Survivor is an advocate for change
Mission is to end ads objectifying women
Advertising executive Madonna Badger is a survivor and an advocate. Having lost her three daughters — a 9-year-old and twin 7-year-olds — and her parents in a 2011 house fire, she can certainly speak about overcoming tragedy that would bring down the strongest of us.
And she has plenty to say, in person, via hashtag slogan and via website, about getting advertisers to stop portraying women as sexual objects to sell their products … whether or not those products have anything to do with sex.
“Why are we still portraying women in advertising as not only … less than equal, but essentially objects?” — Madonna Badger
“I really wanted to find something that I could do within my industry that would make a difference in terms of diversity and inclusion,” she says.
Badger, founder and chief creative officer of Badger & Winters advertising agency in New York and creator of the website WomenNotObjects.com as well as the hashtag #WomenNotObjects, will, in fact, be the featured speaker for a “A Story of Experience, Strength and Hope,” a benefit luncheon to be held from 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. March 26 at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion. Proceeds will be used by the Cosmopolitan Foundation.
The nonprofit foundation maintains a building at 2323 Durwood Road, which now hosts 35 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings a week, says foundation member Craig Douglass. The building sees an average of more than 300 people attending multiple hourlong meetings in a day.
The foundation, in fact, was formed to purchase the venue. “Someone else … owned the building and could have sold the building out from under us, [as] we were renting,” Douglass says. Now, the mortgage has been paid off, but the building needs some work. And while the AA groups that meet there can’t raise money or accept any outside contributions, the foundation can, he explains.
Experience, strength and hope are the very things to which Badger, who has spent time in The Natural State, can speak best.
On Christmas Day 2011 her world was altered forever. The fire robbed her of her family and her Stamford, Conn., home. From this tragedy came her Arkansas connection.
Then came a journey that took her from “mental hospital to mental hospital,” she recalls. “Nobody … knew what to do with me.”
Finally, “my friend Kate Askew came and got me from one of the mental institutions I was put in in Tennessee,” Badger continues. Askew, who lives in Little Rock,
invited her to live with her and her husband under one condition: “You just have to promise you won’t kill yourself.”
She promised, Badger says, but the promise was a flimsy one as she was “totally depressed and suicidal.” Askew called her friend Helen Porter, who was involved with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Psychiatric Research Institute and whose name, along with her husband’s, graces the institute’s Brain Imaging Research Center.
‘I THINK WE CAN HELP YOU’
Porter got the director, Dr. G. Richard Smith, on the phone and asked if Badger could be seen. Smith agreed. “It was on Super Bowl Sunday,” Badger recalls. “My hair was falling out and I was just a mess … and Rick was the first person that said to me, ‘You’re not crazy; you’re not mentally ill. You don’t belong in a mental institution … you have been through a horrible tragedy. You are very sad and obviously filled with grief and … I think we can help you.’
“He was the first person who explained to me what had happened to me.” The bond is so intense between mother and children, and she’d lost all three of her children at once. “It was like these three giant nerve endings got severed.” Plus, she’d lost her parents. Smith told Badger that time, and love, would help heal her wounds.
Badger stayed in Arkansas for more than a year, living with Kate and Jeff Askew for eight months, then renting a little house, and attending Friendly Chapel Church of the Nazarene in North Little Rock. “And Cosmo was a big part of my life, too,” she adds, referring to the Cosmopolitan Foundation.
On its behalf, Badger will discuss her recovery and how that dovetails with the work of the institute, which is starting a trauma center for people going through what she did, as well as her #WomenNotObjects campaign, whose goal is to not only keep women from being portrayed in an overtly sexual manner, but keep their images from being unrealistically enhanced.
A JOB WITH A PURPOSE
Badger says #WomenNotObjects was born of her desire, once she returned to advertising, for her work to have more of a purpose. She notes that women make 85 percent of all household decisions when it comes to buying on a global scale, and fuel a third of the world’s economy — bigger than China and India combined. So, Badger asks, “Why are we still portraying women in advertising as not only … less than equal, but essentially objects?” Women are used as props, overly retouched to “beyond human achievability” and “treated like body parts in some instances.” Badger says that advertisers should ask themselves the question: What if this was my daughter, or mother, in the ad?
Badger got the idea to take her campaign to “the world’s largest, greatest awards show” — those given at Cannes Lions, the International Festival of Creativity. She made a talk there to about 3,000 attendees, telling them, “Hey, we’ve got to stop this.” A petition geared at ending the practice was circulated; it represented more than 100 different ad agencies. “Now, at Cannes if you objectify or stereotype a woman it’s automatically disqualified from being judged.”
Women will never be treated as equals as long as they are portrayed as objects, Badger has pointed out. Take car commercials, for instance. It’s mostly men who are driving the cars. Some of these commercials use female voice-overs, but the voice is often oversexualized, she says.
The situation is even worse when it comes to nonwhite women, Badger adds.
“Women of color are not even seen … in advertising unless they’re highly objectified.”
The thing that people get confused about is the argument that the campaign is sending the message that women can’t be sexy.
“That isn’t true,” Badger says. “We are highly sexual beings. We’re as sexual as men are. It’s not that we can’t express ourselves however we want to, like Beyonce or Rihanna or Lady GaGa. “[But] when we do that type of woman in advertising, she has to be shown as having her own narrative, her own reason for being, that she’s not part of a man’s narrative.”
IT DOESN’T TAKE ALL THAT
Badger feels the same way about restaurant chains that objectify women’s body parts; and male-dominated sports matches that use scantily clad women as accessories. “It’s so over to play around with women at that level,” she says. Then there are the video games in which women are often portrayed as prostitutes and available targets of violence.
She says children are especially susceptible when it comes to advertising messages. “They live on their phones; they live on their computers. That’s where most of this advertising takes place. And the reality is that we’re not doing anything to change their minds from a media perspective about what a woman’s worth is.”
What can consumers do to help take up the cause? Badger cites a phone application called Gender Fair, the app for an organization that rates companies per their “fairness practices for leadership, employee policies, advertising and philanthropy.” The app allows the user to search more than 1,000 brands for those whose scores are the highest, taking consideration of such factors as type of advertisements and number of women in the C-suite (holding top company positions beginning with the word “chief”), in upper management, on the board of directors.
“If we’re going to create an equal world, I think we need to start with our pocketbooks, with our wallets, and make a difference that way,” Badger says.