And now, my transcription:

The theme music from Bewitched begins to play as Ripa enters a spacious, completely clutter-free room with white shelving and a clothes washer and dryer in turquoise. She wears casual, fitted clothing. She is carrying a large white laundry basket.

A voiceover says: “Now that I have my Electrolux washer and perfect steam dryer, I can juggle more things in my day.”

Ripa smiles broadly as the music picks up. She twirls toward the camera with her laundry basket, then leaves the room. She walks down a hallway. She throws a garment in an open doorway, and the camera follows it to show that it puts itself away in the closet of a pink bedroom. The bedroom is spotlessly tidy. A pre-teen girl is sprawled on the bed, reading a book. She exclaims, “Wow!”

The scene changes. Ripa is now visible through the back of a white storage unit in a yellow room. Her arms are a blur of motion as she rapidly places folded clothing on shelves. A girl is visible in the background. She sits on a white bed, playing a clapping game with a partially-visible playmate, who appears to be another girl of around the same age.

The scene changes again. Ripa is walking through a hallway with her basket. The walls are pale blue, hung with art prints. A console table is under one print, and a white chair under the other. A dog barks. Without looking, she slides a bowl across the floor with her foot. The dog appears, and eats from the bowl.

The scene changes. Three girls wearing tank tops and lounge pants in various colors sit at precise intervals on a brown couch. They are sitting very upright, with their hands on their knees. They are facing a large, flat-panel television. Black display shelves and framed art pieces are visible in the background. As Ripa walks by, each girl in turn raises her arms, and is clothed by a shirt Ripa throws into the air. She is no longer carrying the basket.

There is a voiceover: “With the Electrolux washer and perfect steam dryer you can remove wrinkles, and wash and dry clothes in just 36 minutes.”

During this voiceover, the scene changes twice. First, Ripa is back in the spacious laundry room, removing a man’s dress shirt from the dryer and looking at it, apparently appreciative of the lack of wrinkles. Next, a different view of the room is shown. Ripa throws a child’s jacket into the air, and it puts itself away on a hook behind her. She kicks a laundry basket in the foreground. She is very happy.

The voiceover continues, saying, “So you can be even more amazing,” as the scene changes back to the girls sitting on the couch. They have moved closer together, at one end of the couch. They are holding glasses of milk. Ripa enters, carrying a plate with cookies. The camera angle changes. She sits on the couch, and tilts the plate. The cookies fly through the air and into the free hands of each of the girls. The girls smile and begin to dip their cookies in their glasses of milk as Ripa looks on with a broad smile.

Ripa says, “Nice catch!” to the girls. They look at her and smile as they eat their cookies. One girl nods.

The logo for the Electrolux company appears in blue against a white background. Grey text in a font resembling handwriting appears above the logo, reading “Thinking of you.” In voiceover, Ripa says, “Electrolux: Be even more amazing.” The logo rotates, and becomes the Electrolux web address. The commercial ends.

Annnnd finally, discussion time!

I think there are some obvious points to hit here. The theme music along with the laundry “magically” putting itself away, as though there isn’t still labor involved in washing clothes even with fancy appliances. The way Ripa walks through the house for thirty seconds doing things for the children and the dog (and apparently a man who doesn’t appear in the commercial, unless she plans to wear that shirt herself), smiling brightly and all but dancing. The spotless, tastefully decorated house. Is this a realistic portrait of what housework is like? What life with children and a dog is like? SBG hates this ad. How about you? Is there a positive side?

1. Media Monday: Jean Paul Gaultier’s Designs at Target
2. Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Never Again’
3. Invisible Touch — Kelly Parra

Note: Like most of Picoult’s work, the book flits back and forth between present day and events as far back as twenty years ago, detailing events whose consequences culminate in present day, with the final detail being revealed on the last page. It’s kind of like the literary equivalent of an episode of Cold Case. For the sake of clarity, I’ve summarised the plot chronologically, not how it’s revealed in the book.

So we have Jack St. Bride, a popular young teacher whom several female students have crushes on. Honourable man that he is, he doesn’t even register these crushes; they’re just impressionable young minds that he wants to fill with knowledge. One of the students, Catherine, writes her fantasies about him in her diary, and when her ultra-conservative preacher father finds it, along with the birth control pills she was using in her sexual relationship with her boyfriend, he assumes the worst and Catherine’s testimony is disregarded. Jack does an eight-month stint in jail for sexually assaulting a female. Catherine recants at the end of the book, y’know, after he’s done jail time and has a record as a sexual offender.

His time done, he makes his way to the little town of Salem Falls, New Hampshire. He starts up a relationship with (the very much adult) Addie Peabody, but of course it doesn’t take long for him to attract the attention of other members of the female population, particularly teenage girls. Specifically Gillian, daughter of the town’s richest man. Gillian’s a Wiccan, see, except she ignores the advice of her fellow-Wiccans (ie, her doppelganger friends) that magic should be used for good, and instead uses it to get back at the people who laugh at her and make Jack fall in love with her. It doesn’t take long for Gillian to accuse Jack of rape, except what actually happened is that Gillian and her friends were practicing spells, high as kites, when Jack stumbles upon them, drunk. Gillian comes onto him, and when Jack turns her down flat, Gillian cries rape.

So here we have a man who not once, but twice has been the victim of infatuated teenage girls and paid the price for their misplaced devotion – first through a series of misunderstandings with Catherine, then with a manipulative Gillian who cried rape when she was turned down. I’m pretty sure Picoult isn’t actually saying, hey, all rape allegations are just screwed-up teenage girls crying rape, but the book definitely perpetuates that myth.

(Also, has anyone read the book who’s also familiar with the US legal system? Because if I apply Picoult’s logic to the Australian legal system, the state would be lucky to get a trial, let alone a conviction, on the evidence they had in both cases. Come to think of it, My Sister’s Keeper kind of fails there, too.)

Wait, it gets even classier. In the final scene of the book, it turns out that Gillian is in a seemingly consensual sexual relationship with her father. I say ‘seemingly consensual’ because it’s hard to gauge as the whole scene takes less than a page; she goes into his room and there’s references made to ‘an old, old dance’ and ‘sealing the deal once more’. It’s left up to the reader to decide how consensual it is. Has Gillian been so damaged that she cried rape with Jack as a cry for help? Is she just an out-and-out evil, manipulative tramp? Somewhere in between? We don’t know, because Picoult thinks it’s a good idea to let the reader decide her motives. Uh, no. Sometimes, it’s a good plot device – but not when we’re talking about crying rape and father-daughter incestuous relationships.

The shame of it is that Salem Falls could have been a thought-provoking read about people’s tendency to judge out of fear and ignorance. Girl cries rape and naturally the new guy in town with the criminal record had to have done it, because men who are devoted fathers and pillars of the community don’t commit crimes, let alone such heinous ones. Or maybe it could have looked at the idea that instead of Jack being the victim of Catherine and Gillian’s actions, he was indirectly the victim of their fathers’ unhealthy attitudes towards their daughters, which in turn screwed with their way of interacting with men. Instead, Picoult not only relies on a seriously bad trope, but ends it with an even worse one that should never be treated lightly, let alone as a throwaway ‘Ohmygod! It was him all along!’ moment.

1. Cattle Call #4
2. Tit for Tat on CSI
3. 24: Chloe Rocks!

It turns out that’s a lot more difficult to do than I’d feared. We’re all ignorant of our privilege. It’s when we refuse to let that ignorance be removed that we become hypocrites.

The ultimate test came a few months ago when I started reading about ableist language and suddenly realized: maybe the name of my anti-privilege site (“Blind Privilege”) was ableist. A couple of weeks later, someone else asked the same question, and I opened a discussion. The discussion was… interesting.

It took me a few months of researching, thinking, discussing and thinking some more, but I finally decided the site required a new name, even if I managed to dig up thousands of people who thought it was fine as it was. We decided to make it a sister site to Hathor (see the cute link at the top left?) and relaunch it with the new name:  What Privilege? You’re invited.

1. Geico on blind privilege
2. Invisible Privilege – a handy, snappy definition
3. Blinding Privilege

To summarize the episode, which can be viewed here, Chris asks out Ellen, a girl with Down syndrome (that he finds her attractive sounds promising at first). Stewie helps him dress for the date while singing a musical number, “Down Syndrome Girl“, which refers to Ellen having just recently learned to tie her shoes. (For bonus points, it also contains the line: “You wanna take that little whore, and spin her on the dancing floor,” because apparently the writers think calling a teenage girl a whore is funny.) Ellen proves to be extremely demanding, making Chris give her massages and make her ice cream sundaes before she’ll let him touch her sexually. This culminates in his saying: “I don’t care how hot you are! I don’t much like being treated this way. You know, I used to hear that people with Down syndrome were different than the rest of us, but you’re not. You’re not different at all! You’re just a bunch of [bleep bleep bleep] like everybody else!”

Okay, let’s get the Palin joke out of the way before I start dissecting the above: when Chris asks Ellen about herself, she says, “My dad’s an accountant, and my mom is the former governor of Alaska.” This joke fails completely on the humor front, because a child having Down syndrome does not imply anything at all about her parents. Where’s the humorous dig at Palin?

Jezebel says:

Out of context, it seems mostly mystifying…  The dig about Ellen’s mom being the former governor of Alaska just seems sort of out of place, and the entire scene appears less about disabilities than about a girl who likes to order her date around.

The rest of the episode yields some more upsetting bits — notably the musical number “Down Syndrome Girl.” Stewie sings a bunch of jokes about Ellen spilling Yoo-Hoo and learning to tie her shoes, all of which are tasteless. There’s also the odd assertion that Ellen has a super-strong, crushing embrace. Given the fact that people with Down syndrome sometimes have poor muscle tone, this seems especially stupid: an attempt to play on stereotype without even understanding what the stereotypes are.

Yes. And the only way these jokes “work” is if the viewer simply equates having Down syndrome with being “a retard”, thinks “retards” are good fodder for jokes just on the basis of how they look or act, and – in the case of the Palin dig – thinks that giving birth to a “retarded” kid suggests that a parent is defective in some way.

Also disheartening is the fact that Chris’ attraction to Ellen turns out to be based on the assumption that a Down syndrome girl would be sweet and malleable. While I like that Chris learned his prejudice was wrong, the idea of a neurotypical person deliberately seeking out a date with someone he believes will be less socially/emotionally mature sounds more than a little predatory.

The emphasis on the Palin dig distracts us from what’s really happening here. Everyone’s trying to score points for their political agenda, the right wing calling out liberals for accepting a joke that uses a child with Down syndrome to get at her mother and the left wing suggesting it’s all Palin’s fault for using her kids to further her political agenda. It’s all crap – even the bits that are true. We’ve talked before about the faux liberalism of Hollywood and the inability of many Hollywood people to recognize that children who aren’t somebodies have as many rights as their good buddies. It’s almost clever that right wingers have finally picked up on this hypocrisy in the past few months, but they so often end up re-using the victims in question to attack their liberal opponents that I’m just sick to death of all of ‘em – both sides.

“The Family Guy” had a cool opportunity to make an awesome character who happened to have Down syndrome and be a girl. But the portrayal failed epically because instead of thinking of her as a character, the writers thought of her as a disorder they find humorous and a gender they’re content to stereotype

1. Links of Great Interest 11/20/09
2. NBC looking for women viewers?
3. Easy Mode Is For Girls

For those who can not or prefer not to view the video, a fairly comprehensive transcript/summary follows:

The video begins with some upbeat music in a sort of mainstream techno style. Over a black screen, white letters appear spelling out “Which Muse Are You?”

The screen fills with small black-and-white snapshots of models wearing the clothing being advertised. One image moves toward the viewer and expands. Text appears to the side saying “[muse #1] / Punk / [you are] / provocative / feisty / impulsive”.

The image shifts to a color view of the model in the photo in a white room as lyrics are sung over the music. A female voice sings the words “don’t need a dance floor” and the model begins to dance. She is a young, slender, white woman with short, blonde hair. She is dressed in patterned tights, black boots, a black miniskirt and top, and a leather jacket. She is smiling and posing for the camera. She continues to dance, moving to the music and kicking her feet. The lyrics are “I’m gonna dance.”

The camera closes in on the model’s face briefly, and there are some transition effects before she walks off screen in the first outfit and back on in a second. Now she wears gray tights, black boots, a black miniskirt and vest, and a white t-shirt with a screen-printed design of a stylized woman’s face. The lips are red sequins. She dances and poses again as the camera focuses alternately on her entire body, her face, and specific details of the outfit.

The video returns to the screen full of black-and-white snapshots, and another is pulled out of the group and enlarged. The text this time reads “[muse #2] / Holly / wood / Glam / [you are] / glamorous / sophisticated / breathtaking”.

Now the screen shows a young, slender woman with light brown skin and long, loose dark hair (I didn’t read her as white, but I think it wouldn’t be difficult to do so) wearing a yellow sundress and black, high-heeled sandals. The lyrics “I’m gonna dance” play again as this model begins to move to the music. Her dancing style is less aggressive than the first model’s. She soon walks off screen and then back on, now wearing a fitted black dress with a blue bodice and another pair of high-heeled sandals. The singer’s voice says “dance” as the model poses in this second outfit.

The video goes back to the black-and-white photos. The highlighted photo this time is accompanied by text reading “[muse #3] / Ingénue / [you are] / innocent / coy / charming”. Once again the camera shows a young, slender white woman. Her light brown, long hair is pulled back. She wears a black miniskirt and pinstriped blazer, a white blouse, white knee-socks, and black and white sneakers.

The lyrics “I’m gonna dance” play as she starts to move. Transition effects show multiple versions of the same young woman as the camera changes focus. She chews bubble gum, twirls her hair, and blows a bubble. She walks off screen and then on in a new outfit, this time a black skirt, white spaghetti-strap top, and dark, multi-colored cardigan which a white stripe. Her hair is braided. She wears the same shoes and socks.

The camera pans back and we can see the model’s entire body. What appear to be white pocket liners, or perhaps the tails of her shirt, are just visible beneath the edge of her miniskirt. Her dancing is accompanied by indistinct lyrics. (I thought I heard “give me the what / give me the you”.)

The screen returns to the black-and-white portraits. The text accompanying a portrait now is “[muse #4] / Hip / Hop / [you are] / confident / artistic / lyrical”. The singer repeats the word “you” in different tones as a young, slender, Black woman appears in the white room. She wears a tan trench-coat, black leggings, black boots, and a black leather ball-cap. She dances, showing the camera the jewelry around her neck, to the lyrics “don’t need a dance floor”.

The lyrics “I’m gonna dance” play, and the model moves toward the camera out of view, then reappears in a different outfit. Now she wears colored tights, brown boots, a black miniskirt, a short-sleeved brown leather jacket with patterned long sleeves underneath, and a gray cap. The lyric “dance” is repeated several times as she moves.

Again, the screen returns to the black-and-white portraits. The text beside the enlarged portrait this time is “[muse #5] / Rock / ‘n’ Roll / [you are] / rebellious / electric / thrill-seeking”. The model is a slender, young, white woman with blonde hair pulled into a french twist. She wears black, high-heeled ankle boots, semi-sheer calf-length leggings, a black miniskirt, and a black-and-white striped tank top. The lyric “you” is repeated several times as she dances and poses for the camera. This model does not have a second outfit.

The screen returns to the black-and-white portraits, but this time the large portrait is of a man, identified by text nearby as Jean Paul Gaultier. He is shown in black-and-white behind a camera, filming the first model and giving instruction. He approaches her and adjusts her hairstyle. She embraces him and he lifts her off the ground as they turn in a circle. The indistinct lyrics from before repeat. (Give me the something give me the something else? I am still clueless.) The ad closes with a final image of the black-and-white photos.

So much for the media! Now on to the discussion.

On the bright side, this ad shows these young models being happy and energetic in their clothes. They don’t look like they’re drugged, or, you know, dead. Not that I have anything against that advertising trend. *cough* And though seeing anything actually marketed as “punk” always makes me flinch, the outfits that have been put together are interesting and, for the most part, fairly different from one another even when they share certain pieces in common, allowing for some individuality.

Less positive, in my mind, is seeing that apparently no matter what “muse” you are, chances are good that you’re still going to end up wearing a black miniskirt at some point. Also, you must be young and very thin. And preferably white. And, as ACW said when she sent us the link, “will someone *please* give a black woman a spot in an ad without designating her style as ‘hip-hop’ or ‘urban’?”

Also, who is this ad aimed at? I find the “Rock ‘n’ Roll” outfit’s clear callbacks to Madonna’s early look really fun and entertainingly nostalgic (and also entertaining because Gaultier was, of course, one of the people who designed Madonna’s look), but I am preeeetty sure that people in my age group are not actually the target market for these clothes, which seem to be designed for the “juniors” department (aka, teenagers).

But there’s plenty beyond those things to discuss and unpack here. What do you think? What do you like? What do you hate? And how does this ad compare to similar media?

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3. Slimfast using normal size people