Jennifer Berger on About Face and American Apparel

Recently I sat down with Jennifer Berger, the executive director of About Face, a media literacy organization, helping girls and women resist harmful media messages. They currently have a campaign against American Apparel's advertising.

I recently sat down with Jennifer Berger, the executive director of About Face.

We talked about her organization and a current campaign they have against

American Apparel.

About Face equips women and girls with the tools they need to understand and also

resist harmful media messages that affect their self esteem and their body image.

I got involved with About Face back in 1997 which was a year before I graduated from

college. And I read about About Face in Bitch Magazine. They were doing an action,

Kathy Bruin, the founder had put up all these posters everywhere

of Kate Moss reclining and it said "Emaciation Stinks" instead of Obsession.

And I knew at that moment that I had to be involved in one way or another.

So the problem we have with American Apparel's advertising is that it continually

objectifies and exploits the female body for the sake of selling a product.

It may glorify the female body one could say, one could argue in terms of showing

how beautiful it really is, however the pornographic use of the female body

in this case in order to sell the product essentially commodifies the body.

And that also takes away women's agency. It takes away any thought that this could

be a full and complete person and turns her into a set of body parts that are sexualized.

It turns her, it essentially takes her worth and makes it about her sexual self as opposed to

any other parts of herself that may also be wonderful.

And so, our main problem is that, is all of that advertising, however the CEO of the

company is, CEO president named Dov Charney is sort of a notorious slime bag,

and essentially has created a very sexualized culture at the company.

He used to take most of the photos of the models and is known to really approach

various staff members and workers at the company in a very sexual manner

that we find very inappropriate. Part of the problem with American Apparel's advertising

in a sea of over sexualized images of women essentially is that the website that

American Apparel, many of American Apparel's photos is on is not an over 18

website, it's an under 18 website and it's extremely, extremely obscene.

Where you see women's breasts, but not just women's breast,

women laying in supine positions. There's one with a woman with her legs spread

and she's wearing a leotard with circles on it and it says Bullseye, that kind of thing

that little, you know, very young teenagers, even 8 years olds can go onto the website

and see, so a lot of parents probably are probably not aware that their teenagers are essentially going to the

American Apparel website to go "shopping" and seeing what is essentially pornography.

When I say pornographic as if it's a bad thing what I really mean is that power is essentially

taken out of the women's hands, sexual power isn't necessarily the best type of

power to have as far as my opinion is concerned and so things like having

Hustler in the changing rooms and things like that to encourage this very oversexualized

environment really just makes women feel weird. That's essentially it that's the easiest

way to put it without using big words and everything. We walk into a fitting room

like that and immediately think "Oh my god, do I look like that? Am I hot enough?

What do I do? What do I do?" And most women are not "hot enough" to be in an

American Apparel ad or in a magazine or in Hustler magazine or things like that.

It takes the power away from us and makes us not want to buy

American Apparel products quite honestly.

So our demands of American Apparel are #1 that this sexually exploitive

advertising ends altogether in all of the American Apparel points of purchase

as well as the website as well as stores and #2 that Dov Charney hires a

marketing consultant for one year to relaunch the brand in a way that's more friendly to

women and I think that will happen is that women will actually buy the products

more often, women are the main consumers of American Apparel's products.

For more on About Face visit their website About-Face.org