Alice on Screen: Who is Alice? Curious Interpretations of Wonderland

To coincide with ACMI's Winter Masterpieces exhibition "Wonderland", which focuses on Alice's representation in the moving image- from magic lantern slides to Tim Burton's film- I was invited to prepare a video essay on screen Alices. In the video, I talk about Alice from her first silent film appearance, her use in psychedelic counter-culture and anti-drug propaganda, and Dr Pepper ads, through to the fascination with Alice in Japanese popular culture and her darker incarnations in video games.

MasterChef Offers a Slice of Sexism

This article was published in today's Age newspaper.


We don’t switch to reality television when we want to expand our minds, but their frivolous pleasures do not mean that these shows are beyond criticism and public debate. In the past week, the teaser promotion for the new series of MasterChef Australia has drawn international attention for its sexism.

The offending ad pitches the upcoming series of the cooking program as a battle of a sexes, with the infantilising title of “Boys vs Girls”. The contestants are segregated on pastel gender lines with the women wearing pink and the men blue.

A volley of stereotypes relating to women’s and men’s respective abilities are traded as the teams trash talk. Women are “better at presentation”, for instance, because they’re “used to grooming” themselves. While the quality that “all the top chefs in the world” share is that “they’re all men”.  The women face off against the men raising their pink oven mitts like boxing gloves, while the men wield baguettes like batons.

Yet the repeated national broadcast of limiting views that suggest women are naturally suited to tirelessly producing meals for the family while men are destined to elevate cooking to a sophisticated art form has been defended by some online commentators. Indeed, the counter-response to criticisms of the MasterChef ad shows just how complicated it has become to critique sexism in popular culture.

From both within and outside the feminist cause, we are told to ignore the reinforcement of sexist attitudes in the media because there are more worthy battles to fight. Proponents of this argument point to violence against women and female poverty as “real” causes to which outrage should be more rightly directed. Last month, for instance, Helen Razer described the Destroy the Joint feminist social media movement as a kind of “dessicated...masturbation”. She argued that such campaigns about sexism in popular culture mean  that “we are spending our climaxes in tiny online moments when, really they are due elsewhere...”

Another common argument, which has been used frequently in support of the MasterChef ad, is that sexism sometimes arrives in the form of harmless jokes. Maudlin feminists are simply barging in to interrupt good-natured humour as self-appointed fun police. For those who subscribe to this view, there are innate gender differences that mean that men are incapable of doing two things at once (“A woman can multi-task”) and that women cannot complete most endeavours as well as a man (“When a man puts his mind to a job, it always turns out better”), and hilarity ensues from pointing out these fundamental truths.

Nevertheless, it is crucial not to separate the worst outcomes of sexist societies, such as violence against women, from the cultural ideas we take for granted that support them. The widespread propagation of ideas that women are inherently inferior and are primarily valuable because of their appearance and ability to perform domestic work contributes to the existence of the “more important” problems confronting women. While we need to agitate for political change to continue the process of lobbying for substantive equality in the workplace, reproductive rights and protection from violence and poverty, these victories will only come alongside transformations in how men and women are understood by our society.

This is not to say that MasterChef’s Stepford wives dancing with shopping trolleys have a direct impact on the treatment of women. Yet the continued acceptance of gender stereotypes as fact, and even as subjects of amusement, continues to imprint the belief that gender inequality is the result of natural differences rather than discrimination. An ad that was humorously playing with these stereotypes, rather than reinforcing them, might show a male contestant alongside a tiered stand of delicately iced cupcakes or would depict a woman bringing her tongs into the sacred realm of the masculine barbeque. Instead MasterChef gives us the uncomplicated view that biology determines whether we can bake or char-grill.

The show promises entry into an industry in which the majority of chefs are male for various reasons, including the incompatibility of restaurant working hours with the family responsibilities that primarily fall to women. The male hosts and judges are the resident experts on the profession.

One of the female contestants on the sexist ad spuriously claims that “the average woman cooks over 1,000 meals per year” in the home. Yet we understand that this kind of cooking is not regarded with the same esteem. Two of last year’s female “Professionals” contestants were repeatedly relegated to dessert duties, though they were not specialists in this area, while men took command of the mains, showing the entrenched view that a man’s work “always turns out better”. With real-world discrimination against women in professional kitchens, as in other prestigious male-dominated industries, MasterChef’s decision to exploit baseless gender stereotypes is thoughtless rather than entertaining.

Victorian-Era Beauty Advertisements: Part One

I had the pleasure of being invited to speak at The Johnston Collection (which includes the wonderful Fairhall House museum) last week on beauty in Victorian girls' and women's magazines. I chose magazines in particular because the second half of the nineteenth century was a time in which more people became literate, more magazines were able to be published more affordably, and technological improvements meant illustrations and fashion plates became commonplace. Magazines were the dominant media form, especially as books remained relatively expensive. Not only were women specifically targeted as readers in the nineteenth century, but they were also newly imagined as consumers. The arrival of the the department store, a concept borrowed from France, transformed how items for the self and the home were bought, with their extensive ranges of branded goods arranged in lavish displays designed to be browsed. The illustration above of a woman selecting from a choice of hats from Myra's Journal of Dress and Fashion (Sept. 1885) is one of many depictions of women in the act of shopping that showed its new-found importance to femininity.

Most magazines became heavily dependent on advertising. Even quality publications like The Queen (which became Harper's and Queen) placed ads on almost half of its pages by the mid-1880s. While people complain about ads taking up column inches and screen space today, the strong presence of advertising in the print media is not new. For girls' and women's magazines, the ads that were included were often for products that promised to improve the reader's appearance, with corsets, skin creams and hair products featuring regularly.

Cosmetics, however, had a bad name for encouraging artifice and deception. Charlotte Yonge, the editor of the Anglican girls' magazine The Monthly Packet and author of popular books such as The Daisy Chain opposed cosmetics as a form of lie: "All attempts to pretend to beauties that we do not possess are clearly falsehood, and therefore wrong." Young women in particular were warned away from cosmetics because they were considered more vulnerable to potential damage to their "moral character" because of their sexual associations.

Cosmetics were therefore not commonly advertised but products that would purportedly improve the skin by removing freckles, tans, redness and roughness were promoted because they did not transgress beliefs about "natural" beauty being superior than artificial aids. This ad for Beetham's Glycerine and Cucumber from Woman (11 April 1894) promises to give the user soft, smooth and white skin that "blooms".

Along with facial creams, hair products also promised natural improvements to a woman's beauty. Koko for the hair, for instance, is described as a "hair food" that promises to do everything from preventing greyness to eradicating dandruff, but it was not only the hair that benefitted from treatment, as the ad suggests that Koko also stimulated the brain. After brushing with Koko readers are directed to look into a mirror to see the increased "brilliancy" in their eyes, which suggests a benefit to health and well-being, not only appearance.

In the lecture I showed a contemporary Maybelline magazine ad featuring the company's familiar slogan "Maybe She's Born With It. Maybe It's Maybelline" to show the continuation of these ideas about natural beauty (or at least cultivating the appearance of natural beauty) in advertising. It's a real conundrum that women are encouraged to desire products that will "improve" their looks, but they ought to be working to make it seem as if they were "born with" their cosmetically enchanced charms. The many contradictions surrounding women's beauty in Victorian magazines seemed to strike the audience at the lecture as none too dissimilar from those we see in the popular media today. And nowhere are these resonances more obvious than in early advertisements for weight loss, such as Trilene tablets, which promised to "cure corpulency permanently". With that degree of effectiveness, how surprising that they're not still in manufacture.

PART TWO TO COME...

Talk about Sexualised! Old Love's Baby Soft Advertisement

I have no idea of the original magazine source for this ad, which appears to be from the late 1970s or early 1980s, as I discovered it during a procrastinatory exercise that rambled through photo collections of strange animals and bad celebrity plastic surgery. This was among a collection of "weird old ads".

Given the recent reports about a beautiful artistic photograph of a young boy depicted as a peacock being considered inappropriate for sale in a charity auction conducted by the Sydney Children's Hospital Foundation, it is hard to believe that an ad such as this one for Love's Baby Soft ever made it to print with its explicit connection of childhood with sexiness. Then again, we didn't have little girls in extreme beauty pageants in all their spray-tanned, be-wigged and sequinned glory at this point I'm guessing.

Girl Scouts Cake Mix Advertisement

I'm still buying silly amount of Girl Guide and Girl Scout paraphenalia on eBay for a potential book. Girl Guides originated in England, and the movement arose out of very British sentiments, just like the Boy Scouts. The adoption of Girl Guiding as Girl Scouting in the USA saw a few distinct differences evolve. Not only is the name and uniform different, but the Americans have unsurprisingly proven to be more effective merchandisers and promoters of their girls' movement. I have bought many UK books, badges, letters, scrapbooks etc. but it is from the US that I find annual Girl Scout calendars, most LPs of girls singing, clothing and equipment catalogues, dolls etc. Girl Scouts also regularly feature on popular magazine covers, such as the Saturday Evening Post, as symbols of American identity and innocence.

I've also found a number of American advertisements in which the wholesome connotations of Girl Scouts are used to market other products, including for Mutual Life insurance! This one for Dromedary Angel Food cake mix shows a level of commercialisation that just doesn't occur with Guiding and Scouting in the UK. I am partially annoyed at people who are tearing out advertisements from old magazines, destroying them as historical records and then charging large amounts for them on eBay. But then, without these opportunistic sellers, I'd never come across these images, so I'm not entirely innocent in the process.

The Collector's Impulse

I've got two Girl Guide projects on the boil at the moment. And for this reason I've become a somewhat compulsive eBayer, trawling for interesting ephemera that might make for good illustrations. I've now got a giant box of Guide books, photo albums, camp diaries, badges, certificates, letters, application forms, even an original belt. Here's hoping a book results or I'm going to have a busy time relisting a hundred back issues of the Waratah (New South Wales Girl Guide magazine) from the 1950s.

I've also nabbed a few fairly scare weekly issues of the Girl's Own Paper with their advertisements still intact. Anyone working in this area knows that advertisements were usually removed for libraries and binding into annuals. I've only ever seen advertisements from this magazines contained in a Library of Congress microfilm, which include issues from the early twentieth century. The copies I found are from the 1880s, the earliest years of the paper.

Some contained additional fold-out ad booklets, usually for soap, including the pictured advertisement for Brooke's Soap, which I think became well-known as Monkey Brand soap. I've been reading Anne McClintock's article on the history of soap, and she mentions mirrors, soap, light and white clothing as the four domestic fetishes of the period. In this image, we've got a kind of mirror in the form of the artist's canvas, but it's depicting a humanised monkey that the girl has proudly painted. As I'm intending to write a paper on Tarzan in light of Victorian popular understandings of social Darwinism, I'm not sure what to make of the monkey in the suit. Can he be humanised and civilised like native peoples with the influence of femininity and whiteness? But what on earth is that giant furry thing on the girls' chair? An animal skin? If so, is there a reversal of the monkey in the tuxedo with the idea of the girl in the monkey's fur? A strange one, that's for sure!