I am getting completely sick of those hair and beauty product ads that co-opt the whole "I am empowered woman" thing. It's just too irritating [actually, it might be the whole "I am empowered woman" thing that's just too irritating. The co-option maybe doesn't bother me so much as the thing. Just to be clear, though. Either way, I am severely irritated]. I just saw an ad that had words like "soft but strong", and "pure but sensual", floating across the faces of women with great hair who are forthright [prepared to look directly at the camera] and feminine [cue secret smiles all round] and fulfilled and content blah blah blah. Puke puke puke. The point was, I'm sure, to demonstrate how these 'seemingly contradictory' terms can now be understood as the great and complicated characteristics of modern womanhood. And don't we all just love that? It's so evolved and intelligent. Yay women. And hey, if these empowering words also happen to describe the kind of hair you can have if you use a particular woman-targeted shampoo then, isn't that all for the good? [short and emphatic] Fuck [disgusted pause] off. Another self-satisfied little piece of crap that has me contorting my body on the couch in an attempt to express 'interpretatively' my revulsion is an ad for some make-up remover towelette, or something. There's this chick taking off her make-up at the end of a long [and presumably terribly modern, with all the joys and pitfalls that that entails. Embrace it, girls] day, and with each wipe she says "Because I am not my mascara", and so on, as she does away with each corresponding type of make-up [mask, falsity, caricature of essential 'woman', whatever you want to call it]. I am biting my fist right now. But the ad becomes its most excruciating at the end when, having rid herself of all the accoutrements women are forced to hide behind on a daily basis, she looks directly into the mirror [she's a forthright one, sassy] and says, "Because I am me". But it's not some deadpan "because I am me". She sounds kind of indignant and shrill with a rising pitch on the "I" and the "me" so she sounds like a whiny school debater, you know, "Because I... am ME". Take that, boys, or whoever it is this 'consciousness-raising' piece of crap is directed at. Take it. Aaarggh! Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. It's just a fucking beauty product! Yeah yeah, power of advertising to shape people's conception of themselves blah blah signpost moments in pop culture revealing or reinforcing an attitudinal shift blah blah no fucking way. These ads are stupid, conceived probably as a cynical ploy that guises greed in 'enlightenment', and they most definitely reduce this 'complex woman' crap to its most unbearable parrot form, and then have it stand for what "the best and most content and adjusted and glossy haired of us" think about ourselves. Please make them go away. It's just too irritating.