Saturday, June 26, 2010

Vegans, Mylie Cyrus and British Petroleum

The chatter on Facebook this afternoon was about Mylie Cyrus and sex. Specifically using an underage girl as a sex object to market her brand. Of course this is as cynical as it is effective. The human beast is wired to respond to the high hormone level in the young females of the species. They become sexually attractive by virtue of their body chemistry, and in turn enjoy the attention they get by being available to males. In previous generations mothers actively discouraged their daughters from advertising their availability by controlling their clothing choices. Now we find the clothing choices are marketed as 'empowering' even in prepubescent children.

Empowering means flaunting this basic sexual reaction between males and females in females that are not ready emotionally or intellectually to make choices that protect them from the cynically predatory male sexual response.

Who benefits from this empowerment? Not the little girls who are targets for every sexually frustrated male in their vicinity, including adults who should know better. Not the sexually frustrated male, especially at his 18+ yr peak. A three year delta at eighteen is a jail term but at 21 it's getting lucky.

So the majority of marketing is targeted at people with the highest hormone levels, the least maturity and the most sensitive egos. And the corporate marketing executives use sex to increase their sales, and incidentally driving the cultural norms implying that the rules don't apply to the observer.

And the corporations will tell you that they are just reflecting societal norms, not making the norms. Which is a lot like how BP is addressing the Gulf Coast. One lady (a clean up team leader) was fired for telling her team to excavate for sludge buried by the tidal sands. She was told the job was just cosmetic.

I heard in the Crystal Restaurant in downtown Watertown NY that BP is leasing the charter boats that have been losing business due to the oil spill. Are they using these vessels to mitigate the oil problem? Of course. They want to prevent the news media from discovering the true extent of the disaster they (BP) created.

Of course with BP the truth is this is just business. They want to control the perceptions of how bad the problem is. It's all about marketing the brand. They can't be the green energy brand name when they've caused one of the biggest ecological disasters since the Exxon Valdeez. (Exxon has never lived that down and it's no where near as bad as the BP Deepwater fiasco.

So what's this got to do with Mylie Cyrus and Vegans?

Corporate greed uses human nature, whether sex, or security or greed, to meet its objectives. The vegans unfortunately, are trying to do something lofty by not eating animals under the presumption that will prevent the death of the animal. However since the majority of food animals are raised specifically for diner their lives will not be spared if we skip a hamburger. Should we as a race cease eating meat the animals would have to be disposed of just so their waste wouldn't continue to damage the ozone layer.

We shouldn't let corporate greed dictate our morals. In fact we should insist that corporations behave in a moral manner. After centuries of using oppressive control techniques to protect our daughters a free society can't abide lies, chastity belts and the law treating females as property. But we need to be open about human nature and what the unpleasant truths are about human sexuality as well as the more pleasant aspects. A blunt and open discussion with our youth would be more effective than all the platitudes and fear campaigns and jean advertisements.

We can't change human nature but we can understand it, accept it and work with to build a better society.

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