Don’t celebrate plunge of Victoria’s Secret (yet)
State spends nearly $1.1 billion a year without making our communities safer
Arizona spends scarce taxpayer dollars to lock up a growing number of people who don’t need to be imprisoned.
We need to reform Arizona’s prison system because we can do better.
Arizona’s prison population is 12 times larger today than it was 40 years ago — giving our state the nation’s fourth-highest imprisonment rate.
And we know that many prisoners suffer from drug addiction and mental illness, which often become primary crime drivers.
Yet many prisoners do not receive the critical treatment they need for these conditions in prison. Not because we don’t want to give them it, but because we can’t afford to.
As a longtime Arizona prosecutor, I know firsthand that some people belong in prison. Prison sentences are necessary to protect the community — but not all the time.
It’s time we take a harder look at who we lock up and why. About 95 percent of incarcerated folks return to the community, and many are made worse by their time behind bars.
Yet our prison system releases them back into the community with little ability to reintegrate or adapt to life outside prison. Over the last couple of years, with the leadership of Gov. Doug Ducey and the state Legislature, Arizona has worked to improve inmates’ reentry processes and programs. But we can do better.
It’s time to look closer at who we lock up to evaluate if there are better, more efficient alternatives for them. Arizona spends nearly $1.1 billion a year on our prison system and still has an unacceptable inmate recidivism level. Arizonans deserve a better return on that taxpayer investment.
A new nonpartisan report from the group FWD.us details how we got here. Since 2000, Arizona’s prison population has grown by 60 percent. Not because of state population increases or more crime. But because of policy choices to send non-violent and even first-time offenders to prison rather than to some type of community supervision that could more effectively prevent reoffending.
These are expensive policy choices. Consider this: if Arizona reduced its imprisonment rate to that of Nevada’s, a state with a similar crime rate, we would save
I’d gladly dance on the grave of Victoria’s Secret.
But I’m not wearing my dancing shoes yet.
Yes. Sales continue to decline for a lingerie store with a marketing strategy that is 100-percent old-school misogyny.
Recent stories in
Times and earlier reports.
The Times tells its liberal audience VS stock is falling because the store reiterate “has clung to the idea that women should look sexy for men.”
No kidding.
The Journal tells its more conservative readers VS “has lost appeal as customers turn to rivals offering comfort and ease, not airbrushed fantasy.” If only.
I’m not dancing yet because VS is evidence that those unrealistic Barbie doll images of women are as hard to kill as a zombie.
Victoria’s Secret should never have succeeded.
It was a Hugh Hefner fantasy sold to a generation of women whose mothers spent their careers trying to shatter
glass ceilings.
VS should have been dismissed as an anachronism when it launched its first lingerie fashion show in 1995. Instead, it made succumbing to age-old stereotypes seem somehow modern and hip.
The image clicked at the same time malls were bursting with American Eagle, Hollister, Aeropostale and Abercrombie stores that were selling clothes aimed at teenage girls — but styled and sized for razor-thin models.
This may look like a conspiracy by the patriarchy to hobble women. Blame capitalism, too. Convincing women they aren’t good enough is a proven marketing strategy — especially if you’re in the business of selling them a fix for what you’ve convinced them they lack.
Don’t get me wrong.
Lace and satin have enormous appeal on their own merits. So do those delicious colors. Money spent on luxurious unmentionables is money well spent.
But you shouldn’t have to wade Victoria’s Secret continues to see declining sales as it clings to an anachronistic image, Linda Valdez writes.
WESTPORTWIKI/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
through layers of BS – I mean VS – stereotypes to buy beautiful underwear.
Queen Victoria – whose name was borrowed for the store – wore silk bloomers – a pair of which sparked a “fierce bidding war” at auction in 2014, according to the reports at the time.
But these unmentionables had a 52inch waist, something you’re unlikely to
find at Victoria’s Secret.
In fact, the chief marketing officer of VS parent company L Brands, rejected the idea of using plus-size and transgender models for the 2018 annual lingerie fashion show.
Why?
“Because the show is a fantasy,” Ed Razek of L Brands told Vogue in an interview that was criticized enough to win an apology.
But Razek’s initial comments were honest. VS sells fantasy – a male fantasy. And it gets women to buy in and buy products.
I’m a grown-up woman. I know I’m being manipulated. If I buy anyway, that’s my business.
But this insidious marketing strategy captures girls when they are measuring their emerging sexuality against what they see as society’s norms.
It teaches them that 1) they have to please men, and 2) they aren’t good enough to do it without oodles of help.
Victoria’s Secret remains a powerhouse by being the Joe Camel (Remember cool, smoking Joe Camel?) of the lingerie world.
VS sales may be slipping, but don’t get your hopes up.
Every new generation will look to popular culture for help in defining beauty. And the popular culture stinks when it comes to preferring fantasy images of women over the real thing.
This marketing strategy is the zombie in our basement.
It won’t disappear without a fight.
linda.valdez@