Dolce & Gabbana under fire for comments on family

[Anomaly]

Your apostate nonsense is really starting to show its evil consequences. Hardcore pornography... God help us.

Come on. You know it's his hipster antiestablishment outrage against anything not different enough. 

[Era Might]

Come on. You know it's his hipster antiestablishment outrage against anything not different enough. 

​lol. Not sure what a hipster is, but I don't think I have what it takes to be one.

[veritasluxmea]

I've reached my breaking point with the whole world of marketing and advertising. Seriously, I think we've reached a point of no return, this world is done for. These bourgeois depictions of "family life" are worst of all. I can't take this ish anymore.

​

​Ah yes. Because "traditional" families are another bourgeois lie! ad pictures of "traditional" families are a capitalist conspiracy to make people buy stuff! Good work, comrade. 

Frankly, that looks pretty normal to me. A little sexed up, photoshopped, and they have weird looks on their faces, but most families I grew up with, including my own, resemble that pretty closely. (Usually with more kids.) I'd post Christmas photos of all the "traditional" families I know but I have rules against personal information on the internet and I think we threw most of them out anyways. From about age five to sixteen I knew exactly four families that divorced/had adultery involved, two were from my parish and the other two were distant non-Catholic relatives. Sure, now I've expanded a lot and know teen moms, couples that use contraception, and I live with a single parent myself (death, not divorce or adultery), but the "traditional" family is pretty normal and everything else is just a different deviation where something went wrong or unfortunate happened that left you in tough circumstances. 

I support Dolce and Gabbana's statements. I don't have personal experience with children of gay couples, but if it's anything like what happened to my friends after living through divorce, I feel very badly for them. I was surprised at how traumatizing divorce was for my friends, for the kids of couples I know who went through it. It changed and hurt them in ways I still don't understand today. Sin and broken families might be the norm but it sure ain't good for you. 

[Era Might]

​Ah yes. Because "traditional" families are another bourgeois lie! ad pictures of "traditional" families are a capitalist conspiracy to make people buy stuff! Good work, comrade. 

​You think a metrosexual, a lingerie ad, and a bunch of props for the Dolce & Gabbana constitute the "traditional family"?

The traditional family smelt like horse manure and the kids died of typhus, the daughters were property of their father, the wives were beaten, and the men were kings of their castles. The bourgeois family has no smell, never dies, always smiles, creates nothing but consumes what it is given.

THE RIGHT TO GRIEF by Carl Sandburg

TAKE your fill of intimate remorse, perfumed sorrow,
Over the dead child of a millionaire,
And the pity of Death refusing any check on the bank
Which the millionaire might order his secretary to
     scratch off
And get cashed.

     Very well,
You for your grief and I for mine.
Let me have a sorrow my own if I want to.

I shall cry over the dead child of a stockyards hunky.
His job is sweeping blood off the floor.
He gets a dollar seventy cents a day when he works
And it's many tubs of blood he shoves out with a broom
     day by day.

Now his three year old daughter
Is in a white coffin that cost him a week's wages.
Every Saturday night he will pay the undertaker fifty
     cents till the debt is wiped out.

The hunky and his wife and the kids
Cry over the pinched face almost at peace in the white box.

They remember it was scrawny and ran up high doctor bills.
They are glad it is gone for the rest of the family now
     will have more to eat and wear.

Yet before the majesty of Death they cry around the coffin
And wipe their eyes with red bandanas and sob when
     the priest says, "God have mercy on us all."

I have a right to feel my throat choke about this.
You take your grief and I mine--see?
To-morrow there is no funeral and the hunky goes back
     to his job sweeping blood off the floor at a dollar
     seventy cents a day.
All he does all day long is keep on shoving hog blood
     ahead of him with a broom.

[veritasluxmea]

So to clarify, your beef with the ad it's that it's a ridiculously good-looking and wealthy family? 

[orapronobis]

​What you said, I'm guessing.

And I agree. It's horrific and absurd, like Gregor Samsa waking up one day and finding himself to be a monstrous vermin. I would be rather be dead than identify with those ads, even if it makes me a giant bug.

​God Bless Phatmass. Within a few posts it went from slamming modern advertisement to quoting from The Metamorphosis! :D

[Era Might]

​God Bless Phatmass. Within a few posts it went from slamming modern advertisement to quoting from The Metamorphosis! :D

​lol. Sorry, I was listening to a lecture on the story on my drive into work this morning (yes, I work for the man).

[Era Might]

So to clarify, your beef with the ad it's that it's a ridiculously good-looking and wealthy family? 

​No, that it is false, says nothing, has no human or artistic value, and like all advertising, is a technique of propaganda meant to confirm and sustain people's fantasies as consumers. There is no such thing as "good" advertising, all advertising (or rather, good advertising) is pure technique. It is not art intended to plumb the depths of human experience and question all our certainties. Advertising exists for one reason: to create your reality for you, and translate that reality into a process of consumption. Why do cereal companies market Tony the Tiger? Because they want to get to the kids, that's how they get to the moms.

There is plenty of art that depicts beautiful people and wealthy people. The difference is that art has a human purpose, advertising has only a technical purpose. the purpose of advertising is to translate abstract systems of production and consumption into human fantasies. That's not a Marxist critique, it's basic marketing.

[veritasluxmea]

​No, that it is false, says nothing, has no human or artistic value, and like all advertising, is a technique of propaganda meant to confirm and sustain people's fantasies as consumers.

​I agree the "perfectly clean and always happy family" ad is shallow and unrealistic, but I wouldn't say a "mom and dad with kids" family is unrealistic. 

[Era Might]

​I agree the "perfectly clean and always happy family" ad is shallow and unrealistic, but I wouldn't say a "mom and dad with kids" family is unrealistic. 

​No, of course not, the purpose of advertising is to reflect whatever social habits there are. But the subtext of the ad is not just about happy families, it is about happy CONSUMER families. The family is happy and beautiful and ideal not because they are a "traditional family" but because they are a Dolce & Gabbana family. Forget any idea of any ad trying to confirm you in your traditional values, and if an ad does try to do that, it is even more insidious, because then it really becomes propaganda and ideology, it transforms your world into the shell for a brand relationship. That is what marketing is, turning brand relationships into emotional processes, where you don't even have to think about buying from that brand, you do it automatically because the brand has confirmed some emotional connection, but has only done so on a surface level. These ads are targeted toward a market that can buy Dolce & Gabanna products, and the rest of the audience may not be able to afford D&G, but can support the brand's goals by buying into the fantasy being sold, and help share the brand feeling. We are trapped in an antichrist system, all joking aside, what one of my favorite authors calls "Techno-Moloch." This world is in a very bad place.

[Nihil Obstat]

[Era Might]

Imagine an ad with Christ during the crowning with thorns, very beautiful, but the only difference from traditional iconography...he would be draped in a Dolce & Gabanna cloak. Would that not be a blasphemous ad, regardless of any shallow "pious" context? That is no different from this. The Christ in that ad would not be Christ any more than the family in this ad is a family. They are both antichrist.

[Era Might]

​I love you.

[Credo in Deum]

​No, of course not, the purpose of advertising is to reflect whatever social habits there are. But the subtext of the ad is not just about happy families, it is about happy CONSUMER families. The family is happy and beautiful and ideal not because they are a "traditional family" but because they are a Dolce & Gabbana family. Forget any idea of any ad trying to confirm you in your traditional values, and if an ad does try to do that, it is even more insidious, because then it really becomes propaganda and ideology, it transforms your world into the shell for a brand relationship. That is what marketing is, turning brand relationships into emotional processes, where you don't even have to think about buying from that brand, you do it automatically because the brand has confirmed some emotional connection, but has only done so on a surface level. These ads are targeted toward a market that can buy Dolce & Gabanna products, and the rest of the audience may not be able to afford D&G, but can support the brand's goals by buying into the fantasy being sold, and help share the brand feeling. We are trapped in an antichrist system, all joking aside, what one of my favorite authors calls "Techno-Moloch." This world is in a very bad place.

D&G is a company.  Companies market and advertise their products in a way to make you want them.  This is the point behind marketing! Companies do this because companies need consumers. No company will spend money on advertisements that say "Hey buy D&G, sure it won't change your life and you can live fine without it but please consider buying it anyway." Or for Coke, "Are you thirsty? Well then consider getting a cold Coke.  Sure the sodium may not completely quench your thirst, but the sugar will make feel good even though you don't really need this much sugar."  Yeah, hmm probably not the best marketing technique.

Furthermore anyone who lets a D&G ad shape their entire belief system already has a big problem.  I mean if you can't look at their ads and be able to distinguish between the fantasy they're portraying and the reality of everyday life, then that is the scarier story. Heck anyone who would let a D&G ad piss them off so much they interpret that the father is going to plow the mother right when the camera is off them is a scarier story than the stupid ad depicting the obviously unrealistic environments!  

Lastly people like ads because they give you a chance to escape reality.

 

 

 

Edited March 17, 2015 by Credo in Deum

[Era Might]

D&G is a company.  Companies market and advertise their products in a way to make you want them.  This is the point behind marketing! Companies do this because companies need consumers. No company will spend money on advertisements that say "Hey buy D&G, sure it won't change your life and you can live fine without it but please consider buying it anyway." Or for Coke, "Are you thirsty? Well then consider getting a cold Coke.  Sure the sodium may not completely quench your thirst, but the sugar will make feel good even though you don't really need this much sugar."  Yeah, hmm probably not the best marketing technique.

Furthermore anyone who lets a D&G ad shape their entire belief system already has a big problem.  I mean if you can't look at their ads and be able to distinguish between the fantasy their portraying and the reality of everyday life, then that is the scarier story. Heck anyone who would let a D&G ad piss them off so much they interpret that the father is going to plow the mother right when the camera is off them is a scarier story than the stupid ad depicting the obviously unrealistic environments!  

Lastly people like ads because they give you a chance to escape reality.

 

 

 

​I didn't post the ads, simply commented on them. I don't drink Coke, and try to block out advertising in general. And I absolutely reject the entire premise behind Coke, an inhuman product if there ever was one. It's sad that in a Western culture where water is such a primordial symbol, once the symbol of our rebirth in Christ and of spiritual refreshment, has now become a mass-produced concoction of sugar that becomes the fantasy of everyone from third-world Africa to third-grade New York. Our culture and civilization has long ceased to exist, we live as consumers of packaged dreams and services from companies and professionals. It's sad.

You find it scary that I take these ads seriously. I find it scary that you don't.

Ads do not allow you to escape reality, they are your reality. These ads do not piss me off. I've never even seen a D&G ad before this thread. I'm just interested in how ideology and propaganda work in general. I also work in marketing, and am very interested in what marketing represents. I think it is a form of mass superstition beyond anything you ever found in the most primitive society. We are under the spell of marketers, in the ways you outline and many more.

Anyway, I don't spend my days raving at ads. I try to avoid them as much as possible. I prefer the traditional asceticism of the eyes...flee evil, don't fight it.