Consumer Identity and Desires Passage

Analyze the following passage and provide appropriate answers for the questions that follow.

Either explicitly or implicitly, our informants suggest that the objects that transfix them are hoped to be conduits to, rather than surrogates for, love, respect, recognition, status, security, escape, or attractiveness. These are the social relations we desire, consciously or subconsciously, beneath the objects that we find so compelling. The value of the objects that we focus our longing upon inheres less in the object or in a Lacanian search for childhood love than in the culture. The hope for the hope that an altered state of being may result keeps the cycle of desire moving. Desires are nurtured by self-embellished fantasies of a wholly different self, and they may be stimulated by external sources, including advertising, retail displays, films, television programs, stories told by other people, and the consumption behavior of real or imaginary others. But we find that the person who feels strong desire has almost always actively stimulated this desire by attending, seeking out, entertaining, and embellishing such images. The desires that occupy us are vivid and riveting fantasies that we participate in nurturing, growing, and pursuing, through self-seduction.

The social nature of desire implies that preferences of consumers are far from being independent. Yet, choice models assume that preferences of consumers act as individuals. The mimetic aspect of desire creates difficulties for using individual attitude or intention measures to predict adoption of new products whose use will be visible. The notion of desire we have derived suggests that the appeal of the desired object is not inherent in the object itself. Models that begin with preferences for product attributes or benefits are therefore problematic. The consumer, individually and jointly, has a role in constructing the object of desire, within a social context. What makes consumer desire attach to a particular object is not so much the object's particular characteristics as the consumer's own hopes for an altered state of being,involving an altered set of social relationships.

Consider the statement given below as true: "The failure of men to transition from being shoppers and consumers to producers and creators has implications about their manliness."

Which of the following statements would concur with the above idea and the theme of the main paragraph?

Consider the statement given below as true: "Men use the plasticity of consumer identity construction to forge atavistic masculine identities based upon an imagined life of self-reliant, pre-modern men who lived outside the confines of cities, families, and work bureaucracies." Which of the following statements would concur with the above idea and the theme of the main paragraph?

Consider the statement given below as true: "By appropriating fashion discourse, consumers generate personalized fashion narratives and metaphoric and metonymic references that negotiate key existential tensions and that often express resistance to dominant fashion norms in their social milieu or consumer culture at large."

Which of the following statements would concur with the above idea and the theme of the main paragraph?