This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 35, Summer 1997.
Why has there been so little apparent feminist response to the deliberate revival of blatant sexism in advertising? Has the focus on the relationship of representation to ‘real’ violence made us lose sight of the need to protest against the ‘symbolic’ violence done to us by sexual objectification in the media? Delilah Campbell calls for women to arm themselves with spray paint and stickers.
When I first saw the infamous Wonderbra advert with a semi-naked supermodel posed over the line ‘HELLO, BOYS’, I thought it might be a parody. It was certainly offensive, but at the same time it was ludicrous: the unfortunate woman was posed in such a way that she seemed to be addressing the line to her own pneumatic breasts. Others saw comic potential in it too. The makers of Kaliber alcohol-free lager bought up advertising space next to the Wonderbra ad, where they displayed a poster showing Billy Conolly clutching two bottles of Kaliber over the line ‘HELLO, GIRLS’.
British advertising, at least the high production values stuff that you see on TV, at the cinema and on street hoardings, is widely admired for its subtlety and cleverness. The Kaliber piss-take is one example of this tradition. What temporarily confused me about the Wonderbra ad was the very fact that it was not clever, not witty, not ironic or a joke. I was looking for a subtext that wasn’t there. With ‘HELLO, BOYS’, what you saw was what you got: essentially a pair of larger than life-sized breasts. It was just straight-down-the-line sexism, yet the advertisers and the trade press judged it highly effective in ‘raising brand awareness’ and increasing sales. There were even reports of traffic accidents as male drivers passing the ad found themselves unable to keep their eyes on the road—though since men are at best a small minority of the bra buying public, it seems odd to claim this as a commercial triumph.
Effective or not, the crude and blatant ‘tits out for the lads’ approach—especially to a product with an overwhelmingly female market—is something I had thought was obsolete in British advertising. It’s not that sexism per se had disappeared, more that it had become less overt, less (forgive me) transparent. Feminism, expressed both in organised campaigns and individual complaints about advertisements which degraded women, had contributed to a perception that straight-down-the-line sexism was no longer acceptable, and even worse, no longer ‘cool’.
Back with a vengeance
Yet as we hurtle towards the millennium, crassly sexist advertising seems to be back with a vengeance. A few months after ‘HELLO, BOYS’, there was a new bra on the block: you couldn’t walk down the street without encountering ads for the Gossard Glossies range of underwear, whose poster showed a woman in black lingerie reclining in simulated ecstasy in what appears to be a haystack, over the line ‘Who says a woman can’t get pleasure from something soft?’
This does gesture towards the hallowed traditions of British advertising: if ‘HELLO, BOYS’ is for Sun-readers, the Gossard slogan requires at least the intellectual capacities of an Express-reader to make any sense of it. Unfortunately, a number of readings make sense, and you are left wondering if the advertiser could possibly have intended any of them. I passed this ad in the company of several women friends, whose (spontaneous) comments were instructive. One said that whoever devised it had obviously never had sex out of doors: haystacks were a particular non-starter in the comfort-and-pleasure stakes. A visiting American friend was astonished by the ad (nothing so risque would appear on a billboard in the USA), and drily remarked that it would be bound to attract complaints—not just from feminists and Mary Whitehouse types but also from the Male Impotence League.
This last comment might well be on target, for at one level the text presumably is intended as a sly dig at the male member. True, the idea that women are turned on by their own underwear is not much less offensive than the idea that only a rock-hard willy can satisfy their desires. But there is an element of ‘men: who needs ‘em?’, which the advertisers doubtless imagined would appeal to post-feminist chicks. The visual image, on the other hand, is unambiguously for the lads. If the slogan is a failed attempt at subtlety and wit, the scantily-clad-woman-in-a-haystack shot has all the wit and subtlety of a brick through a window.
The Wonderbra and Gossard campaigns attracted comment in the media and financial pages under the vaguely amusing heading of ‘Bra Wars’. The makers of women’s underwear were seen to be battling it out, not merely for dominance of the market, but for recognition of their ‘daring’ in mounting controversial advertising campaigns. In that context the question is not who can sell more bras, but who can go furthest in terms of sexual explicitness and female objectification. Certainly the attempt to create controversy met with some success, in that both campaigns triggered a significant number of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). It is discouraging, however, to discover who these complaints were from, and what they were about.
Taste and Decency 1, Feminism 0
It needs to be said at once that the ASA is a pretty feeble institution from a feminist point of view. If it thinks a complaint has some foundation it will ask the company responsible for the ad to reply to the complaint, and then adjudicate between the contending arguments. This is most straightforward when the complaint alleges that an ad is making false claims (there has for example been an ongoing saga about men challenging the factual accuracy of statistics on child abuse which appeared on Zero Tolerance posters in a number of British cities). However, most ads offensive to feminists are not making factual claims at all (‘HELLO, BOYS’ is not a ‘claim’) and in these cases there’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing about ‘community standards’ and whether complaints are ‘representative’ of public opinion.
Quite often when ads are withdrawn or modified in response to complaints, it’s not because the ASA has exercised its powers to demand this kind of action, but because the company, or the industry lobby it is part of, has recognised a potential public relations problem and decided to back down before the ASA can censure them. More cynically, one might point out that a media furore about a controversial ad is such good publicity for the product concerned, the company can well afford to withdraw the ad (thus getting not only a lot of free media attention, but also points for being ‘responsible’).
On its own, it is unlikely the ASA’s censure is a major deterrent to anything: but it does seem that companies use their awareness of what issues people are raising with it as a sort of litmus test for how far they can go before there’s a public outcry, and there is peer pressure within industries (which would always rather regulate themselves than risk stricter independent regulation) to stay on the ‘safe’ side of the line. For instance, companies are aware that they will not get away with advertising alcohol and cigarettes in ways that are likely to appeal to children, or with using sexualised images of children (as Calvin Klein was censured for doing). These are cases in which the ASA believes ‘community standards’ are very clear, and where they have some history of being enforced.
Sexism, however, is a much greyer area. With the notable exception of concerns about child pornography, feminist concerns are not often thought to represent the concerns of the community at large. And while one obvious reason for this is of course ideological—anti-feminist prejudice—another, regrettably, is that there aren’t enough feminist complaints.
In the ‘bra wars’ case, for instance, the ASA received more complaints about the Gossard ‘haystack’ ad than about ‘HELLO, BOYS’—800 as opposed to 53. I find this depressing, for it is clear the perception that one is ‘worse’ than the other has nothing to do with feminist politics. What gave Gossard the edge in perceived offensiveness was its use of verbal innuendo—that is, the veiled reference to penises. Some complainants said it was ‘embarrassing’ to have to explain this to children.
The ASA did not force Gossard to withdraw the ad, since it took the view that most of the complaints had been ‘orchestrated by the press’: specifically, the right-wing columnist Lynda Lee-Potter had urged readers to complain, and some of those who did so apparently hadn’t even seen the offending poster. However, in view of the public outcry, the company decided to change the slogan to ‘When a firework is smouldering, stand well back’. The sub-pornographic image remained exactly the same.
Not only do I think that the complaints achieved nothing from a feminist point of view, I find it ironic that the penis-allusion should have been singled out for criticism, since it was the only feature of the ad which departed even minimally from the straightforwardly sexist script, by poking fun at the lads and their idea of sexual prowess. Personally I would find it ‘embarrassing’ to explain to a child, especially a girl, why a woman in her underwear should be equated metaphorically with a smouldering firework. The two slogans have equally offensive implications regarding women’s sexuality, and these are also blatant in the visual image.
Double Standards Agency
Whereas the ASA took a relaxed approach to the ‘bra wars’ ads, the idea that similar techniques might be used to sell men’s underwear got their knickers in a right old twist. In the autumn of 1996 the Authority’s Advisory Committee on Advertising Practice issued a warning to the Brass Monkeys underwear company about a campaign for men’s briefs that was clearly inspired by the success of the Wonderbra posters. The offending ads featured a male model wearing the product alongside slogans like ‘LOIN KING’ and ‘FULL METAL PACKET’. Brass Monkeys protested that the committee was operating with a sexist double standard. If ‘HELLO, BOYS’ was OK, why weren’t their ads? A logical enough question, to which the ‘official’ response can only be described as a load of old bollocks.
The committee replied that the campaign ‘focus[ed] on the groin area’ (no, really?) and objectified the male model by not showing his face. By contrast, the committee explained: ‘Eva Herzigova [the Wonderbra model] is shown in full body shot, and the copy lines [i.e. ‘HELLO, BOYS’] endow her with a particular personality and sense of humour’. Pressed to elaborate, the committee’s spokesman [sic] said: ‘The authority reacts to prevailing standards. To some extent we live in a sexist society, and to some extent we reflect that’. What this really means is: ‘we think it’s acceptable to show women as sex objects, but comparable representations of men really upset us’.
There could be no clearer demonstration of the problem with taking ‘community standards’ as a measure of offensiveness. Only in a community where sexism is wholly unremarkable could copy lines and facial expressions that make a woman complicit in her own objectification be seen as endowing her with ‘personality’ and a ‘sense of humour’. The committee not only denied the obvious parallel between the Wonderbra and Brass Monkeys campaigns, they also overlooked the sense in which the two cases are not parallel: the depiction of men as sex objects is exceptional whereas the sexual objectification of women is pervasive, and not confined to media representations. For feminists, that’s a reason to be more concerned about ‘HELLO, BOYS’ than ‘LOIN KING’; for the ASA, apparently, the exact opposite is true.
This was another case where the ASA stopped short of demanding the withdrawal of the ad; a compromise solution was reached whereby the modern media equivalent of a figleaf was superimposed on the model’s genitals — to wit, the Brass Monkeys company logo. Since the function of a logo is to draw the viewer’s eye, it is unclear why this would be the logical solution to the problem of ‘focusing on the groin area’. Nor does it seem logical to address complaints about objectifying the model by figuratively branding his genitals. One can only conclude that the ASA are not very knowledgeable about the medium they police: more generally, to judge by the inanity of their comments, they’re a few rivets short of a full me(n)tal packet.
A new media sexism?
These bra adverts could be seen as part of a new media sexism, which is marked not only by the return to degrading images of women, but also by the celebration of ‘laddish’ behaviour in many popular media genres. It is deeply depressing to discover, for example, that one of the most popular television comedy shows at present is the repellent Men Behaving Badly. If you’ve never seen this programme, the title tells you everything you need to know about it: Men Being Sexist would be equally accurate. And again, what’s novel about this is not the sexism in itself—the past ten years or so have hardly been a golden age of nonsexist television—but the crudity of it. It seems frankly amazing that sexism could become the central theme of a 1990s sitcom. It’s as if we had suddenly gone back to the days when racism featured as the ‘comic’ premise in shows like Love Thy Neighbour and Mind Your Language. It is unimaginable that those programmes could be conceived and produced today. But sexism, it seems, is still fun for all the family.
Is the ‘new sexism’ any different from the old sexism? I would say, yes: it is more self-conscious and knowing. Two decades of feminist influence on culture cannot be simply erased, and the new sexism, therefore, is always in some sense a deliberate reaction against feminism. This is explicit in another notable example of the new sexism in advertising: one of a series of Guinness ads using the slogan ‘Not everything in black and white makes sense’. This appropriates the feminist slogan ‘a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle’. It begins with a scene showing a world in which women have apparently taken over men’s roles: then there’s a scene showing an empty maternity ward (feminism means there will be no more babies and the human race will die out). Finally, a large fish peddles by on a bicycle, and the ‘Not everything…’ line comes up on the screen.
This ad is an example of the ‘clever’ type: it makes the viewer work for the meaning. The sales message of all the ads in the campaign is that Guinness—which is black and white—does make sense, but that has to be inferred by contrast with a different proposition, that some other black and white thing does not make sense. In this particular ad it is feminism, and especially its claim that women do not need men, which is pegged as not making sense. Thus: feminism is black and white (polarised, extreme, lacking in sophistication and balance) and feminism does not make sense. Clearly the new sexism does not have to be as crassly presented as it is in the bra ads or Men Behaving Badly. In the Guinness ad the medium is sophisticated, but the message, once you ‘get it’, remains crudely sexist and anti-feminist.
The fish on a bicycle ad also shows, as I said before, that the new sexism is not simply a return to the days when sexism in the media was normal and unremarkable. When record companies or advertisers produced sexist images and slogans 25 years ago, it was just something you did to sell products; early feminist objections were received with bewilderment by the industry, for the concept of ‘sexism’ had yet to sink into public consciousness. That is not the case today. The new sexism is highly aware of itself as sexism. It deliberately sets out to be offensive to feminist sensibilities, and expects to get brownie points for daring to depart from the po-faced orthodoxies of so-called ‘political correctness’. That knowingness is what I find most objectionable about it. Another objectionable feature is the selectivity: not even the most daring advertiser or sitcom producer would dream of challenging ‘po-faced orthodoxies’ about disability or race (a Guinness ad showing some multicultural event like the Notting Hill carnival over the slogan ‘Not Everything in Black and White Makes Sense’ would never get off the drawing board, and if it did it would risk prosecution). In other words, this phenomenon is not just about pushing back the boundaries of taste and received opinion: it’s specifically about making misogyny OK again.
Who sets the trend?
Advertisers say that they follow public opinion rather than leading it, which would suggest that the new sexism is a trend they have identified, and to which they are merely responding. Certainly they do extensive market research before launching a costly campaign. But I have to wonder who they do this research on; because to me it is striking—I will even admit to being quite surprised by it—how much a lot of very ‘moderate’ women detest the kinds of advertisements they are constantly bombarded with. My 18-21 year old women students, for example, generally shy away from the label ‘feminist’ and on many traditional feminist issues they are pretty apathetic, if not actively hostile to feminist arguments. Yet the sexism they perceive in the media, and particularly in advertising, is the one issue capable of rousing them to fury. They hated the Wonderbra campaign; they also seem to loathe certain ads which are less crudely objectifying, like the ‘Papa/Nicole’ campaign for Renault cars. They resent the idea that the cutely vacuous ‘Nicole’ might be considered a role model for women of their age, and those who notice it are also uncomfortable with the hint of father/daughter incest.
Survey after survey shows how typical these women’s responses are. Women find the representation of their sex in advertising patronising, unrealistic and stereotypical, and they object to the way women’s bodies are used to sell products. And yet the sexism continues in defiance of women’s opinions. If advertisers are as responsive to market forces as they claim, why have they apparently got the female half of the market so wrong?
One possible answer is that advertising has very little to do with the ‘real world’, and certainly much less than it claims. Advertisers live in their own rarefied world: in that world, the new sexism/ antifeminism really is part of a trend, but it’s a media-led or even media-created trend, which may not necessarily go very deep or last very long.
Where do such trends come from? Increasingly, from the fertile imaginations of so-called ‘trend forecasters’. In the US, for example, one of the leading trend forecasters is a strange woman with the even stranger name of Faith Popcorn. Ms Popcorn (or she may be Dr Popcorn for all I know) has for some time made a handsome living out of advising companies and other people willing to pay for her predictions on what we will all be doing and feeling over the next decade, so that companies will be able to guess what kinds of things we will be wanting to buy. As a result, of course, we won’t be able to buy anything else—it’s rather like the weird and wonderful world of ‘colour forecasting’, whereby a group of international experts ‘predicted’ several years ago—or rather, decided—that all the clothes in the shops last summer would be orange or acid green. If that wasn’t what you wanted to wear, tough. This kind of ‘forecast’ can never be wrong: the only question is how much orange and green clothing the consumer can be persuaded to buy on the grounds that it’s ‘in fashion’.
Emotions, identities and political positions can also be commodified and marketed as ‘trends’ (this is one thing I think the postmodernists are right about). In the 1980s, for instance, Faith Popcorn coined the term ‘cocooning’. She predicted that yuppies would be so exhausted after their 14-hour days making six-figure salaries, they would want to ‘cocoon’: instead of going out they would stay at home, rent videos and get pizza delivered. (Good news, then, for Pizza Hut and video shops.) Now, Faith is predicting something she calls ‘the new hedonism’. Apparently we are all sick of being told that everything is bad for us, physically, spiritually or morally. It’s going to be cool to eat huge steaks, drink alcohol and smoke cigars. It’s also going to be cool to reject the idealistic and egalitarian philosophies that used to get in the way of enjoying full-on hedonism. So it’s OK to admit that homeless beggars annoy you, and that your idea of heaven is ogling a 12-foot picture of Eva Poriskova in a Wonderbra. In fact, it’s more than OK: it’s a trend. And even if the vast majority of us remain untouched by the wisdom of Faith Popcorn and her ilk, those industries which live and die by their trendiness, advertising pre-eminent among them, will Faith-fully reflect what they read in the Popcorn Report.
Before we get too steamed up about this, and start muttering darkly about the ‘backlash’, I think we should remember that what it’s really about is consumerism. It’s about shifting steak and whisky and cigars and frilly knickers. As an indication of how people are really feeling or thinking, it may not be all that significant or profound. In a couple of years time we may all be encouraged to discover the ‘new puritanism’ or even the ‘new feminism’—labels which will be as meaningless as ‘cocooning’ or the ‘new hedonism’. What consumerism really requires is not that people should think or feel anything in particular, but that there should be continuous and fairly rapid change in what it’s supposedly cool to think, and more importantly to buy. In other words I’m suggesting that the new sexism may not be as all-pervading and deeply rooted as it looks: perhaps it is just an invention of the media, with no firm foundation in the ‘real world’.
Even if this is right, though, it’s not a reason why we ought to just put up with it. On the contrary, the ease with which very crude forms of sexism have reasserted themselves in the media suggests to me that we have recently been putting up with far too much. There’s another side to this story, which is about the decline of organised feminist campaigning around issues of representation. That is just as much a sign of the times as the new sexism itself.
Where have all the stickers gone?
There has never been a time when sexism wasn’t pervasive in media representations. What has varied is how visibly this was contested. Many T&S readers will remember when it was common to see sexist ads plastered with stickers which were public comments on their sexism: ‘This ad degrades women’, and suchlike. Spray painting feminist grafitti on ads was a similar if rather more risky form of direct action, the best results of which are immortalised on postcards that still sell well today.
What has happened to this kind of action? Did it come to be seen as trivial and pointless? To be sure, it didn’t eradicate sexist ads (though grafittied billboards often embarassed advertisers, and the offending image was usually removed at least temporarily). What it did do, though, was send a message, a bit like the recent Zero Tolerance campaigns: there are women out here who don’t like this kind of shit and won’t put up with it in silence. It was an attempt to create a climate of intolerance for something objectionable. At the same time it had a more playful side, displaying feminists’ wit and ingenuity; as well as making the serious point that the ads were offensive, it often made them look ridiculous. Here was a kind of guerilla action which used the advertisers’ own technique — the publishing and broadcasting of words and images to a mass audience — to oppose the advertisers’ message. There was something very satisfying about this turning of the tables, and its ‘unofficial’ status enhanced its popular appeal.
Going out with a spray can to engage in illegal property damage was not the only option. Once upon a time there were feminist organisations whose members did the work of monitoring ads, systematically complaining about offensive ones and sending out newsletters to other women’s organisations which encouraged them to add their own complaints to the pile. It was because of these feminist activities that watchdog bodies like the ASA and the Broadcasting Standards Council eventually recognised complaints of sexism as a possible cause for action against advertisers and media producers. As I said before, though, the volume of complaints these bodies receive about sexism nowadays appears to be depressingly small. It seems a pity that, having established the principle that sexism can be subject to official censure, feminists are no longer sufficiently organised to produce the complaints that might activate the mechanism.
I have no idea how many of the 53 people who complained to the ASA about ‘HELLO, BOYS’ were feminists deploring its sexism; but even if they all were, 53 is a paltry figure. It compares badly with the 800 who were moved to complain about the Gossard ‘something soft’ poster, many of whom did so at the instigation of a right-wing tabloid and on nonfeminist grounds of taste and decency. I hope and believe that it also compares badly with the number of feminist women who must actually have seen the ad and found it offensive. Our spirit is willing, but our organisation is weak. Why? No doubt there are many reasons, not least the difficulty of sustaining any and all activist projects in the current economic and cultural climate, but it seems to me there are two points in particular which merit discussion among radical feminists.
Academic obfuscation?
One point concerns the move in recent feminist theory away from what’s become known in shorthand as ‘images of women’ criticism. The politics of representation are still on the syllabus of your average women’s studies or media studies course, but they are discussed by academics nowadays at such a rarefied level, it seems crude and unsophisticated to be saying things like ‘this ad degrades women’. (All women? Which women? What does ‘degrade’ mean? Is there only one reading of a representation?) It isn’t radical feminist activists who have made the move I am talking about, but many women new to feminism, particularly if they’ve encountered this topic in an academic context, may have trouble reconciling their gut feelings about, say, the ‘Papa and Nicole’ ads, with any kind of theory they believe to be intellectually respectable. This tends to reduce their objections to silence.
As it happens, I myself disagree with the idea that analysing representations is a straightforward matter of reading off the meaning (for every reader/viewer) from the overt, literal content. But the new media sexism is itself so crude, it does not require a massive theoretical apparatus to analyse how it works: on the contrary, this often amounts to mere obfuscation, the use of a sledgehammer to crack a nut. If I wanted to use the language of media studies, I might point out that the ‘what you see is what you get’ approach of the ‘bra wars’ ads deliberately solicits a crude and literal reading: it’s a reaction against clever-clever, difficult-to-decode traditions of advertising. To say that is already, admittedly, to go beyond simple content analysis: part of the meaning lies not in the image itself, but in the contrast with the more ‘sophisticated’ images we have come to expect of the genre. But for exactly that reason, we might just as well call a breast a breast. By refusing to state the obvious, we are falling into their trap: applying high theory to a text like ‘HELLO, BOYS’ merely allows the boys at the advertising agency to have a bloody good laugh at pretentious academics and humourless feminists who always miss the point. In Wonderbra’s case, two of them. (See what I mean?)
Anyway, analysing how representations work is not the same thing as taking issue with them. ‘This ad degrades women’ may not get you a Ph.D, but it still has resonance as a political slogan. Politically speaking, the point is less to explain media sexism than to mobilise the widest possible resistance to it. You choose the strategy that works.
No violence = silence?
The other point which I want to raise as a possible contributory factor in the decline of ‘this ad degrades women’-style campaigns concerns the question of violence against women. For all that there is much still to do, raising public consciousness about the prevalence and seriousness of male violence is one of the achievements of the last 20-odd years that feminists can be most proud of. As well as having effects in such obvious areas as courts, policing and social services, it has profoundly affected the way the politics of representation are talked about, not only among feminists but also in the wider public sphere. But if this has been in one way an important feminist gain, in another way, I want to suggest, it has had unforeseen negative effects.
The precise relationship of ‘real-life’ violence to sexist (and especially pornographic) representations is, obviously, a contentious issue, within feminism as well as outside it. But the point is, it is an issue. It is something which now has to be considered routinely by mainstream media, and by the bodies which regulate their output. It has also become the most obvious ground on which particular representations — advertising campaigns, TV shows, films — may be vulnerable to feminist objections. Because of our success in getting violence against women on the agenda, the easiest feminist argument to win when it comes to offensive representations (which is not to say it is easy in absolute terms, or that we’ve always won it) is the argument that a representation incites, or at least condones, sexual violence and abuse. The broadcasting watchdogs do quite regularly censure graphic or titillating depictions of rape or battery; the ASA has forced the withdrawal of some posters and slogans which sexualised young girls.
So far, so good: but there’s a downside. Success in getting people to take the problem of violent representations seriously seems to have had the effect of taking the heat off what we might call ‘lower level’ sexism: images and words which objectify and demean, which are ‘only’ offensive, not putatively dangerous. To some extent, this is because the establishment types who dominate regulatory bodies are not very bright: they can only keep one feminist idea in their heads at a time (I base this conclusion on having once had a conversation with the British film censor James Ferman, who showed a clear understanding of and concern about the ‘inciting violence’ argument, but total incomprehension in relation to sexist representations more broadly defined). I suppose that if they really can’t deal with more than one idea, that idea might as well be that depictions of eroticised violence against women are unacceptable and indeed dangerous as public entertainment. But while we may not be able to legislate against other people’s stupidity, I think it’s worth asking how far we ourselves might have unintentionally contributed to the perception of ‘non-violent’ sexist representations as not really much of a problem.
Killing Us Softly: Symbolic violence
That might seem to be a rather unfair question. More than a decade ago, in the days of the so-called ‘Sex Wars’, a version of it was often put to feminist anti-pornography campaigners by those who called themselves ‘pro-sex’ and defended porn: ‘why are you so obsessed with a few dirty mags when the “respectable” mass media are awash with the most insultingly sexist images?’. One answer to this was that on the contrary, anti-pornography feminists made a point of demonstrating the connections between porn and other genres: in the various consciousness-raising slideshows that circulated, it was standard practice to have a slide showing an image from ‘hard’ pornography along with one showing how that same image had been slightly toned down and translated into, say, an advert or a record cover.
An even more pertinent answer was that sexual objectification was itself typically analysed as a form of violence: symbolic violence. A Page 3 pin-up or a Wonderbra ad is not going to inspire a copy-cat attack, but such images contribute to a climate where attacks on women are commonplace; they also damage women by confronting us with the fact that we are perceived and treated as objects rather than people. The pervasiveness of objectifying representations, the fact that (unlike the more extreme forms of violent pornography) they appear routinely in public space and are accepted as normal, naturalised, makes it hard to avoid internalising that perception of ourselves. As Susanne Kappeler asked in her book The Pornography of Representation, ‘what [does] it mean to turn a person into an object?’ Symbolically, it means killing them.
One 1970s film about sexist advertising, which I used to show on women’s studies courses when I lived in the USA and which was not especially radical, was titled ‘Killing Us Softly’. No-one found this title shocking or hard to understand. I mention this to underline the point that feminists had an analysis of sexist representations as a form of symbolic violence quite early on, and that this analysis was common ground for different tendencies within feminism—there was nothing ‘fringe’ or obscure about it.
Since then, however, for many complicated reasons, feminist arguments around representation have gravitated more and more towards the issue of its relationship to the commission of violent acts in reality. Symbolic violence is less talked about than it used to be, and I suspect many of the students I teach now might find the concept obscure, at least initially. I think that’s a pity, not only because it deprives us of a language in which to complain about offensive images that aren’t obviously violent, but also because it removes what I would see as a significant line of argument about pornography itself: the argument (Susanne Kappeler’s argument) that it is an objectionable form of representation whether or not it can be shown to affect real-life behaviour. I am not saying radical feminists have lost their understanding of this, but I think we may well have lost any wider public understanding of it, because we have not said it often and explicitly enough.
Picture This
Sexist representations, however inane, pathetic and apparently lacking in menace they may be, pollute public (and in the case of TV, private) space. The violence they do to us may be symbolic, but it is not insignificant: it belongs on a continuum with more obvious threats to our integrity and our safety. And with this kind of symbolic violence on the increase again, retaking its old position as a normal, unremarkable and indeed acceptable part of our lives, it is time for feminists to voice their objections, repeatedly, loudly and if possible inventively.
I do think we ought to use the official channels of complaint available to us, albeit with an awareness of their limitations (not merely the fact that they are weak, but more importantly the fact that they do not represent our interests). It should not be possible for regulatory bodies to say that nobody cares about sexism per se and that respect for women’s status as people is not a genuine ‘community standard’. But if they never hear from us, they can go on saying this with impunity. So let’s send them a message, or better yet, several thousand. ‘HELLO, BOYS, THIS WON’T DO’. (Maybe someone could design a satirical postcard for this purpose.)
I also think, however, that more direct, unofficial guerilla-style action has its merits, and that we should be doing everything we can to press our own claims to public space and public utterance. At a time when half the population seems to have a degree in media studies, and solemn analyses of popular culture clog every newspaper and magazine, piss-taking, humour and ridicule are weapons whose effectiveness we shouldn’t overlook. The people who brought us the ‘comical’ Men Behaving Badly should be shown that women can get laughs out of behaving badly too. And who says a woman can’t get pleasure from something wet and sticky, like the contents of a can of paint?
Let’s put the new media sexists on notice: when a radical feminist is smouldering, stand well back.