“I am a woman of the baby boom, which means my history is filled with embarrassment, littered with images I’d just as soon forget. Old photos of my friends and me in platform shoes or, worse, hot pants, our hair freshly ironed, arm-in-arm with some neanderthal yet highly self-satisfied boyfriend in a surplus army jacket, serve as unforgiving reprimands of how naive and pliable we seemed in our youth”
You’ve probably read this book or a book like this. It’s an almost quaint, very 1990s book, applying some solid second-wave feminism to media analysis and looking into the media messaging that bombarded baby boomers throughout their lifetime. And of course, the media messaging that inspired the creative executives among the baby boomers to bombard subsequent generations. I was born in 1981, and I am squarely the child of baby boomers (my parents are in their mid-70s). I remember very much so watching a program on HBO about the lies that ads tell us, and how kids are impacted by it. I specifically remember them breaking down a commercial for a toy line called Food Fighters, anthropomorphic food dressed as soldiers, where the commercials showed them fully animated and autonomous. We were told very certainly that they didn’t do this in real life. We also saw glue being poured on cereal and things like this. I remember thinking: son of a bitch.
This book is a lot like that. It’s not naive or simplistic, but it is a more or less basic breakdown of media messaging, that is also well-covered by plenty of other books.
The biggest issue of course is that by centering herself, and you know exactly where I am going with this, this book is very centered on images blasted at white girls, and it entirely ignores and misses how those messages land different, not at all, with women of color. In a lot of ways, this is a transitional kind of text toward a more third-wave analysis.