2023-07-29 08:08:45
Why didn’t anyone tell me that I had to be beautiful, young, athletic, smart, healthy and in a good mood? Why don’t I hear these voices that seem to demand this of most women around me? It’s felt to be an inviolable law of nature, and I wonder why I missed that lesson again.
My colleagues, who are between 20 and 40, say that we should always function perfectly, be good mothers, be independent and look good at the same time. Most of us have kids and we understand each other a lot, but when we hear those “we should…” phrases that make everyone nod self-pityingly, I feel like I was kind of left out when these laws were promulgated.
No unhealthy products, no skinny models
I don’t really want my ignorance of what we women and mothers are supposed to be like to have anything to do with my eastern origins. That can’t still be the reason after three decades!
I ask a colleague. She can’t tell me exactly where she got this important piece of wisdom from either. “Maybe from the commercial?” I ask and she nods her head thoughtfully. She grew up in the West while I grew up in the ad-free East Zone. She thinks the advertising industry needs to change. For example, that they should not advertise unhealthy products and should not show models that are too thin.
But to demand that advertising change would be to really give it that educational mandate, rather than deny it, I think.
If the essence of the advertising industry is not to provide information about products, but to entice people to buy them, that is by no means a reason for consumers to want to transform themselves into a seductive product. Or is it?
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I was 15 years old at the time of reunification and went to Hamburg with my mother and sister to visit a friend who had recently left the country and whom we thought we would never see again. The girlfriend always looked like a West woman in the East, which was very time-consuming. You needed a sewing machine, a talent for improvisation and contacts with the West. In Hamburg she looked like all the other women, which wasn’t that complicated.
During the Elbe boat trip, the city guide told us at each bridge how many millions it had cost to build. That was the strangest thing I remember about Hamburg. I understood that I don’t understand something very fundamental here. I could think of absolutely no explanation as to why anyone would care what a bridge cost. It could only have been a kind of educational measure, with which we were constantly given information that we were not interested in at all, even in the GDR. For example, when Lenin was born and what grades he had.
The feeling of an illusory world
With children who were our age, the friend now lived in a house in a Hamburg suburb. While she and her new but elderly husband gave the impression that they were now living in the real world, we four Eastern children had the feeling of a make-believe world. Despite the distraction of the great toys and cool clothes, it felt like an amusement park setting and we wondered where real life was hiding here.
Advertising and consumption as a purpose in life were apparently given the greatest possible scope. When the advertising industry came to power in the East as well, it was suddenly all about what it had never been about before. Advertising educated everyone to have more individual needs than possible.
Thirty years later, I’m sitting with my colleagues and I’ve noticed that only young women from Eastern Germany are the ones who complain about the fact that they notoriously feel overwhelmed because they not only feel obligated to many of their own needs in addition to their career, but also to to manage the many needs of children and partners. That’s what they were brought up to do. Badly brought up I think. So bad that they don’t dare to use hand cream on face or face cream on hands anymore. But what should one expect from mother-consumer and father-advertisement whose only interest in their children is to earn money from them? The perfectly trained can even sell themselves.
GDR childhood: Swap and build yourself
When I was growing up, it was common to somehow get the things we needed. Money was often not the answer. If you couldn’t buy something that went beyond the basic supply, you swapped it with friends and acquaintances or built it yourself. The necessities of life were cheap, luxury was expensive, scarcely available and therefore did not have to be advertised.
Today it’s the other way around. Renting is more expensive than air travel. The monthly commuter stamp that you take to work, as expensive as a new pair of shoes. This contradicts my imprinting so much, as if I had to flip two brain regions every day and live with the fact that real life just goes the wrong way round.
Whoever grew up with advertising seems to instinctively demand that the consumer economy offers things to them as if they had a right to it. This legal right never developed in me. Apparently I was already uneducated at 15. I did not accept the obligation to consume. I miss the need to fit on a billboard or be a competitive career mom.
In the East, the “we should…” phrases went further in a direction that implied that the state needed us as workers with a proud community spirit and strong ideological convictions. I didn’t care about the ideology. Already on being used. From the age of 15, however, my country only seemed to need me as a buyer. Character and ideology irrelevant. The job market, on the other hand, didn’t need me at all.
Shaved legs, dazzling white teeth, good mood
My colleague says that if we look young, beautiful and relaxed, it’s easier for us to get jobs. But if we consider what jobs these actually are, in a broader sense they are also related to advertising, media, sales, consumption and pleasure. The utility jobs don’t need employees who have shaved legs, dazzlingly white teeth, expensively creamed cheeks, spoiled children and high spirits.
Another complaint I can’t think of is the requirement that care work be paid for. I can think about it all I want, the idea that by cooking my children’s meals I am doing work for which I should be paid remains completely alien to me. I feel like I’m asking for money to brush my teeth. As if I were a product that maintains itself in order to remain attractive to the market for as long as possible and to present itself as flawless in the window. Do I really want to get something from the proceeds for producing other good products that I later want to see not on the back shelves but also in the shop window?
My children are not economic products that I produce for the state.
If I got money to care for my own children, I would feel that I was supporting the system, which is geared towards the functioning of high-performance everyday life. In addition, the system is primarily designed by men, who are fine with letting women take care of the children. There may be a few women among the system designers and a man here and there among the providers. This somewhat obscures the prevailing division of labor, which presumably would not turn into equality if caring work was paid for.
For me, getting paid for childcare would be like housekeeping money from my husband, which manifests the dependency. Except that the state would be the husband. Whichever way you look at it, kindergarten, after-school care and holiday care for everyone is simply the better solution. But it also seems to be a law of nature that there should never be enough kindergarten places in Germany so that all women are never allowed to enter the labor market. Not even now, when we could use them. When I had my first child at 24, no labor was needed. And I still hadn’t understood that you had to be able to sell yourself if nobody needed you. Then you have to be able to upgrade and present yourself instead.
“How much longer do you want to stay on the taxpayer’s pocket? Having a child doesn’t make life any easier either. You can’t offer your child anything!” said the employee at the job center at the time. My life wasn’t supposed to get any easier. I needed a job. If my labor power wasn’t needed, I wanted at least to have children. They needed me. And what could I offer them? one life! I didn’t say that, but put my maternity pass in my pocket and swallowed the lump in my throat.
“I also got my children out of defiance”
I also had my children out of defiance, because I didn’t want to make reproduction dependent on money. It only worked with a lot of compromises.
My main task was to get everything that cost money used, borrowed, given, swapped and sometimes stolen for the children, and I wondered how many rejection applications a person can actually endure. Our lives functioned by requesting help. We have benefited from living in a society where most people have enough or too much and are not reluctant to give something away when someone really needs it. We really needed it and it made me think of what my grandmother wrote in her diary when she lectured to white high society women in Australia, Africa and South America in the 1960s about the role of women in socialism. “The women of the upper class shape the family luxury through the exploitative business of their husbands and are also responsible for giving back the leftovers to the exploited.”
I had believed that with plenty of time I could offer children the same good childhood as with money. And against the accusation that you shouldn’t have children if you don’t have money, I argued that if you don’t have time to spend with your children because you’re making money, you shouldn’t either.
I didn’t want and don’t want to accept money as the main recipe for happiness.
And I still don’t want to get paid to live with kids. I prefer a country where things are so social that I can raise my children free of charge to become adults who can at least distinguish advertising from real life, who have their own ideals and who can translate the “We should…” sentences into “We want… ‘ convert sentences.
#grew #GDR #advertising #taught