Culture Jamming

It seems next to impossible to go a day without being bombarded with overly sexualized images of women. The images that I find to be the most ridiculously offensive of them all are the advertisements for American Apparel.

American Apparel, a popular clothing line known for its amateur pornographic-like advertisements, heavily utilizes the perfect provocateur; an "exemplary female prototype" who embodies youth, good looks, a slender body, and sexual seductiveness (Cortese, 54). The company also is an example of Cortese's statement that, "Advertising images simultaneously tried to co-opt and commodify the very notion of 'women's liberation'" (Cortese, 56) because American Apparel encourages their female consumers to send in photographs of themselves wearing AA clothing, usually while in overtly sexual positions. American Apparel has been highly criticized for its advertisements, so much so that this anti-advertisement featuring Dov Charney, the company owner, was created. The anti-ad takes an image from an actual American Apparel advertisement and features a statement from Dov Charney himself, highlighting his clearly misogynistic opinions regarding domestic violence and rape. I find the anti-advertisement to be very effective because it mimics the American Apparel style yet exposes it for what it truly is: a company whose founder reinforces the existence of rape culture through advertisements and his speech. The anti-advertisement demonstrates the mindset behind the objectification of women in media images that is so consistently denied to even exist.