Beautiful Lace

Product: Victoria's Secret Biofit Lace Bra Summary: Soft-focus, quick cuts over Adriana Lima's pink lingerie-clad body. An acoustic song in French plays. "New Biofit Lace" floats across the screen--"Lace" in cursive. "You'll think it's custom-made for you," intones the female voiceover breathily. "Your shape, your cup size." A range of cup sizes appears onscreen in smaller serif capitals. Adriana Lima smiles, moving away behind a wall. Perhaps she is leading us to Victoria's Secret. Themes: fantasy, objectification, soft[core]ness, concealment See Also: Dance of the Seven Veils, The Beauty Myth I certainly have some kind of condition, because from time to time I will be walking down the street, as normally as is proper, when all of a sudden I will be struck by a sense of jamais-vu. "Why does everyone have different cars?" I will think to myself. "That's strange, and surely unnecessary." This feeling never really goes away. It is in this spirit that I want to look at Victoria's Secret ads. Recall, if you will, several facts: 1. Victoria's Secret ads are ostensibly targeted towards the major purchasers of lingerie, women. 2. The large majority of women are straight. 3. Victoria's Secret ads are essentially soft porn. It's pretty well-documented that seeing a sexy lady makes men more willing to buy things. But what is going on in the psychology of straight women that would make them more likely to snap up some lingerie based on seeing a doe-eyed femme with a come-hither look? I can only speculate. What happens to me is I get a funny feeling downstairs, and then I start imagining a Soviet-style transportation system where you can have any make and model of auto you want as long as it's chrome and shaped like a bullet. Anyway, I've read a bunch of stuff about straight women, and I have a theory. There's two potential impulses that could drive heterosexual women who see sexualized women to buy, both based on a type of identification. 1. This woman is me. I'm supposed to act like that, to see myself in that way and allow myself to be seen that way by others. To do this, I must buy this lingerie. 2. This woman is my competitor. When my husband sees her on tv, he sits slack-jawed and his conversation becomes limited. My only recourse is to purchase her lingerie, thereby stealing her essence and reminding my husband of her in the boudoir. These would presumably operate quite low in the conscious mind, barely even perceptible except for a slight feeling of social pressure to be a Brazilian supermodel. What the ad does is fairly complex. Start by divorcing sound from video. The v/o's sound is intimate, just above a whisper, but hardly overtly sexual. And the voiceover is all about You. Your Shape, Your Cup Size. Custom Made For You. In this case, You are a woman in need of a bra that suits your individual needs, apparently for beauty and fit. Now the video without the sound. The story of the ad becomes very different. Now what you see is (parts of) a beautiful young woman, who shoots you sexy looks. I'm wondering if the idea isn't that when this comes on, women will avert their glances, taking in only the audio part of the ad, while men absorb the message that Victoria's Secret is where one goes to get Adriana Lima sexy lingerie. And then, the ad is so brief, and the cuts so quick, that you only get the barest hint of sex. I wonder whether the ad is counting on our culture's long association of the bared female body with sex to make its point, or whether it's just another shrill note on top of the cacophony of sexualized imagery that bombards the senses every day, ultimately signifying nothing.

Product: World Mastercard Summary: To the sound of tinkling fairy chimes, a woman walks into a dark wood-paneled shop with a wicker basket. The elderly shopkeeper smiles crinklingly at her as small objects around the shop move charmingly of their own volition. She buys things like laughs, smiles, contented sighs--it's all super Harry Potter. She brings her magic basket through the moving, rustling shop to the clerk, despite the fact that it's all free. Cut to an oddly-animated beach (complete with bathing machines). The basket contents frolic with the children as their mother enjoys a huff from her bag of sighs. Zoom out through the clouds--the whirling globe becomes the O in World Mastercard, which is misty for some reason, probably magic. Themes: wonderment, animism, free as in beer See Also: etsy If you watch closely, you'll notice that the whole "priceless" series of Mastercard ads have stopped saying that things have prices, and have moved toward a strategy of just having everything in their commercials be free. It's not hard to see how this might relate to the current insane level of consumer debt, but that's not really what I want to talk about. I'm here to make a broad generalization about American and British ads. Now, I'm not an unbiased observer. I watch the shows I like to watch, and sometimes I watch the ads in between. In America, this generally means I'm watching channels aimed at your 18-35 male demographic, while in Britain, it means I'm watching Channel 4 and general-interest programmes. Sample bias is an issue here. On the other hand, it's a blog. So: Broadly speaking, American and British ads have different tones. Basically, it's about different kinds of happy. Ads want you to associate their products with pleasure, so generally they'll try to make you happy. (And insecure, but that's another post.) American ads want you to be happy like this: Exciting happy, Disneyland happy, snowboarding and yelling "WOOOOO" happy. The happiness of x-treme. British ads want you to be happy like this: Comfortable happy, warm and fuzzy happy. The simple pleasure of a cheese toastie. You'll see lots of high production values and whiz-bang CGI in both genres, but in what I'm calling British-style ads it's funneled towards bringing a sense of delight and wonder. Think of the Coke ads where a man puts a dollar in a machine and it is transported to a magical vending-machine fairyland. American-style ads are all about originality--showing you the newest, the biggest, the strangest and most shocking thing. These are the ads that have "do not attempt" in small letters at the bottom. As you can surmise, I consider this Mastercard ad a classical example of the British style, wherever it was made. The use of the cloud-cut makes me speculate that it's multi-regional, but I am not willing to do any research on this topic. Unless it jibes closely with my preconceptions.

Special: Politics!

Let's do some word association. What pops into your head when you think of political ads? "Sleazy"? "Dishonest"? "Fucking irritating"? For me, it's "primitive". Let me explain in excessive detail. Regular ads, the ones that want to sell you things instead of people, don't take three out of four years off. Regular ads are locked in a constant Darwinian struggle for airtime, mindshare, and profitability. One of their main limiting factors is consumer sophistication. Jadedness begins early, as the Awesome! and Amazing! toys you're sold as a child break down and/or put out your eye. As you age, the promises they make have to keep just slightly ahead of your disillusionment, or they'll go broke. Animated ads in which cartoon space beavers shoot germs and sing give way to appeals to 9 out of 10 dentists' authority, which in turn give way to Powers of Ten-style extreme close-ups of CGI microbes. So in this climate, where every commercial is a whizzing, buzzing, perfectly-honed marketing (and killing) machine, it's quite offputting to see a political ad lumber up to your screen, toss back its brow and grunt "GROG OPPONENT UGLY. NOT GOOD LEADER. GROG APPROVE MESSAGE." Political ads often use a technique that's been abandoned long ago by normal ads: the direct appeal. Regular ads would never say something so gauche as the word BUY, but political ads will constantly exhort you to VOTE for their guy. Regular ads have all the time in the world (or at least in the quarter), so they can get away with just giving you a feeling, an impression, a memorable 30-second movie that you can associate with their product. They can afford to depend on mere exposure. Political ads are on a budget and a schedule, and they can't afford for you to only remember that Joe Biden smokes black tar heroin, or that Sarah Palin murders political opponents, when you're waiting in line at the Target. They need enough people to perform a specific task at a specific time or all of the balloons they inflated and put in a big net will have been for naught. As such, every political ad smacks of desperation, fear, and urgency. Now, this go-around, Barack Obama has enough money to have his opponent fired into the sun, as well as innumerable artists and slick graphic designers with hairstyles who will work for him for nothing. His ads have been effortlessly laid-back, much like, if you'll excuse a bit of racism, the Harlem Globetrotters. All John McCain has is a guy who's won elections before. His ads use the familiar tactic of fear-mongering and implicit accusations of pedophilia and terrorism. You're probably familiar with how that's going, but for posterity: It's not going well. Who will win? Oh, it's exciting! Like the ending of a romantic comedy! Will she end up with the boring, stodgy guy she's known for years--or the new and thrilling guy who happened to get top billing despite not appearing until the middle of the second act! It's totally unpredictable! Seriously, though, Obama's got like a lot more money.

I love blogging!

Product: Twix Summary: At a party, an attractive woman rants about nonspecific "politicians" being "out of touch" to an average-to-dumpy man, who agrees simperingly. After several seconds of this "listening", he invites her to his apartment (which is where sex happens). "What?!" she replies. Using his Twix to stop time, the man reflects briefly on the most effective technique for acquiring sex with this woman. "I thought you were a believer. Someone who'd wanna...blog about our ideals. But I guess..." The woman's face lights up. "I love blogging!" SEX ASSURED. BUY TWIX. Themes: PUA, female gullibility See Also: Can't Hardly Wait et al Fuck you, Twix. Fuck you.

Not In Your Hand

Product: M&M's Premiums Summary: An anthropomorphic M&M, which as you may recall is a type of ovoid chocolate candy, pouts, lounges, teases, winks, and gets showered with smaller M&Ms. Do not consider the relationship between a large anthropomorphic M and a small M-thropomorphic one, I urge you. As the M settles into an uncomfortable supine position, the sexy music stops suddenly, and it is revealed that "she" is being filmed for a commercial by three non-feminized Ms, who stare open-mouthed at her. A flashbulb breaks. Themes: the male gaze, the handicap principle, softcore shoots See Also: Bugs Bunny, furries, Miss Piggy "Sex sells" is an old enough cliche, and feminism a depreciated-enough ideology, that observing that the "sex" which sells is overwhelmingly a sexualized female body seems trite, even naive. But let's take a step back and consider what "sexualized" means. The secondary sex characteristics played up in this ad--long eyelashes, big lips, high heels--are themselves creations of advertising, rather than intrinsic feminine traits. These signs descend from a long, long tradition of marking female characters in animation with makeup, bows, and bouncy gaits. The default Ms, like the central characters in most animation, are male, but they are sexless until the appearance of a character in the appropriate drag. Her presence creates sexual desire for unsexed creatures. But that's what the candy feels. What are we, the viewers, to feel, besides desire to buy candy-coated chocolates? There's some ongoing character development for the Ms, who are some kind of franchise, but this is deadly dull to me so I'm not going to treat it. Mostly what I see is an ongoing trend of ads that look into themselves or pull back the curtain. The level of marketing savvy on the part of the consumer is so strong that parody and self-awareness are everywhere. Try and see how long you can watch without seeing an ad that references other ads. Basically what I'm saying is even though it uses the signs for "[female] sex," I don't think we're intended to be attracted sexually to the green M, but rather to laugh at the overblown sexualization that's used to market products, especially food but especially chocolate, to us. Any sexual attraction, then, and any subsequent M&Ms porn that you find online and send to me, is purely incidental, the result of filmmaking vagaries which disallow a critique of sexualization (or violent imagery, or war, or voyeurism) without a display of same.

Outmoded displays of masculinity

Product: Big Brothers Big Sisters of America Summary: Shots of lonely men failing at traditional male activities, or staring dispiritedly into the middle distance, as melancholy music plays. A young boy provides the voiceover: "Filling their time with empty tasks and outmoded displays of masculinity. They're adult men, and each one is precious. Fortunately--" A balding man with a toolbelt runs out of his house, cursing and clutching his thumb-- "There's help." Children appear in the corners of the screen, directly addressing the viewer as the shots of male pathos continue. The boys, as it happens, are "ready to offer their wisdom and friendship as Little Brothers...It's not too late to help you." Themes: Male inadequacy, isolation See Also: Sally Struthers, sitcoms, Isaiah 11:6 First, I think this is a well-made and successful ad. It's a clever reversal of the typical "children in need" ads that desensitized us all to the plight of needy children in the 80s and 90s, and it's especially praiseworthy for how well it avoids the issues of pedophilia that by now enter the mind of every single person in the Western hemisphere when they hear phrases like "we match adult men and young boys in need of mentoring". By positioning the children as the source of demand for mentoring and, more cannily, by making sure that men and children never actually interact with each other, the ad creates a comfortable distance between them. Whether this merely plays into the cultural stereotype of the predatory and voraciously sexual male, I leave as an exercise to the reader. If you've paid much attention to popular culture at all for the last, oh, thirty or sixty years, you'll know where I'm going next: one of the reasons the ad can be this successful is that it uses the omnipresent trope of the incompetent husband. The men in the ad are in their late thirties to mid forties; presumably they have wives who are off tricking their children into believing that they cooked and cleaned for them. If you watch enough ads, and most of the programs on between them, you'll quickly learn that men can't do shit by themselves, and require constant supervision and feeding to keep from choking on Legos or barbeque grills or whatever. So here we see children as significantly more competent than men, and if you're not a man you get to chuckle and feel warm inside, and if you are a man you probably feel a little hollow and then have to go roll around on a pile of extra dollars or something.

The Sweet Touch of Love

Product: Axe Dark Temptation Summary: A guy sprays on deodorant and is transformed into a chocolate man with a grinning Easter Bunny rictus. He breaks off and melts down parts of his body to feed a large number of attractive young ladies. In traditional Axe ad fashion, the last scene sees him walking in front of a glass-windowed gym as women, so overcome with choco-lust as to have forgotten the existence of doors, throw themselves against the glass to get near him. Then someone speeds past on a moped and snaps off his arm. Themes: transubstantiation, cannibalism, black sexual potency, neoliberalism See Also: Be Aggressive; The Burger King; Mandingo; Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered I often feel uniquely terrified by advertising. Other people seem to be able to take these things in their stride; they do not suffer nightmares; they do not see the Burger King when they close their eyes. This ad in particular threw me for a loop--I quite enjoy Allen Toussaint's song, and when I heard it I looked up from my monitor excitedly only to see two women gnawing into the flesh of a brown man's face as he grins in that special clown/horror movie way. But I seem to be alone in my terror: other people either think it's "funny" or "bad" or "overly sexual". Everyone wants to be desired. But body spray ads are a whole different kettle of fetish. Here, above and beyond the traditional threesome, the ultimate goal is to be drowned in a sea of female flesh* -- or in this case, consumed wholly by the lust of women. In ads where a woman has been made irresistable, men stop and stare, fixed in place. In Axe ads, the women hurl their bodies at the irresistable man like zombies. This has traditionally been the end of the ad, but here we see the logical conclusion: the Maenads rip him to pieces and consume him. To me, with my simple lady brain, this is something I fear. It is fearful. But apparently it's a desirable enough outcome to sell chocolate cologne. *I say "flesh" but the more accurate term is of course "stick insects"