Advert rage

Ever deconstructed the messages and language within adverts?

Sometimes there's fun to be had (see the weekly column at the beginning of the Saturday Guardian's Guide section). Sometimes there are pure head-desk moments. And sometimes the red mist of rage descends.

At the moment, amongst others, I am feeling pretty pissed at the relatively recent appearance of adverts which assume that plastic surgery will be an eventual and necessary choice for every woman.

Firstly, Juviderm, a feather will never convince me that the needle you are hiding behind it will not hurt. Of course it frickin' will. And no, I do not have an aesthetic practitioner. And hiding the word surgery does not change the realities or the risks of undertaking even so-called simple procedures.

But putting all that to one side, the other thing that chaps my hide about all of this is the limited and restrictive idea of 'perfect woman' that these kinds of adverts promote at an apparently increasingly urgent fashion. These women are almost universally white, definitely middle-class (both by accent and by resource measures for these things to be matter of course), absolutely not queer, not differently abled, without doubt cisgendered, etc. This woman that we are all supposed to be and to spend money on being as 'naturally' as possible ignores the realities of the vast majority of women in this country. I realise that advertisers target the market that will buy their product, but when all the adverts make the same assumptions, I have to come to the conclusion that to a capitalist system, I am invisible and therefore irrelevant.

On the other hand, when I think about who I am invisible to, maybe I am better off existing in their blindspots.