Giving Away Victoria's Secret

I just removed myself from the Victoria's Secret daily email listing.

And it feels good.

Haley G. Hoover has begun a new project-blog, Presence. She started things off with a bang, taking a stab at Cosmopolitan while calling out to all girls and women who are aware of the Cosmo problem, as well as the countless others unaware of the daily barrage of media-created stereotype expectations that surround life as a female in America.

While Hayley is far from the first person to come to this realization, she is one of YouTube's most respected vlogging celebrities. I've spent a lot of time getting to know Hayley as one of the Five Awesome Girls over the last three years, and admire and respect her as a personality and a person. We're of the same generation and mindset, and I can't wait to see what she comes up with!

In college I majored in both English and American history, with a focus on the 20th century. It was pretty awesome. My thesis for English was all about the American Girl book and doll franchise. For my bachelors in history I studied the lifestyle and stereotypes of a young woman living in the late 1960s, taking a close look at Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and publications like 'Teen, Co-Ed and Ms. Magazine, as well as the 1970 presidential commission report on the lives of women of all classes and creeds.

A happy side effect of so much focus on the lives of girls and young women was a much greater understanding of all of the bullshit that we put up with as Americans. I could go the route of complaining about the barrage of makeup advertisements and the Hollywood obsession, etc. The problem, however, goes much deeper than what's between the pages of Cosmo.

It's too much to go into at the moment.
Think about it. But don't think about it.
See what you come up with.
And remind me to tell you about my brilliant solution to those annoying ads that run before and after YouTube videos and TV commericals, and the like. It's pretty good.

Check out Ms. Hoover's most recent video on the birth of Presence:


Presence [noun]
1. The state or fact of being present, as with others in a place.
2. A person or thing that exists in a place but is not seen.
2. The ability to project a sense of ease, poise, or self-assurance.
(Thanks, dictionary.com!)