Honestly, I'm rather embarrassed that this has fallen to me. How can this be my responsibility to call out this blatant degradation of women? Where is Rebecca Walker? Shira Tarrant? Elizabeth Wurtzel? Nancy Pelosi? Hillary Clinton? I really do not want to be the one to do this. Over one hundred years of Feminism in the United States, but it has somehow fallen to an Anti-Feminist to indict a company that is harming women? Well, if I must...
Dove chocolate degrades women and insults our intelligence with their stupid wrappers. This is a company that specifically targets women, taking advantage of our virtually universal love of chocolate and then assuming we need and will enjoy their little "inspirational" remarks printed on the wrappers. Such as, "Be Free. Be Happy. Be you." Oh, and here's a good one: "Love is a Flower, a Friendship, and a Sheltering Tree." Like I really needed a chocolate wrapper to tell me to be myself. And the latter one isn't even consistent. If you're going to relate a metaphysical ideal to three limited images, at least make sure they're all in the same genre.
I'm sure there are plenty of women who find the sayings on Dove wrappers "cute" and "fun." These women are what I like to call "stupid."
Yeah, I don't need to purchase Dove chocolate. Of course, I don't have to read the wrappers. But hasn't society progressed enough to make the condescension of women a thing of the past?
Oh, except in the workplace where men are still paid higher salaries than their female counterparts, despite the nearly 50-year-old efforts of NOW. And in government where we have yet to elect a female president and the only viable contender the Left has produced is less feminine than Miss J Alexander, and any viable contender on the Right is maliciously attacked and unmercifully misrepresented by the media (because that isn't at all sexist/chauvinistic/misogynistic, right?)
But, hey, we’re still liberated, right? We can vote. We can dress like whores and have SlutWalks. We can be promiscuous. We can readily divorce our husbands. We can kill our children. Ah, equality. Rights. Freedom.
And yet insulting and condescending comments are still permissible under the guise of cute and fun inspiration?
Things just are not adding up. I would think that the liberated and respected women of a society would never be perceived by a corporation to need nonsensical remarks thrown at them.
Or perhaps we are not as liberated and respected as we think we are.
Maybe, just maybe, through our efforts to free ourselves from the shackles of an antiquated patriarchal society and distance ourselves from what Nature dictates a woman should be, we have actually degraded ourselves.
You know that saying, “What is last in execution is first in intention,” or something like that? Well please allow me to be all Bible-y for a moment:
“Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.’ So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them . . . . The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,
‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman because she was taken out of man.’” Genesis 2:18-23
It was not until God had created Woman that he had finished creating altogether. We were it. The last thing God brought into being. But the first thing God intended to be. The “Crown of Creation,” to quote Dr. Bergsma.
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So what happened? Are not crowns worn on the top of heads of royalty and kept on pedestals in museums? Are not they carefully crafted, cared for and demand respect?
I demand to be treated like a Crown of Creation, dammit. But I’m not holding my breath in this culture.
Even though women’s rights were severely limited back in 1910 when Feminism first came onto the scene in America, at least women were still respected. It would have never been socially acceptable in Victorian society for a man to refer to the woman he was courting as his “bitch” or “hoe.” Never would it have been tolerated for a young lady to degrade herself through promiscuity. There was a time in American society when women were held up on a pedestal.
And it was because all women were either mothers or potential mothers. And everybody in every culture of every society in every country knows not to disrespect someone’s mother.
But because Feminists successfully separated sex from childbearing, women are no longer viewed as mothers or potential mothers, and therefore do not demand respect from society as a whole.
By “freeing our sexuality from reproduction,” or rather, acting contrary to Nature, we have lost all respect for ourselves, for our role in Nature, and for sex itself. And men and society have merely followed along.
And for what? Obviously, Feminism has yielded irreplaceable advances for women, but what are we really getting out of all of this?
We still do not make as much money as men, but we have the right to kill our children.
We asked society for equality and freedom, and they handed us a dead baby. And pieces of chocolate wrapped in foil printed with stupid, condescending remarks that are supposed to make us feel better about what we’ve done to ourselves.
To echo the general rhetoric of my favorite (and most despised) revolutionary, Malcolm X: that’s not liberation! That’s TOKEN liberation!
Sorry, but I believe women deserve better than that.
I’ll let the real Feminists take it from here.
