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Sexism with an alibi
Supposedly ironic, even kitsch, ads still keep women in their place
May 31, 2003
The Guardian
Sexism in advertising. It sounds almost quaint. The very words have a retro ring to them, conjuring up, on the one hand, scenes of be-aproned housewives serving casseroles to hungry husbands, and on the other, posters of leggy models in platform boots and hotpants with - and this is a key image in the scenario - feminists in dungarees slapping "this degrades women" stickers all over them.
For sexism isn't just a phenomenon, it's an idea - and once the word stops being used, the idea goes out of fashion. What then becomes passe isn't actually sexism, which is doing just fine, but the concept of sexism, in advertising or anything else. This concept (unlike "racism") has fallen into disuse in recent years, and is now rarely employed in public debate. So our view of the situation it describes becomes locked in the moment when the term flourished: and increasingly our culture presents sexism as a kind of 60s or 70s phenomenon, to be enjoyed as kitsch, rather than as a contemporary problem to be addressed as unjust.
Certainly you would never know from media imagery that women's income lags far behind men's, that domestic violence against women is frighteningly common, and that women still perform the bulk of domestic labour. In today's ad world, women outperform male colleagues in the boardroom and steer Jeeps across rugged landscapes, while husbands with skewed ties struggle over baby formula, and anxious youths worry about spots before dates. What might be termed "social" (as opposed to sexual) ad images - depictions of the workplace and domestic life - have changed beyond all recognition in the past few decades, and airbrushed away the grinding day-to-day sexism women still encounter in reality.
To complain about this would be to berate advertising for being itself: it always idealises, but what is telling is the change in the ideal. "Social" advertising has achieved a gender revolution before the fact, creating an implicitly post-feminist world in which women are powerful and men compliant (or, if not, about to get their comeuppance). It is a depiction of gender relations that fuels sexism, while banishing it: the portrayal of contemporary society as female-dominated generates powerful sexist feelings which, however, cannot "innocently" be expressed in this imaginary present.
So they become channelled on the one hand into what I call retro-sexist imagery, where sexism operates freely within the frame of a period style; and, on the other, into increasingly fetishistic sexual imagery, which depicts power relations as about S&M sex rather than who washes up or chairs the board.
Retro-sexism as a social and stylistic phenomenon can be seen across all the media, from ads and fashion spreads to CD covers, where overtly sexist scenarios are couched in period setting and clothing, and/or presented with 60s/70s typography and graphics. A perfect example is the Saturday-night TV series Boys and Girls, which has just finished its first run. The show has sexism built into its live audience format, incorporating a weekly "totty competition" which, though applied to both genders, is framed entirely in male terms, with members of the opposite sex voted either a "babe" or a "minger". But this almost brutal sexual scoring is wrapped in a cutely tongue-in-cheek retro package: the title sequence employs perky 60s graphics and the theme song is Andy Williams's 1967 Music to Watch Girls By. These stylistic trappings imply that it's knowingly done, self-aware, even kitsch: as if that somehow changed the crudeness of the actual content.
But the grosser the sexism, the more "retro" it now seems - and this process extends beyond media imagery to society at large. Take the rise in acceptability of lap-dancing clubs: the very name "Spearmint Rhino" has a 70s vibe, a combination of spearmint gum (retro wholesome cleanliness - Wrigley's advert) and Rhinestone Cowboy (retro nostalgic male longing - Glen Campbell's 1975 hit). Another example is the supposedly tongue-in-cheek "stripper for stag night" syndrome - usually presented as old-fashioned fun - or the success of men's magazines, with their nods to the old-style Playboy and Esquire. Retro-sexism is sexism with an alibi: it appears at once past and present, "innocent" and knowing, a conscious reference to another era, rather than an unconsciously driven part of our own.
Indeed, retro-sexism seems to hark back to golden days before feminism, an innocent time when it was perfectly OK to think of women as domestic servants or sex objects. But the era its imagery invokes, the late 60s to 70s, was not a pre-feminist era, it was the feminist era - when terms like sexism (originally, male chauvinism) entered public speech. And to signpost sexism today - to make an image look consciously sexist - retro styling is necessary to activate the "period" language in which it had widely understood social meaning.
For by the 90s, feminism and sexism were being treated as over, and issues of "sexuality" rather than gender became the focus of cultural debate - with the bizarre result that, as sexual imagery became more explicit, a feminist critique became less fashionable. This was part of a wider process whereby the political counterculture gradually embraced the objects of its critique during the 80s and 90s - a process whose effects remain with us today. And besides locking "sexism" into modes of the past, it has resulted in a climate where, far from seeming exploitative, highly sexualised images now tend to be seen as cutting-edge and radical. Therefore "sexual" (unlike "social") ad imagery has become an arena in which sexism can operate with very little criticism.
This is partly because, increasingly, men are portrayed as sex objects, too. But the notion of gender "equality" within sexual imagery takes no account of gender inequality in the world surrounding it. Numerous men complained to the advertising standards authority about the Lee Jeans ad where a woman rests her stiletto boot on a man's naked buttock, on the grounds that it encouraged violence against them. Deeply unpleasant as this image is, its relation to actual violence may nevertheless be the reverse of that proposed in the complaints. It could be seen as projecting in fantasy form not only some men's wishes and/or fears, but an eroticised justification for their anger. In the world of sexual ads, the dominatrix, the bitch and the whore wield power over men; in the real world, a British woman is physically attacked by a man she knows every six seconds.
This suggests that, rather than embodying sexual liberation, today's fetishistic imagery provides a language for expressing both sexism and, perhaps, the pain and rage of a sex war which at heart is about social, not sexual power. These ubiquitous images translate the social as sexual: showing gender power struggles nakedly in every sense.
And yet we have deprived ourselves of the language to analyse them as such. Our unwillingness to name sexism in the present has on the one hand encouraged it to develop as a form of nostalgia, and on the other, allowed it to flourish in a sexualised form which we perceive as daringly cutting-edge. Alongside these phenomena we have the interesting fact that mainstream social advertising has concocted an impossibly female-dominated world which makes sexism, both the fact and the concept, appear extinct. The reality of sexism is, however, still with us: it is time to resuscitate the term and renew the critique.
This is an edited version of an article to appear in the summer edition of Eye (eyemagazine.com). Judith Williamson is the author of Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising
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If you're interested in pursuing this subject, as am I, there are a lot of resources on the web.
I have a selected list of them on this site:
ANTI-MASS-MEDIA-MIND-CONTROL MESSAGES