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.