They also seem quite fond of whoever happens to be selling Doritos at the local corner store. Friendly people, stoners.
You should read the rest of the thread. He never said the lawsuit would be frivolous.
Wow, all the squickiness in this thread! No, in a misogynistic society using conventionally sexualized imagery of women is not equivalent to using conventionally sexualized images of men or, especially, a particular celeb beefcake. Next week’s lessons in obvious false equivalences: why cracker is not equivalent to the n-word, and why lampooning vain Orange Julius’s hair malfunctions is not the same as policing the wardrobe of a rising female politician. FFS.
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Apparently, before they went with MOMOAS, the Girl Scout wanted to go with this, but knew HBO was much more litigious:
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Ah yes, the Girls Scouts already excelled and promoting capitalism and sales skills, now they can learn the important lesson than not just sugar sells, but sex.
Next time I suggest they pair with Disney and make limited edition boxes. You could go with Disney animation, Marvel heroes, or Star Wars. Or maybe all three. Collect all 27 variant boxes!
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That was my thought as well. It was a fun idea, turned out neat looking, but in the end she did the thing that drives me nuts about certain types of designers that have no problem appropriating things they have no rights to. And that’s coming from someone that feels the copyright laws in this country are horribly overreaching.
As @Franko said, if this had been the girl’s idea, and she moved forward with it on her own, it would have made a difference in how I felt about the story. As it is, it leaves me a bit cold.
Yeah, that. The idea is fun. If they made an actual cookie, with proper licensing, in cooperation with WB and Jason, that would be an excellent outcome. My breath is not held though.
The problem with your proposition is that boys/men are already on top of the food chain, as it were, and women are horribly sexualized in our culture throughout advertising. You can’t walk down most aisles of a store without seeing some form of women being sexualized to sell a product. Maybe the cereal aisle is safe.
For girls doing it, I see it as a step toward equalizing an unequal field and think fair enough.
If the boys were doing it, I would see it as adding to an already existing problem.
Add to the fact that men can walk around essentially wherever they want with their nipples showing, and women can’t, and you should be able to see the difference.
Or maybe not.
All I know is that I can see a difference between those two scenarios.
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I do not believe that anyone is making the argument that they are equivalent (at least I am not). I do believe that nothing beneficial can come of perpetuating the sexualization of advertising, regardless of gender. Why would an adult woman wish to impart that lesson to her young and impressionable daughter?
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Don’t know. As a SWM, I’m not in the habit of policing how mothers raise their daughters. YMMV.
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Stargate Guides as a spin-off series? (Or maybe Cookie Extreme?)
I hate to say this, but maybe so that her daughter’s prepared for the horribleness that is our world today? So she isn’t blindsided when she attempts to exist as an adult?
It’s not the world I want, but it’s the one we have.
“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”
If we want things to change so that sex isn’t used to sell products, stopping this isn’t the way. Stopping the other stuff is. Of course, the reality is that as long as sex does sell, it won’t be stopping any time soon. So, like I said before, doing this helps equalize the playing field.
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You’re right. we should lock up all culture so that only the corporation that owns it can even think about using it… Maybe we give the death penalty for anyone who has an unauthorized use of IP… Especially a bully organization like the girl scouts… Truly, the civil rights issue of our day, allowing massive corporations to squeeze ever tiny little bit of value out of culture for the next 1000 years, without letting ANYONE even THINK of defrauding such good corporate citizens as Warner Brothers! /s
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Sure. Let’s put the girl scouts out of business in defense of WB… totally good use of tax payer’s court system… /s
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A lot of people are talking about women sexualizing men here…but I’m just not seeing it.
Yes, Momoa is an attractive, fit guy. But the pictures are from his movie press. And while he isn’t wearing a shirt, no one in their right mind would argue that a disembodied boobs or a topless woman are in any way equivalent.
I think the cookie boxes are selling because people think it’s clever and cute. The fact that people are crying sexualization and exploitation of men over this demonstrates the point of how differently men and women’s bodies are respected culturally.
I wonder if the concerned folks in this thread are just as worried about boys and the sexualization of women- and what they are doing to change it.
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Yeah, but see, ever since wimmins got the right to vote, it’s been detrimental to men… and now we have these young girls being taught that men are just pieces of meat… don’t you see how unfair that is to men! /s
Probably not… 
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i’d buy that for a dollar!
If you are trying to fight for the well being of men, I think you could do so without making it sound like there is some sort of contest between the sexes. There are men’s issues that are worth recognizing, but it feels like every time someone raises them it comes through this angry-at-women lens.
I think there is an issue with hyper-idealized bodies. I’m not saying the girl scout was doing something wrong, but I don’t love the source material.
We know that hyper-idealized and sexualized bodies play a role in how people form negative body images. Showing bodies like the one in that image of Momoa as ideal contributes to men developing eating disorders (which have been rising significantly in men) and in men harming themselves in other ways (e.g. steroids) to obtain unrealistic bodies. And it has nothing to do with whether the people who are buying the cookies are sexualizing Momoa, it’s about how images like that play to boys and young men.
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My understanding (I’m not a lawyer) is that it’s not OK to swipe someone’s intellectual property without their consent–who they are is irrelevant. I’m surprised the Girl Scouts haven’t put a stop to this.
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Publicity or personality rights are a mess, depending on the country or even the US state. (See the fight over the right to use the image of Albert Einstein.)
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Alright, let me rephrase. I find that advocacy for men’s issues is too wrapped up in annoyance at advocacy for women’s issues. I find it super off-putting.
If you are concerned about issues like eating disorders in men then I’m emphatically with you. I think that people who are already aware of issues around presentation of ideal bodies are naturally allies in that, and my experience talking to activists has born that out.
Yes, and I’ve had some time to rethink the idea of “sexualized” since I posted. After all the idealized male body and the idealized female body are both fantasies created by men for men. The female body is very sexualized while the male body is a power fantasy not a sexual one (Not to say that no one finds that body type sexually appealing, I certainly know someone who does). But it’s not the same for you to say you don’t see the sexualization as it is for someone who would say they don’t see the sexualization in movie posters featuring women who are standing in the classic movie poster stance that lets their butts and breasts both be in the frame. One image was created to make men feel like heroes by proxy, the other was created to make men feel titilated.
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