made me laugh, initially, because clearly naomi wolf has only ever shopped for cosmetics in fine department stores and not at Walgreen's, heaven forbid! oh, i forgot, heaven forbid anyone shop in the sin against aesthetic pleasure that are the walgreen's and walmart's of the world. shopping for beautiful things are loverly, aesthetically pleasing stores is a revolutionary act! gag me with DP's, uh, urinal scrubber. :)
<quote> 1. The ideology critique. Most critical perspectives on consumerism takes as their point of departure the observation that people often spend a lot of money purchasing goods that don’t actually produce lasting satisfaction or happiness. This is buttressed by the observation that, as a society, we invest an enormous amount of money in some things, like advertising, or dubious product "enhancements," (e.g. Pepsi’s "new look, same great taste" campaign, or the $3 billion spent developing the Mach 3 razor), while neglecting certain other important social priorities, like health, education, famine relief, and so forth. As a result, a consumerist society is thought to be one that is governed by a set of priorities that no reasonable person would endorse upon reflection.
So how is it that we, both as individuals and as a society, manage to make such bad choices? What is it that prevents us from doing what we know we should be doing? One fairly straightforward answer to this question is simply to suppose that, when we make these sorts of choices, we are exhibiting some form of practical irrationality. This is another way of saying that consumerism is a type of ideology – in a somewhat narrow sense of the term. According to this conception, an ideology is a system of beliefs, or a type of mental condition, that prevents agents from acting in a way that is most conducive to the attainment of their goals. There is nothing wrong with their goals per se – agents have a clear and well-ordered set of priorities – they are simply unable to translate these priorities into successful conduct, because their minds are somehow clouded.
This view of consumerism enjoyed much greater popularity in the heyday of Marx and Freud than it does now. But it still pops up now and again. Here is an example, drawn from Naomi Wolf’s book The Beauty Myth. Wolf is faced with the task of explaining why intelligent, successful, educated women continue to buy cosmetics, even after the feminist critique of the fashion industry has exposed the social consequences of their behaviour. Part of the explanation, says Wolf, is straightforward irrationality. Thus she describes how, in order "to reach the cosmetics counter, [a woman] must pass a deliberately disorienting prism of mirrors, lights and scents that submit her to the 'sensory overload' used by hypnotists and cults to encourage suggestibility."5She claims that women experience an "unconscious hallucination," that they have been "stunned and disoriented" by changing gender roles, and so on.6 In short, they are not in full possession of their faculties at the time when make the buy.
When stated bluntly, the problems with this hypothesis are fairly obvious. It simply strains credulity to imagine that intelligent, reflexive agents are all acting irrationally when they exhibit consumerist behaviour patterns. Quite apart from the fact that the people in question tend to take offense at the suggestion, there is a deep philosophical problem with the entire explanatory strategy. Positing widespread irrationality and error as an explanation for organized or systematic behaviour patterns tends to suggest a failure of interpretation on the part of the theorist, not a rationality deficit on the part of the actors.7 If it looks like people are playing baseball, then they probably are playing baseball. It doesn’t make sense to say "they’re really playing cricket, but they keep making mistakes."
Thus the attempt to explain consumerism as a form of irrationality is a self-defeating theoretical strategy, since the ascription of irrationality to agents counts as prima facie evidence against any theory that draws support from such an ascription.
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http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/philosophy/twp/9903/twp_99_03_heath.html