For this project, I was to choose an ad that I thought was terrible and satirize it in Seminar, then create an object for Studio whose existence provided social commentary on that ad in a manner reflective of the commentary I provided in my Seminar presentation. I chose a Fairlife milk advertisement that featured a bunch of naked pin-up style women wearing nothing but strategically placed milk blobs that created a sort of photoshopped milk dress. This company takes pride in their sustainability efforts, their kindness to animals, and the quality of their ingredients and traceability of their materials, but instead of advertising any of these fantastic things, they simply exploited the female body to try to sexualize things that aren’t sexy. So many advertisements use this strategy, so I decided to create a line of office supplies shaped like penises to spotlight how ridiculous it is to pair genitals with random, unsexy products, and I did this in the shape of a penis to further emphasize this point, since penises are rarely objectified or sexualized in media, whereas the female body is subjected to it, constantly.
This project was originally about female sexualization in media as a result of the male gaze, but it began turning into a perspective that wasn’t what I intended, so it shifted to this final project. Nonetheless, my first iteration of this project was a journal “for men” in the shape of a penis with the words “MARKETING STRATEGIES” written across the front, since that’s from where certain men do their thinking. There was only one page in this journal.
In the final draft of this project, I created two notebooks out of decorative cardstock and thin cardboard, filled with lined paper that I designed in InDesign then had printed and cut out. I punched holes in all the sheets and the covers with a square-shaped hole punch I bought for this project and bound it with wire binding that I also bought for this project. I also created a package of notecards/stationary that I drew then painted on watercolor paper that I’d cut out and folded, and packaged it with brown envelopes (because they are superior to all other envelopes, especially when writing on them with white gel pen, heck yes) in actual notecard packaging from a set of cards I bought simply for the packaging. And lastly, I created a set of paperclips that I bent out of thick bronze wire. I had an idea how to shape them to make them work, but that failed, so upon googling “penis paperclip” I only found one shape in the search results, which I then made. It was shaped like a dog bone, so it only looked like a penis on one side, so I took that shape and modified it to get the final version of the paperclips that I presented.
Here is the paperclip that I ultimately modified:
