MEPs want TV regulators in the EU to set guidelines which would see the end of anything deemed to portray women as sex objects or reinforce gender stereotypes.
And furthermore:
Swedish MEP Eva-Britt Svensson . . . said: "Gender stereotyping in advertising straitjackets women, men, girls and boys by restricting individuals to predetermined and artificial roles that are often degrading, humiliating and dumbed down for both sexes."
These assertions are obviously false. Advertising is incapable of restricting anyone from doing anything. Only the government has the power to restrict people's actions. Advertisers can only try to persuade.
How does an advertisement of a woman wearing lingerie, for example, restrict any woman from becoming an engineer? It doesn't. Eva-Britt Svensson and her fellow EU busybodies simply don't like what some women do, and therefore wants to restrict them by law from doing such things. It is the government, as always, that is "restricting" women and men alike by curtailing their right to decide for themselves what to do with their own lives.
It's been said before, and it bears repeating: the road to totalitarianism is paved with good intentions.
2 comments:
I understand what you mean by saying they have "good intentions", but I think it might be a mistake to give them credit even for that. A large part of the philosophical war that must be fought is explaining to people that such goals are not, in fact, "well-intended".
Is it a "good intention" to want to help people - if helping them means robbing others in order to do so? The whole robbery part just gets skipped over.
"Oh, I'm a nice person, I just want to help people - except for the part where I ROB EVERYONE ELSE first, in order to pay for it. But THEN, I'm going to help people. I have such good intentions."
What about the intent to rob? To extort? To threaten and coerce? How in hell did that whole step ever get exempted from moral evaluation? Why do people allow it to be ignored?
It's a very simple, inarguable point that needs to be held up under people's noses.
As Zoe once said to Malcolm Reynolds on Firefly, "I don't disagree with you on any particular point, sir."
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