Gutless Heart Association Tells Lies that Harm Women
Each year 1.1 million American women are admitted to a nursing home where they will be medicated, monitored, and left with a $56,000 tab. Half of these women have no husband or other living relative.
And here’s the heart-breaker: 60% of nursing home residents have no visitors.
Last week my column highlighted the American Heart Association’s “Go Red for Women” campaign. I explained how men are at 50% higher risk of death from heart disease than women. And I described research that shows widows are at four times greater risk of being sent to a nursing home. [www.ifeminists.net/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.292]
So the Heart Association’s short-sighted neglect of men’s health ends up as a cruel hoax for women.
Go Red for Women also turns the do-or-die fight against heart disease into a frivolous shopping spree: “Every woman loves to shop! And now you’ve got a great reason!” the AHA breathlessly exclaims.
In response to my editorial, many readers shared their heart-rending stories. One wrote, “I sorta went through this with my mother. My father died first. A couple of years later, my mother had to have bypass surgery and had a stroke. She went to a nursing home for recovery and they said she would never come out.”
This came from a quick-witted woman in Michigan who titled her message, “Heart Throb or Heart Rob?”:
“Having worked with scores of widows in senior communities who have missed their dear husbands lost to heart attacks sometimes for as long as 20 years, I must disagree vehemently with the AHA’s spotlighting females only as the target to bring attention to the human heart!”
Of course the Heart Association was not pleased that real women were speaking out. So the group put out a rejoinder called, “Why Go Red is targeting women; how AHA supports men.”
A bigger collection of half-truths, misleading claims, and lies you will never see! First, one of the AHA half-truths:
– “Only 55% of women realize heart disease is their No. 1 killer”
Yes, and why doesn’t the AHA tell us the percentage of men who know heart disease their No. 1 killer?
Now the misleading claim:
– “Every year since 1984 more women than men have died of heart disease”
This is a deceptive statistic, since so many men die in their twenties and thirties from other causes. If we were to accept the AHA’s blinkered logic, then we would have to scrap programs for needy Blacks and Hispanics, since their numbers are obviously so much smaller than Whites.
And get ready for the AHA Big Lie:
– “Historically, men have been the subjects of the research.”
If the American Heart Association was interested in telling the truth, this is what they would have said:
“As early as 1979, 96% of all clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health included women. The NIH spends twice as much researching diseases that are specific to women (such as breast cancer) compared to diseases for men.
“As far as heart disease research, women were included in the earliest studies. In the landmark Framingham Heart Study, women represented 55% of all participants. And an article by David Harris and Pamela Douglas in the New England Journal of Medicine found that from 1965 to 1998, a total of 215,796 women and 183,005 men had enrolled in studies on cardiovascular research trials.
“A review of studies submitted to the Food and Drug Administration found that women composed one-third of subjects for cardiac drugs because ‘angina and heart failure are more prevalent in men than in women.’ That led the FDA to recently conclude, ‘women have been included in drug development studies at least since the early 1980s in approximate proportion to the prevalence of disease in them.’”
So while the AHA flatly says men were the subjects of heart research, the truth is substantial numbers of women have always participated.
The American Heart Association has gone beyond the pale. Are we going to let them get away with a bald distortion of the truth that lets women needlessly spend their Golden Years in a beige-tinted cinderblock nursing home?
Send a heart-felt message to the Heart Association’s PR department: elizabeth.moreno@heart.org (elizabeth.moreno-at-heart.org). Call Mr. Cass Wheeler, head of the AHA, at 1-800-242-8721. Or contact your local heart association office.
Ladies, tell the AHA we’ve had enough of their shenanigans. Tell them its “Go Red” campaign is making you red with disgust.
| More from Carey Roberts
Stumble It!
February 6th, 2008 at 8:53 am
Research Virginia Slims and Gloria Steinem…
These mags needed money to reach women as women enjoyed the martha stewart precursors of redbook and ladies home journal.
The target of the research and campaign was to get women to associate bad behaviors (smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, etc), with empowerment, liberation, and all the iconographic things of the womans movement
The companies doing all this got to run lots of features in which articles would promote the results of the Virginia Slims research into women.
here is a interesting piece, in it steinem lies about her complicity with things. in other words, she writes the peice to set the record straight, but you only have to go back to her other work from the period to see whether she actually is telling the truth!!!
http://www.publishingbiz.com/html/articlebysteinem.html
“When Ms. begins, the staff decides not to accept ads for feminine hygiene sprays or cigarettes: they are damaging and carry no appropriate health warnings. Though we don’t think we should tell our readers what to do, we do think we should provide facts so they can decide for themselves.”
but you can go here
http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2002/steinem.asp
“For the past two years Philip Morris has commissioned Louis Harris to do a large-scale yearly survey of women’s opinions, a device to promote their women-directed cigarette, Virginia Slims. The 1971 poll betrayed its Madison Avenue origins with questions about love and skirt lengths. But the 1972
version, composed and analyzed by Carolyn Setlow, is one of the rare and valuable studies of female opinion in many areas, politics included. ”
does that sound like she would have nothing to do with the ads?
Since the antismoking lobby has been pressing for health warnings on cigarette ads, we decided to take them only as they comply. Philip Morris is among the first to do so. One of its brands, Virginia Slims, is also sponsoring women’s tennis and the first national polls of women’s opinions. On the other hand, the Virginia Slims theme, “You’ve come a long way, baby,” has more than a “baby” problem. It makes smoking a symbol of progress for women. We explain to Philip Morris that this slogan won’t do well in our pages, but they are convinced its success with some women means it will work with all women. Finally, we agree to publish an ad for a Virginia Slims calendar as a test.
then she lays the calim that they didnt advertise with them for 16 years…
anyone care to check out who they let advertise?
“Occasionally, a new set of executives listens to Ms. saleswomen, but because we won’t take Virginia Slims, not one Philip Morris product returns to our pages for the next 16 years. ”
now remember, 16 years from inception would be what year? 1984
Gradually, we also realize our naiveté in thinking we could decide against taking cigarette ads. They became a disproportionate support of magazines the moment they were banned on television, and few magazines could compete and survive without them, certainly not Ms., which lacks so many other categories. By the time statistics in the 1980s showed the women’s rate of lung cancer was approaching men’s the necessity of taking cigarette ads has become a kind of prison.
i challenge people to go back and take a look… not just at Ms. but Vogue and Cosmopolitian too… as well as marie claire…
and why did they give them cancer and heart desease? well you can see above that they are victims of circumstance that forces them to abandon their principals to survive. how convenient… all of the ill wihout any of the blame. and now they get to make lots of money by harvesting the product of their ill!!! so they are rewarded by this deal they made.
here is her teling the truth… but lying by ommision… and it contradicts her other points… she is reinventing the past.
General Mills, Pillsbury, Carnation, Del Monte, Dole, Kraft, Stouffer, Hormel, and Nabisco — you name the food giant, we try it. But no matter how desirable the Ms. readership, our lack of recipes is lethal. We explain to them that placing food ads only next to recipes associates food with work. For many women, it is a negative that works against the ads. Why not place food ads in diverse media without recipes (thus reaching more men, who are now a third of the shoppers in supermarkets anyway), and leave the recipes to specialty magazines like Gourmet (a third of whose readers are also men)? These arguments elicit interest, but except for an occasional ad for a convenience food, instant coffee, diet drinks, yogurt, or such extras as avocados and almonds, this mainstay of the publishing industry stays closed to us. Period.
however, alcohol is also a heart desease thing… and here is what she says… note how her language is not one of outrage, or concilliation, but as if the justification once applied, she can ignore any of the responses that would separate her from a end justifies the means sociopath.
Traditionally, wines and liquors didn’t advertise to women: men were thought to make the brand decisions, even if women did the buying. But after endless presentations, we begin to make a dent in this category. Thanks to the unconventional Michel Roux of Carillon Importers (distributors of Grand Marnier, Absolut Vodka, and others), who assumes that food and drink have no gender, some ads are leaving their men’s club. Beer makers are still selling masculinity. It takes Ms. fully eight years to get its first beer ad (Michelob).
what happened to refusing to visit the ills upon women? it was never there. ladies home journal and redbook could advertise food, and recipies… they werent promoting unisex, and so they could handle fashoin too… the make up industries didnt want ladettes who didnt use cosmetics… and the list went on.
Out of chutzpah and desperation, I arrange a lunch with Leonard Lauder, president of Este Lauder. With the exception of Clinique (the brainchild of Carol Phillips), none of Lauder’s hundreds of products has been advertised in Ms. A year’s schedule of ads for just three or four of them could save us.
see, they didnt want to be a part of it because of the ideology they were promoting. but as soon as they found out that the women promoting this were heretics to their own cause and just wanted power and position not necessarily based on an actual representation of their real selves.
he says, Ms. readers are not our women. They’re not interested in things like fragrance and blush-on. If they were, Ms. would write articles about them. On the contrary, I explain, surveys show they are more likely to buy such things than the readers of, say, Cosmopolitan or Vogue. They’re good customers because they’re out in the world enough to need several sets of everything: home, work, purse, travel, gym, and so on.
he knew the score, and once she was oh so willing to prostitute her values to get the ear of women – he was then willing beacuse he, and tobacco,and others knew that they controlled her because she was willing to compromise her values and ideology and rationalize it to be something else.
her lamenting is a lie by ommision that he magazine didnt support women, because women were not interested much in the message as a mass… and so these radical political rags masquerading as self help and informative sources, WANTED alcohol and tobacco…..
now they are afraid that we will remember… and so this story is done so that we can endlessly argue the facts with the femnazis dipping into these facts first… just like with salaries, abuse, and every other point.
We hear in 1980 that women in the Soviet Union have been producing feminist samizdat (underground, self-published books) and circulating them throughout the country. As punishment, four of the leaders have been exiled. Though we are operating on our usual shoestring, we solicit individual contributions to send Robin Morgan to interview these women in Vienna. The result is an exclusive cover story that includes the first news of a populist peace movement against the Afghanistan occupation, a prediction of glasnost to come, and a grass roots, intimate view of Soviet women’s lives.
ah… yeah… they arent imprisoned… byt they are let go… and this click of women then picks them up and makes heroes of these soviet communist women… (anyone care to research this point too?)
anyway… its a mish mosh of fact, ommission, falsehood… you have to shovel a lot of s**t and read other sources to know though.
February 6th, 2008 at 9:04 am
Madison Avenue versus The Feminine Mystique:
How the Advertising Industry Responded to the Onset
of the Modern Women’s Movement
http://www.asc.upenn.edu/courses/comm334/Docs/femads.pdf
Virginia Slims were introduced in July, 1968, with an advertising campaign designed by the Leo Burnett Company of Chicago.
Ms. is an American feminist magazine founded by American feminist and activist Gloria Steinem, which first appeared in 1971 as an insert in New York magazine. The first stand-alone issue appeared in January 1972 with funding from New York editor Clay Felker. From July 1972 to 1987 it appeared on a monthly basis. During its heyday in the 1970s it enjoyed great popularity, but was not always able to reconcile its ideological concerns with commercial considerations. Since 2001, the magazine has been published by the Feminist Majority Foundation, based in Los Angeles and Arlington, Virginia.
The ads
portrayed a series of fictional historical events involving women in the early suffrage period. In the
first commercial, a manufactured sepia-tone film purported to show Pamela Benjamin who, in
1910, was caught smoking in a gazebo. “She got a severe scolding and no supper that night.” The
ad continued, “In 1915, Mrs. Cynthia Robinson was caught smoking in the cellar behind the
preserves. Although she was 34, her husband sent her straight to her room. Then, in 1920, women
won their rights.” The ad concluded by turning to a modern color format, featuring a fashion
model with a Virginia Slims cigarette and a musical theme singing the jingle “You’ve come a long
way, baby.” Subsequent television ads and print advertising followed this same format. (Simley,
1994, 622)
Many businesses weren’t as sophisticated as Virginia Slims in their approach to advertising to the “new
woman.” One simple strategy to avoid women’s objections was to simply change ads by reversing
traditional gender stereotypes. This approach was even encouraged by Lucy Komisar, vice-president of
NOW, who praised counter-stereotype portrayals and urged advertising agencies to adopt them
(Komisar, 1971, 216).
A perusal of 1972 copies of Ms. magazine reveals the following fairly typical examples of
counter-stereotype ads: A double-page spread for Leilani Hawaiian Rum asks “Why shouldn’t a woman
make a good daiquiri? And why shouldn’t she go on from there?” (Why shouldn’t a woman, July, 1972).
An American Express ad features a male model addressing the camera: “It’s time women got their own
American Express Card and started taking me to dinner.” Readers who wished to apply for the card were
asked to fill out an attached “Women Only” application (It’s time women, December, 1972). Dewar’s
Scotch Whiskey featured 28-year old physicist, Sheila Long, in one of it’s “Dewar’s Profiles.” Long is
pictured as an attractive young woman with flowing hair staring into the camera in the familiar
female-model eye-contact pose. She holds a long, slender piece of chalk in her hand and behind her is a
blackboard filled with complex math equations (Dewar’s profiles, 1972).
Some counter-stereotype ads were designed to suggest that the company in question agreed with at least
some of the social aims of the women’s movement and was undergoing a fundamental change in its
business practices. For example, AT&T ran an ad in Ms. magazine picturing one of its “first women
telephone installers” perched high atop a telephone pole, working on a line (The phone company, July,
1972 ). A similar ad ran in Ms. a month later featuring “one of several hundred male telephone
operators” (The phone company , August, 1972).
Yet, as Wolf points out, this new emphasis on beauty was not part of some great conspiracy: “it doesn’t
have to be. Societies tell themselves necessary fictions in the same way that individuals and families do”
(17).
Gradually, new strategies, campaigns, and even products began to come from the beauty industry to take
advantage of these “necessary fictions.” Revlon, for example, introduced “Charlie” in 1973, a fragrance
designed for and marketed to the “new woman.” “Charlie” ads featured what purported to be a
no-nonsense single and independent working “girl” with a fashion model face and figure who was
usually pictured in a pantsuit. Charlie became the nation’s best-selling fragrance in less than a year, and
other fragrance companies introduced their own “liberated” scents. (Faludi, 1991, 205)
Yet the ideological divisions within the women’s movement sometimes created confusion about which
ads were acceptable and which were not. As Advertising Age editorially lamented,
When for example, an advertiser bows to a suggestion by one of the women’s lib factions
that his advertising is in some way demeaning, he is only too likely to be whapped by
another faction claiming that his new advertising is patronizing. When a company agrees to
draw away from use of “sex object” motifs, it is likely to be criticized for showing women
as plain or dowdy. (Problems of women’s lib, 1971)
This confusion became especially apparent when Ms. magazine (founded by Betty Friedan, Gloria
Steinem, and other feminists) began publication in 1972. Although the Ms. editors indicated they wanted
to limit ads to those they felt were consistent with the women’s movement, there was a significant split
among feminists as to exactly what that meant. While the radical and socialist wings of the movement
found most mainstream ads objectionable, more moderate “liberal” women controlled Ms. and sought to
make the non-profit magazine available to as many women as possible by attracting a large, mainstream
advertising base (Endres & Lueck, 1995, 236-242; Gatlin, 1987, 157). The first regular issue ran a
controversial ad for Coppertone suntan lotion inside its front cover that featured a slim blonde woman in
a bikini and said the product “helps more people get a magnificently deep fast tan” (Beautiful tan today,
1972). The magazine later ran an ad for Virginia Slims (which provoked a negative reaction in the
readership) and editor Gloria Steinem consistently tried to attract ads (generally unsuccessfully) from
Revlon and other cosmetics companies (Steinem, 1995).
February 7th, 2008 at 7:04 am
I just want to state that I wrote an email to Elizabeth Moreno objected to the “God Red for Women” campaign and urging either a non-sexist focus or a focus on men since they die, on average, before we women do.