What if we banned all advertising? Not regulate itβabolish it. This proposal would transform manipulation machines, and maybe save democracy
Even as an advertiser (especially as an advertiser), I am convinced that outlawing advertising is the best thing we can do for our world now. More than gun control. More than tackling climate change. More than lowering the price of eggs.
Removing these advanced manipulation tools would force everyoneβpoliticians includedβto snap back into reality. By outlawing advertising, the machinery of mass delusion would lose its most addictive and toxic fuel.
I started out reading this smugly saying to myself yeah, right.
But by the end I'm sold. Let's ban advertising.
We can start small, maybe with city ordinances. Then roll it out county wide, then at the state level. Once other states see how quiet and sane things can be, they'll adopt the ban too. The ones that don't will remain snarling islands of rage & delusion until the people move away.
British women served at the same guns with their husbands, and during a contest of many hours, never shrank from danger, but animated all around them.
βAdmiral Edward Pellew, Viscount Exmouth, reporting on the Battle of AlgiersΒ
"Not all women living in naval vessels disembarked when the crowds of prostitutes were sent ashore shortly before the ships sailed. From the late seventeenth century until the middle of the nineteenth, it was customary for wives of warrant officers to go to sea. A warrant officer was assigned to a particular ship βin constant employ,β unlike both commissioned officers and seamen, who were signed onto a vessel only for a single commission, and who were often transferred to another ship before the commission was completed. A warrant officer and his wife might continue to live in a ship even when she was taken out of commission.Β
The wives of the ancient triumvirate of warrant officersβthe boatswain, the gunner, and the carpenterβwent to sea as a matter of course. So did wives of the purser and the master, who associated with the commissioned officers on the quarterdeck, as well as those of lower rank: the cooper, the sailmaker, and the cook. Petty officersβmen who were selected from among the able seamen to direct the less skilledβand a few seamen, usually experienced men who made the navy their career, also sometimes brought their wives to sea.Β
Most of the women who joined their husbands or sweethearts at sea knew before they went that life on board would be both tedious and perilous, and they realized that they might be away from home for years. Looking back at these women from a modern viewpoint, it is tempting to decide that they went to sea because they wished to find adventure. This was seldom their motivation. The evidence is that wives went to sea because they did not want to be separated from their spouses. Women who joined naval crews disguised as men were often seeking a broader experience than society allowed them on shore. Seagoing wives, on the other hand, did not set out to break social taboos. They were, in fact, behaving as a good wife was supposed to behave: cleaving to her husband and serving as his helpmate, no matter where that took her.Β
Officially, the women living on the lower deck did not exist. Even when a woman died at sea, the fact was seldom recorded. Their names were not listed in shipsβ muster books, and since only those people who were mustered had any official existence, women were not paid and not victualed. Wives had to share their husbandsβ food ration, and so did any children with them. In contrast, soldiersβ wives who traveled with their husbands were victualed at two-thirds the menβs ration, and their children got half a ration. This meant that in a ship carrying both seamenβs and soldiersβ wives, the soldiersβ wives, who were merely passengers, were given food while the seamenβs wives, who were an integral part of the shipβs company, got nothing."
Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail, Suzanne J. Stark
Even when historical records already suggested theyβd be there
History has a funny way of becoming decidedly less male-dominated the moment we stop assuming it always was.
The echoesβββand the screamsβββof women occupying diverse, influential, and public roles, even within patriarchal societies like ancient Rome, were there. Yet only recently have we stopped treating them as background noise.
As long as humans have kept records, it turns out, there have been queens, empresses, pharaohs, priestesses, female warriors, keepers of knowledge, women who captained their own ships (the Red Sea matrons) and ran their own businesses (the βhousekeepersβ who turned out to be winemakers), and other women who supported themselves, sometimes living free of societyβs otherwise patriarchal bonds.
The surprising part isnβt really that women occupied all these various roles and positions, but that we continue treating them as exceptions to the rule, even as new archaeological methods challenge that idea over and over again.
To manufacture a story in which gender roles are the inevitable result of fixed biological rules requires an almost impressive amount of ignorance of the historical evidence and the messy, complex realities of human lives.
You do not have nine lives. You have one body, one timeline, one set of years that will not be returned to you for revision. The elderly people who say they thought they would live forever are not being poetic. They are describing a very specific and very common failure of the human imagination to make the future feel as real and as urgent as the present. Your future self is a real person who will live in the body and the circumstances and the consequences of the decisions you are making right now. She deserves better than to inherit the results of your present comfort and present avoidance.
One big element of millenial adulthood is that when people hear the news that someone actually got a solid job in the field they got a degree in, people respond the same way as folks a generation ago used to respond to the news of someone having a baby after trying for years. Genuinely awed "holy shit no way, that's amazing, congratulations!" because that's some incredible, life-changing shit.
Nobody knows how you respond to the news of someone you know having a long-wanted baby, because nobody in their right mind is having kids on purpose.
Take it as a testament to how highly I think of people that it genuinely did not even occur to me that anyone would take this as "me and my highly intelligent humanities degree friends (childfree, intellectual) are genuinely unaware that people who work in trades have jobs and can afford to start families, and we all agree that choosing to reproduce on purpose is an inherently, ontologically stupid thing to do."
I hate you Ozempic craze I hate you 'heroin chic' I hate you weight loss ads on public radio I hate Burn Fat Fast ads every thirty seconds I hate you I hate you I hate you
I grew up before the term 'thigh gap' was invented I grew up before 'hip dip' was invented I was born before 'muffin top' was a thing before 'clean girl look' was a thing before 'glass skin' was a thing before razoring off peach fuzz was a thing and I'm so so so fucking tired of us inventing new concepts purely for the purpose of convincing people to hate their own bodies enough to buy products
Last time Tuberculosis ran through the USA a small number of people got it on purpose to look skinny and waifish and delicate and used makeup to look flushed and bony and when the Victorians figured out tapeworms people would infect themselves on purpose to starve themselves smaller and women and now in the year of our lord 2026 there is a noticeable fraction of the USAmerican population genuinely thrilled about a treatment-resistant microbial parasite that makes you shit and vomit your brains out for a month because side effects include weight loss and STILL we talk about being skinny like it's the natural default setting for all healthy people as if it's a self-sustaining standard and not an imaginary goal that we are constantly constantly constantly beating ourselves with a whip to acheive
romaincrisis
kianamaiart
germansingergirl
pixelskylines
