night just seems to rub salt in that wound.
I was impressed by one woman’s simple complaint about the Whore-able promo. Looking at the advertising, she decided to call the sponsor, and tracked down the local rep for Stoli. She presented her concerns straight on. The advertising demeans women by painting them as whores. She told the company rep that it’s a message inconsistent with the product image Stoli should want to promote.
Complaining to the sponsor, rather than the promoter, was a good idea.
The Stoli rep was upset, and said he was surprised by the way the evening is being pitched. He indicated the company would likely have to reconsider its sponsorship.
Maybe. That will be interesting to see.
Last year, a column in Ka Leo, the UH Manoa student newspaper, questioned the whole “hot and sexy” halloween scene, although I have my doubts about the writer’s claim that he was “disappointed because most of the girls were half-naked.”
Last Halloween, my friends and I went out to Waik?k? to see what cool costumes people came up with. Unfortunately, we came back disappointed because most of the girls were half-naked.
What used to be a holiday to show off creative outfits has turned into a show of short skirts and low-cut tops. It’s not ok to dress scandalously and get away with it. Last time I checked, Halloween in America was a time where you could dress up in clothes rather than out of them.
With the invention of cameras and Facebook, all it takes is a split second for your face and costume to be photographed and posted online. In college, students often do not think of the consequences, especially for holidays like Halloween. But getting rejected from a high end job when recruiters see your Halloween costume on Facebook is preventable.
Hmmmm. There are a bunch of different issues packed up in all this. Hopefully a few of you readers will take a shot at unpacking them.
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I don’t think Apartment 3’s (God, how I detest their way of spelling it) poster is saying *all* women are whores — just those who show up to their so-called Halloween party. So any guy should be able to boink any woman in attendance after stuffing a few bucks down her teeny-tiny bra top. You wanna be a whore for a night? Here ya go, sis.
Filed under “Things I’d love to see, but probably never will.” And for the record, I’m in favor of legalized prostitution. See? It all works!
Is that Dita Von Teese in the ad? It sure looks like her. I would question whether that is an authorized use of her photo, and whether she would object to having “whore-er” splattered across it in blood. Someone from the condo owner’s association should send her a tweet to find out how much her attorneys like it.
I, too, was disappointed that most of the girls were half naked. I had hoped for full naked.
Bada boom.
No, seriously, the promotion is simply tasteless. Fortunately it seems Stoli is now convinced that it is detrimental to brand image to align a tasty vodka with a tasteless promotion.
Yes, bad taste and poor judgment abound at Halloween in Waikiki.
I’ll take a few shots at this….
In traditional societies, one does not have “adolescence”; there are children and adults, but no adolescents. (Most famous perhaps in documenting this is the right-wing French historian Philippe Aries’ work “Centuries of Childhood”.)
For example, in tribal societies to this day there are no “teenagers”. A child goes through a rather rigorous or even brutal right of passage, and then becomes an adult overnight. In fact, it has been pointed out that in Japan there really is no such thing as a “teenager”: by American standards, high school students in Japan act like children in many ways, and the Japanese never really ‘individuate’ as Americans would understand the concept.
Starting in the 1950s, a youth culture develops in the US and Britain, which gains a certain hysterical self-consciousness with the arrival of the Beetles. There was a time when people reach puberty then get married and work. Now they go to high school and, increasingly, to college. They exist emotionally, physically and intellectually in an in-between state between childhood and adulthood. This recent historical development is really a very dysfunctional development in some ways for both society and the individual, who exists in a state of temporary role-playing indeterminacy. But this is also an extremely creative phase, and even adults in creative places (i.e., California) look and act like teenagers (it’s been pointed out that Steven Spielberg dresses in short pants, t-shirt and baseball cap like a kid; that Steve Jobs wore his trademark jeans and mock turtleneck like a teenager; Mark Zuckerberg wears jeans and a hoody everywhere as a matter of branding; likewise the Google founders dress like kids sometimes). In fact, in movie comedies today, men remain men-children while women mature and take control. The psychologist Erik Erikson asserted that creative individuals (Martin Luther, e.g.) retain the conflictive qualities of adolescents throughout their lives; this seems to be colonizing American society at all age levels now, at least among males depicted in popular culture.
Two apparently conflicting drives in particular seem to characterize the adolescent as he or she has emerged in Western culture since the 1950s: 1) an intense desire to rebel against (parental) authority and individuate, and 2) an intense desire to conform to one’s peers. One sees this in overtly sexually transgressive behavior among youth. In fact, college feminists have these “SlutWalks” that mock sexualized images of women; but one could argue that this also comprises conformity to that image; college ‘radicals’ are not so radical. (This contradiction is found in behavioral disorders among teenagers, like anorexia, where ‘girls’ are conforming to an ideal of femininity but also rebelling against it.) This risque self-presentation among teenage females moves downward toward ‘tweens’ or pre-pubescents, which many adults find disturbing.
Partly, this is one characteristic of democracy. As the journalist HL Menken once said, when people are given their freedom, the first thing they do is imitate their neighbor. (Indeed, there is a shift that comes with modernization, a move away from traditional fixed social roles and costumes toward fads and fashions that initially are or seem to be rebellious.) Also, Alexis de Tocqueville in his travels in early 19th-century America noted that Americans were the greatest conformists in the world (in public, at least), that there was very little diversity of opinion in the US, despite the apparent inherent rebelliousness of the society.
Corporations have a way of feeding the consumer frenzy of “rebellious conformity”. Young, hip consumers do not want to be identified with corporate conformity, so corporations have to constantly disguise their presence behind hip new products and to identify and co-opt new consumer trends among the young.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/
(I’ve run out of shots for the moment….)
Beatles, not Beetles, obviously not a fan.
And frankly, you left out the sheer numbers of baby boomers at the coming of automobile ownership, radio and rock and roll. The “youth culture” would have happened no matter what all your experts say. Don’t forget the vultures of Madison Avenue either, youth is a market, a trend.
Not trying to scrap here, just an opinion from a 60 year old who dresses any way he likes.
On one level, since the United States has exported all its jobs to China or the Indian subcontinent, what else can we export to get back the money we spend in Walmart. I guess we can export our women, just like the Phillippines does, to work as “maids” or other professions. This type of promotion goes a long way in preparing the next generation of prostitutes to put on their “A” game if they want to be successful in their “profession”.
(For those who don’t get this comment, think of the word, SARCASM!)
There was a baby boom and suburbanization in the US in the 1950s, that is true.
But that does not account for the characteristics of youth culture that have emerged since then.
There was at the same time a baby boom in Japan, for instance. Rock music also became a rage in Japan.
But the rock music Japanese still listen to is that of the 1950s. The Japanese are very faddish and conformist, but without the patina of rebelliousness that took off in the US from the 1960s on.
One reason that Japan is not overtly rebellious might be a long-standing permissiveness that pervades an otherwise rigidly conformist society. One’s personal life in Japan provides a vent for frustrations that accumulate in an almost prison-like public realm, the way personal eccentricity is an outlet for the English. (It has been argued that it was the English who invented rock and roll from American rhythm-and-blues; they needed it.)
That’s one funny thing about all this overt burlesque in the US: all these trick-or-treaters are actually rather tame people. In Japan, they really do have widespread kink. As Roland Barth wrote about pachinko parlors in _Empire of Signs_, “in Japan … sexuality is in sex, not elsewhere; in the United States, it is contrary; sex is everywhere, except in sexuality….”