Media Use of Women's New Social Power: Oil and Gas Companies

Here is an advertisement promoting the immediate use of oil and natural gas for the United States of America in the name of liberating us from our current energy problems.






I'm a biology major. I've taken too many environmental courses including Biosphere to be swayed by this amazingly backward representation of what will benefit us in the future... and I've already tackled my own views and bias on the issue so don't get me started. (Unless you would like to debate daunting global realities and the boring long process of actually extracting oil/gas)

Media Scientific Fact and Influence Breakdown:

They focus on facts conveniently stacked to persuade you that this is the most viable option to agree with. Once you understand that the figures presented are the maximum statistics for extracted energy on the continent, you would also find that by the time the CO2 from that hits and before we could even possibly extract it all to use, we will have hit global warming crisis and peak oil anyway, the financial benefit to consumers spread out to be equivalent to very little, jobs that could have been for greener technologies taken temporarily, and the world gets a huge mess of consequences for the environment instead, which frankly doesnt make matters much better. It creates more dependency on current energy cycles with bad consequences for only temporary fixes that would take a very long time to create small benefits, and yes, a big bunch of money for the companies behind it now and like possible company insurance for the future. Political is personal for me. So is the environment I live in and the people I care about that must swim through the media (here I mean advertising media but it is seen in the real news too) of politically influenced information to figure out what is really going on here. The benefits she mentions, especially agriculture pesticides/fertilizers, are temporary fixes themselves that we've got to stop (several studies on organic and permaculture techniques show benefits for the environment and higher yeilds with less stress for the environment).

The focus needs to be mostly on transcending negative environmental energy cycles, but we've got to overcome the oppression of powerful companies bestowing this skewed garbage upon us to maintain that power structure. This is seen throughout history too folks. It parallels loads of environmental stories from Love Canal to water control in L.A. but that's for another blog another time.

Advertising Rhetoric:

If an advertisement is going to appeal to the most current social birdcage, and have a liberating argument, it might as well use a powerful psychological icon for representing the case. Here, a woman, and a young businesswoman at that, is promoting a strong argument for setting America on a path to independent energy control. Her voice is bold, she wears black and white for dramatic contrast, and she is extremely confident in her statements about the liberating effect of oil/gas. So they're totally ripping off what we want in Women's and Gender Studies to be represented in female rhetoric and using it to continue a power structure that actually is not very liberating in the long run, and is in fact the highest profit maker world wide. (and the branching cause of extreme environmental degradation if you include the production of plastics such as vinyl... plastic is made from oil! This is the most toxic anti-environmental dependence we have today!)

mmhmm. My internal ecofeminist is pondering these implications and the use of women's appeal in such a manipulative manner. I wonder what Charlotte Gilman Perkins might have to say on the matter.