UPDATE: This poster (apparently) isn’t an official AVFM poster, but they have endorsed it. See bottom of post for details.
Is the appearance of this poster at a Toronto train station an example of inadvertently terrible timing, or an act of astounding assholery?
The poster in question was spotted at Toronto Transit’s Ossington station yesterday, a day after reports of online threats against University of Toronto women hit the media. Classy, AVFM, classy!
Adding to the ick factor: As one Twitterer pointed out, the bus line that goes through the U of T campus connects to the subway at Ossington Station.
Even if the timing of this little poster campaign is purely coincidental, it’s a little hard to fathom how anyone associated with AVFM would think that the best way to recruit Toronto women to their cause would be to essentially tell them: “We have no respect for you and no understanding of feminism; we like to imagine you suffering; come join us for some epic mansplaining!”
But AVFMers seem to have perpetual troubles telling the difference between “brilliant PR move” and “shitting their pants in public.”
Twitter parody account @TTCwelps had what is probably the best response to the poster.
https://twitter.com/TTCwelps/status/642376748919746560
And here’s a reminder that not everything that starts out with the phrase “hey ladies” is automatically terrible.
UPDATE: Here’s an official statement on the poster from AVFM’s Facebook page. It’s a little … confusing, in that they’re not entirely sure if it’s one of their posters or not.
Wow, I’m actually the target audience for this poster–single, poor and unhappy about it.
However, my reaction is: I would rather get a second job at a fast food joint and die alone smelling of fryer grease than spend 2 minutes with one of these guys.
The nice thing about being over 30 is that you’ve seen ample, ample evidence that the wrong man is much, much, MUCH worse than nothing.
Because you’ve known someone married to an abuser and someone dating a drug dealer, you’ve read extensively about women murdered by their guys and you’ve probably dated a jerk or a guy whose goals just don’t align with yours at least once.
@buttercup Yeah, that does make a little more sense. I guess I’m used to trying to interpret their poor language skills into something that makes sense lol. Maybe they’re saying, “Well, I can’t help you pay the $2000 per month mortgage, but I could totally pay the $200 per month dues for you!” Also, I love that they assume that feminism is like their movement but for women. WGTOW, if you will. I think what they really want is to go back to a time that doesn’t actually exist but they’ve made up in their minds where the 50’s housewife ideal actually existed for real and men were the breadwinners and could afford to feed a family of 10 on a blue collar salary while the wife stayed at home. Or something. And they’re pissed at feminism because women were able to break out of the prison of not being able to own their own homes or vote or get any of their stuff when they divorced.
Ok, I think I’m done trying to figure out what they’re thinking because they’re just not.
Apologies. This next post is going to be long.
On “AVFM”, the new art installation at Offington Station.
In this new controversial piece by the pseudonymous, eponymous artist, which has been acquired by Toronto Transit and placed on display as part of their public art campaign, we see a savage examination of masculinity within contemporary Canada.
The first thing we notice when examining AVFM is that it affects a faux-naive graphic design sensibility. The words are presented in a single font and single size, all in white on a red background except for a blue bar at the bottom for the URL. The text is unjustified, leading to the “ragged right edge” which places it apart from professional work. The background is plain, devoid of watermark or texture. Here we see that the artist brilliantly evokes the simplicity of internet-based meme culture, drawing the raw feral desperation of this untutored style into the high-art world and providing a real energy to the piece. The boldness of this decision makes AVFM stand out from the mere advertising which surrounds it in the station and draws us deeper into the story it purports to tell.
Looking deeper, we see that the text is also presented in a similarly savage, faux-naive style. It opens with a salutation, “Hey Ladies”, capitalising the second word as if to suggest that this is a letter and that every word will be capitalised in the manner of crude notices. However, this is immediately undermined as it continues on heedlessly, almost recklessly, taking us on a wild ride through five short, ungrammatical sentence fragments, each drawing from the last to provide an Joycean reading experience. The wild discontinuity of the body of the text from the salutation is in turn undermined even further by the graphic design, which does not clearly separate the two and so leads us to discover it ourselves.
In the first sentence fragment, AVFM poses a clumsily-phrased question enquiring after the reader’s love life. By doing so it immediately crosses the line of conventional conversational etiquette and plunges into personal space, combining the raw energy of the aesthetic presentation with a sense of defensiveness and violation from such a question. The poor grammar – “You are not getting any dates?” – prevents us from easily pondering this question and forces the viewer onwards on the journey of the piece.
In the second sentence, AVFM sets up a further contrast with its earlier tone. The awkward, unabbreviated “You are not” is contrasted with the casual “Can’t afford”, furthering the brutal, bold energy it creates. The sense of violation is also furthered by questioning the viewer on their finances and housing costs, a sensitive topic for many Canadians today.
It’s in the third sentence that AVFM begins to show it’s true brilliance. Again, the contrasting tone comes up initially, with “You are 30” unabbreviated as opposed to the earlier sentence; and the personal question of romance returns. Here we see the pattern developing, with unabbreviated, awkward sentences about romance in the first and third sentence fragment, with a more casually-worded question about a non-romantic topic in the second. The awkward line break before “married” emphasises this, creating a stumbling block in the question which mimics the viewer’s own discomfort at the question. The clashing energy of the piece, with its internal contradictions creating a tremendous surge of excitement to the viewer, draws us inevitably onwards through its rhythms. AVFM is not an art exhibition which is merely seen: it is experienced.
In the fourth sentence, we see the pattern recur again. Here AVFM’s structure becomes clearer, and out of the apparently brutal, savage energy a strange crystalline elegance emerges. Like the second sentence, this is phrased casually, without the awkward phraseology of the first and third, and it again concerns a non-romantic subject: politics. It assumes that the reader is politically active and identifies as a feminist – a common political affiliation amongst modern Canadians but by no means universal.
The final sentence fragment simply asks if we want some answers. Brilliantly, the words are chosen so that they sound both casual and awkward; no abbreviation is possible, and so it is impossible for the viewer to assign them either to the pattern of the first and third, or the second and fourth sentences. We have set up our thesis and antithesis, and are now approaching synthesis.
Finally, AVFM ends with an imperative. Closing the piece with a sting like this is a bold move, especially contrasted with the recurring use of questions, but it provides a powerful end and ensures that the energy that has been built up throughout the viewer’s experience with the piece is not wasted. The use of blue as a background contrasts strongly with the red, tying up the piece and providing at long last a reprieve.
Upon closer rumination, the first thing we discover is that the blue and the red provide apparently different concerns. The red text is aimed at women, with its brazen “Hey Ladies” salutation; but it is only at the very end that we discover that the website claims to be speaking for men. While a surface reading might take this as feral, unplanned contradiction, we can see that it furthers both the faux-naive and contradictory motifs of AVFM.
The intention of the artist is clearer when we consider the ubiquity of advertising on Toronto’s public spaces. Most advertising is aimed at women but the products are marketed by men; AVFM reminds us of this, but it then explores the topic deeper by questioning the very consumerist fantasy that such advertising is built upon. When men are not attempting to sell to women, but instead making them question their lives in this manner, it powerfully exposes the meaning underneath public advertising and provides a thoughtful outlook on a very real facet of modern Canadian lives.
When seen from a male perspective, the piece is starker. It reminds men that it is not aimed at them, thus providing a sense of alienation similar to that felt by women in much of modern life. AVFM gives a male viewer a sense of what it is to be a woman in the modern world, left out of the assumed public dialogue and seen only as an object which can provide services to others – be it dates, their half of the rent or marriage. This uncomfortable realisation stays with the viewer and enables them to see the similar subtext in advertising within the station.
By undermining both consumerism and gender objectification in this way, AVFM ensures that the viewer cannot look at other posters without questioning them deeper. It has changed the way the viewer interacts with public displays, much as Borges changes the way one interacts with fiction or Cage with music. AVFM is truly a masterpiece and if the remainder of the work placed on public display by Toronto Transit is up to its standards, then the Canadian art world is in for a very exciting period indeed.
Do not miss this exhibition.
PS: The URL at the bottom actually works, although it leads to a page whose main story appears to be about beer fermentation processes.
EJ, that was brilliant, and your proposed reading of this “piece of art” is now headcanon for me.
@EJ
Go get yourself a trophy, because you’ve won the hell out of this thread.
I know we overwhelmingly nixed David’s offer to install an upvoting/downvoting system (and with good reason), but that’s one of the few posts that makes me wish we had one – brilliant stuff!
Awww, thanks you guys.
I learn so very much reading this site, I’m glad that I can give back a little.
That sign makes no sense. MRA’s are more often then not against marriage, so why do they think it’s a bad thing that women go unmarried??!?!?!?
Huh? By that definition, my place is an apartment/flat to me and a condo to my landlord? Same with my sister’s place.
EJ – “Joycean reading experience” – my favourite part of many. You should submit this to AVFM! They should be flattered to have such an intense and thorough analysis of one of their ‘pieces’!
I’m really shy about submitting my writing for publication, I’m afraid. If someone wants to act as my agent in this, then they’d be very welcome. I place the piece in the public domain, with the proviso that the word “masculinity” in the first draft be changed to “advertising.”
spacelawn:
“That sign makes no sense. MRA’s are more often then not against marriage, so why do they think it’s a bad thing that women go unmarried??!?!?!?”
Oh, that’s easy. See, MRA’s aren’t against marriage, but marriage to women who have this silly idea that they can do whatever they please (i.e. FemiNazis). They also assume that most men feel the same way, and thus all these FemiNazis are Forever Alone just like they are except MRAs are obviously Forever Alone due to Principled Arguments. This is an appeal to FemiNazis who are secretly unhappy without an Alpha Male around controlling everything they do and think because of course they are, and if only enough of them would abandon FemiNazism and become good little Miladies again, Alpha Males would be able to marry them again, safe in the knowledge that if she give him lip, he can just pop her one and everyone will understand that it’s just what one does with uppity women.
I shudder at the “answers” avfm thinks it can provide for these supposed problems. Probably something along the lines of “you’re unmarried because you’re a gold-digging bitch. Also your uterus shriveled up and you turned into an old hag the second you hit 30. We have no solutions for you. We only suggest that you start loathing yourself and buy some cats because you’re clearly going to be alone for the rest of your life.”
@Michael:
I had to reread that about eight times, find-replacing the terminology, before I realised that I agree with you. I think.
http://i61.tinypic.com/ibwfbl.gif
Oh lord, this whole thing had me in stitches. (And you know AVfM is hoping that this is how it’ll be looked at too!)
I could get into a detailed critique from a graphic designer’s point of view…
http://i1307.photobucket.com/albums/s598/Paradoxys3DS/avfmtorontoposters_zpstug8v0hq.jpg
Apologies in advance if you can’t read my terrible handwriting.
@ Paradoxy
I though negging was one of their strategies?
That’s PUAs. MRAs will go on endlessly about how they’re not all the same, even though it’s like trying to explain the difference between Goa and Psytrance.
Arctic Ape is the US apartment complexes are a set of apartments all owned by the same landlord or group of landlords. There can be tens or even hundreds in a “block” (blocks aren’t necessarily physically connected but can be a set of buildings). As they are all commonly owned you can get ratings sites a bit like for hotels which is helpful. The bigger blocks also tend to include services like a manager (mine was 9 to 5), office where parcels are taken and on site maintenance.
I found the concept strange when I moved to US. Look at the site apartments ratings for a better idea. I think if you have a small scale private landlord the place would still be called a condo. That said in the US I did not see the small scale landlord you get in the UK.
A condo is a portion of a building that you own, not rent. The layout is similar to an apartment but the various apartments are owned by different people rather than just one person.
You can own a condo and simultaneously rent it out to a tenant, just like you can own a house and rent it out. It’s just like owning a house, except that you live in what appears from the outside to be an apartment building. Condo associations are more invasive about what you’re doing, though. They might (or might not) have rules about you renting out your condo to someone, whereas homeowners associations (for attached or detached homes) typically don’t. Since you only own from wall to wall, and the building itself is owned by the association, the association is more up in your business than a homeowners association usually is.
Policy of Madness, in the UK the mass ownership of a whole set of flats (to use a word that will cover both apartments and condos) is still very rare.
However the word apartment has been taken from America and then used incorrectly to refer to a flat that you may own or may rent from a landlord. Typically the landlord will only own a small number of properties and will not be in charge of the block or own the whole block.
When I moved to the US I thought I had no idea what a condo was. It turned out though that a condo was just a flat. I previously had no idea what the US word apartment meant since it had evolved a different meaning in the UK. I am still not fully sure what an apartment is tbh.
In other words, they’re all closet Ralph Kramdens. He was a bus driver, hence the Ossington TTC station as a site for their Ralphings. (You can change over from subway to TTC buses there.)
Suddenly, it all makes sense!
And now, a little mental bleach, courtesy of the late, great Stompin’ Tom Connors:
Apartments are groups of housing units built together as a cohesive whole, and then owned and managed by a single authority (usually a management company).
Apartments can be high-rises (up to 30+ stories) or low-rises (groups of 3-4 story buildings). Apartments can be in groups of 500+ units, or as little as 3.
Apartments can also be created out of a single-family house by subdividing the house into separate dwelling units. If you have your own bedroom and bathroom and theoretical kitchen space, you have an apartment. If you share any of those facilities with another person not in your household, you’re renting a room in a house. Sounds the same, but it isn’t.
Apartments are always rented, except in some rare legacy usages. Some units labeled as “apartment” in Manhattan are actually purchased and owned, and function similarly to condos without the “condo” attached. This is not the norm and you should always assume you’re referring to a rental when you talk about an apartment.
Does this help?
I don’t object to ragged-right edges, but if you’re going to do them it would look better if each sentence was its own line.
It’s a bad idea if they actually want women, let alone women who are feminists who are more likely to have heard about their shit, to come and see their site.
That’s also a good idea.