Sometimes sexist ads can be masterpieces
Welch in boys” no more.
Unilever also intends to “advance its portrayals of gender” by presenting men in kitchens doing things with stock cubes. Knorr, one of its products, has replaced mother and daughter in pinnies with ads featuring father and son instead. Sexpots are giving way to Flavour Pots. Goodbye, Oxo mum.
The argument against sexist ads is that they present fantasies that alienate large numbers of aesthetically suboptimal customers. Of course they do. That’s the entire point. Art – of which advertising is part, having its own place on Parnassus – is about fantasies. When Soviet painters were instructed to paint “socialist realism”, they got into a terrible bind. You can either be socialist or realist, but not both. It’s the “Hello, same with ads: you can be seductively persuasive or realist, but not both.
As Mr Weed seeks to introduce gender policing into the world of advertising, it is opportune to review some of the masterpieces of sexist advertising. Tiparillo, a cigar product popular in America in the late Sixties, is the gold standard of exploitative sexist kitsch. A series of print ads featured impressively busty women. My personal favourite carried the copyline “No Strings Attached”, showing a young woman with a preorgasmic cast of features holding a violin and bow. A plunging neckline shows she is innocent of a bra, while a pack of Tiparillos is thrust from the lower left hand corner of the page. “If she likes the offer, she might start to play,” it says. And I do not think it meant to suggest the andante from Beethoven’s Sonata.
Other favourites? Also from the apogee of Madison Avenue, Clairol’s spectacular campaign with the copyline: “If I have one life, let me live it as a blonde”. It is moot to what extent this invitation to enjoy life more through the agency of hair dye was exploitative since the ad was written by Shirley Polykoff, one of US advertising’s great copywriters. Polykoff was a darkhaired Jewish woman. Like me, she believed she was empowering women, not diminishing them.
People who object to sexist ads object to the pleasure principle, as does the new Mayor of London, who has instructed Transport for London not to run those “Beach Body Ready” ads, lest they humiliate women with less idealised figures. He may as well instruct Transport for London not to run clever, well-written ads lest they humiliate the ignorant or illiterate. Shouldn’t life be about gradients and wanting to ascend them to get a better view, rather than have bluenosed neoPuritans flattening the landscape?
The Scandinavian countries arrived at sober decisions before we did. Since 2008, Norway and Denmark have legislated against sexist ads. But this only proscribed naked women being exploited irrationally. Thus, advertising is allowed to titillate customers by showing a woman with no clothes on, enjoying, say, a gel in a shower where to be naked is functional. But it is not allowed to have a naked woman promoting, say, a chainsaw or a car, where it is more sensible to be fully clothed. In the background, you can hear angels dancing on the heads of pins.
As with most things, unstereotyping is a matter of design, of form following function. Alas, passive female form will soon stop following male functions of desire. And I think something amusing will be lost.