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.