I am still struggling to get to grips with human life. Recently I heard that Coco-Cola is going to be promoting female empowerment.
Nationwide, the 'Diet Coke' female will be invited to 'Join the Rebellion' and celebrate her right to say no to the pressures and expectations of modern day life. What's a Diet Coke female? And what rebellion? Rebellion against modern life? Does this mean that all girlies that sip diet coke will be allowed to become rebels? Will dustbins be full of heeled shoes, hair straighteners and make-up? I decided to look into this a little further.
Coca-Cola’s press release states that they will be teaming up with Company magazine and producing a miniature magazine called, ‘Rebel.’ The first ‘impactful’ (nice one Cola even I, a creature that literally has cotton wool for brains, knows that ‘impactful’ does not appear in the English sodding dictionary…) issue will have articles on beauty, fashion and that staple magazine ingredient, 'celebrities', who ‘hint’ (urgh, that vague word, that basically implies no balls subtlety) at REBELLION. It’s obvious that Coco-Cola knows its market and hence, the brainless press release.
However, one only has to do a half-arsed double take to realise that campaign makes no sense. The aim of the campaign is to encourage the readers to say NO to the pressures of modern life. What might those pressures be….hmm. As a kitty, beauty, fashion, looking good and finding Mr Right doesn’t exist….Therefore, I would definitely say they are modern pressures for women…yet, in this new Cola magazine, they will be being flashed at women as though they are tools of empowerment. On top of that, this ‘Rebel’ magazine is featuring within Company magazine that already pretends style, beauty, consumerism and celeb gossip are vital to being a girl and therefore empowering. Such concepts are not empowering and are just self-immersing dross. It’s a magazine, like most womens magazines, that is barely connected to the outside world except via celebrities.
Yes, human society has moved on in one way from the 1950s, the ‘golden age’ of womens magazines, when articles focused on housework and knitting. However in their place, we now have these magazines that are so girlie and brainless that it makes me feel nauseous and lucky that I’m not human. Pages and pages filled with shitty garbage about current style trends, make up tips, sex tips, ‘secrets about men’. As these magazines realise they have nothing left to write about, they fill their obsolete pages with celebrity gossip; worshiping celebrity cretins like the Egyptians worshiped gods (and cats) and divulging every useless bit of pap about the soddingly dull lives of celebrities. The general assumption is that these magazines are empowering because they focus on women and ‘what women should like’. Yet all it means is that they are just encouraging women to be self-absorbed consumers, obsessed with trivialities and fixated on their personal lives at the expense of more broadly meaningful concerns. It seems, puzzlingly enough, that many women like to identify with that woeful ‘singleton’ and frivolous neurotic, Bridget Jones: Bridget Jones is the end result of womens magazines.
Anyway, my case in point is that it is utterly depressing that Coco-Cola, a large brand that sadly has a lot of influence, is simply just advertising via a womens magazine, under the guise of faux female empowerment.
