I'VE TALKED HERE BEFORE of the uncomfortable similarities between what left-wing academic types call "Identity Politics" and what the media business calls target marketing.
The evidence is everywhere you look.
Earlier this week, we wrote about punk rock getting turned into soundtrack music for skateboarding exhibitions designed to sell athletic shoes and soda pop.
Then there was that bizarre Super Bowl commercial with a hospital nursery full of newborn girls throwing off their little pink caps.
It was for Oxygen, a commercial website and cable TV channel billed as being "For Women, By Women." It's really owned by some big media-conglomerate backing; but it's run by Geraldine Layborne, the former Nickelodeon executive who infamously fired creator John Kricfakusi from The Ren and Stimpy Show.
The TV component of Oxygen is not yet available locally. But a Salon review of its initial offerings (mostly talk shows) claims it's about as bad as one can imagine.
Essentially, according to the review and similar slams by other critics, the channel's message is "Don't obey those old corporate images telling you how every female everywhere should think, behave, and consume. Obey our new corporate images telling you how every female everywhere should think, behave, and consume. And now that we've established your material and psychological desires for you, buy these products."
Marketers, of course, have exploited feminist identity politics at least as far back as the launch of Virginia Slims cigarettes in 1968. (When the cigarette's makers bought the controlling sponsorship of pro women's tennis in the '70s, critics used lines like "I am woman, hear me cough.")
Even before that, appliance makers used to tout such newfnagled contraptions as home freezers and electric clothes dryers as tools to help housewives cut down on household drudgery--not, like later ads for such items did, to make women feel such duties comprised the central definition of their lives.
Any "political" or "radical" ideology based not on action but on mere identity just plays into the norms and priorities of the Regime of Marketing.
Some "identity" subcultures will be more ripe for advertiser exploitation (say, college-educated white women) than others (say, homeless people).
But the principle's still the same.
As long as you define yourself by marketer-exploitable definitions (age group, income level, gender, race, or "psychographics"), you identify yourself as a market, not as a soul.
And as long as you identify yourself by your perceived differences from (or your perceived moral superiority to) other market segments (subcultures), you're doing nothing to build the human-to-human coalitions any real change will need.
MONDAY: One group's attempt at defining a way out of the tyranny of marketing.
ELSEWHERE:
- Joey Ramone may be nearing AARP's minimum age, but here's a punk band that's already passed it some time ago--One Foot in the Grave!...
- Take a video-game program, use to make animated movie shorts, and you've got Machinima!...
- Perhaps industrial society's greatest invention, Moist Towelettes! (found by Larkfarm)....
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