When we challenge nudity in advertising, some people think that feminists want to cover girls up. They assume that we don’t want to see naked women on billboards or anywhere else (which would make us like religious fundamentalists). That assumption is false. What is the difference between a feminist perspective and a conservative perspective when both are outraged by the same ad?
I don’t know many feminists who are against nudity – except if they’re conservative feminists. I am personally all for sexual liberation and if men and women wanted to, they could walk around naked for all I care.
Then there’s nudity in advertising that is sexist and degrading. What’s the difference, you ask? Here are four easy questions you need to answer to determine whether the billboard with a naked woman is sexist or not. Remember that just one “yes” answer is enough for the ad to fail.
Question Number 1: Why is she naked?
Is most of her body naked because she’s selling a swimsuit? That makes sense. Are they showing skin because the product does something to your skin (perfume, lotion)? Why not. Is it a lingerie ad in which case we would need to see the lingerie and clothing would get in the way? Naturally.
On the other hand, is she lying naked on the hood of a new car? Hmm. Who does that? Is she in her underwear but the billboard is about a restaurant? That doesn’t make any sense. Wait, why is a naked woman trying to sell me a laptop? When there is no logic behind the use of naked women’s bodies, the highly uncreative advertiser is using a cheap, sexist, demeaning strategy to sell.
Sex sells, yes, but there is a lot more to “sexy” than naked women. Try harder, you can be a lot less cliché about it. The fact that it is so normal to use women’s bodies to sell things is called objectification, i.e. turning a woman’s body into an object. Objectification is offensive because – obviously – we are not objects. When we objectify a population, we are saying that we allow people to use that population as objects. Sex objects, toys, commercial objects, objects of violence.
Question Number 2: Does her body obey the basic laws of physics?
Is it humanly possible to be standing up when the thighs are that thin and she appears to have no knees? If she’s bending over like that, wouldn’t gravity make her fall? Where the hell is her stomach? Does her skin have no pores? Those with a little awareness know that all ads are photoshopped. Fine, your crop something out, you fix the colors. But airbrush a bone? Delete a stomach? There is no way that breasts that big can be physically supported by a waist that tiny. She will fall over.
Women are made to look illogically skinny. And our girls don’t know that it’s a lie. Some skinny we see in advertising is a body type, yes, it exists, but in a tiny percentage of women, less than 5%. Why is that the only body type we accept to advertise with?
Question Number 3: What is she doing (while naked)?
Is she having sex? Could be acceptable. Is she taking a shower? Naked would be useful. Is she trying to seduce you? Great, let her seduce us all. Does she have a head? No? Wait. Why does she not have a head? Are her breasts covered with bowling balls? Hey. You can’t replace body parts with objects like that (it becomes objectification, again). Is she being silly, stupid, or childish? Is she frolicking like an idiot? Is someone stepping on her body? Why?
Why does nudity have to come with a total loss of self-respect? A naked body is a natural thing, a human thing and all humans must be afforded some level of dignity. When we see billboards of naked men (usually only to show chest muscles), they always look dignified and grown up. They don’t look like silly boys.
Ah, wait, did you catch yourself thinking: but women behave silly while men don’t? That’s the sexism. Which brings us to the 4th and final question:
Question Number 4: Would we do the same to men’s bodies?
I am against gendered advertising all together, so forgive me for using it in this example. If a naked woman (which 50% of the population find sexy) can be used to sell a car because that works. Why then, don’t we use a naked man’s body (which the other 50% finds sexy) to sell detergent? Wouldn’t that be a brilliant idea? Why don’t we put big billboard of a naked man with only a bottle of Fairy hiding his penis? Why don’t we cover a man’s thighs or back with chocolate in order to sell chocolate to women?
Sex sells. Doesn’t male sexuality sell too? Don’t women find men’s bodies sexy? Why the big difference then? Why would we never see a naked man on the ad for a vacuum cleaner? Because we don’t treat men’s bodies the same. We don’t degrade them and objectify them and exploit them and sexualize them. Why not, when advertising targets both sexes? The answer is because while we should see that doing these things to both men and women is completely wrong, we are so used to seeing it done to women that we find it normal. Sexism has become normal. So normal, we can’t see it. The answer is not that we start doing it to men’s bodies as well (like gay advertising has started doing), of course not, the answer is not to objectify or degrade anyone to sell anything.
Does your ad pass the test?
Article by Nadine Mouawad
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7 Comments
some thin bodies can support huge tits. It’s called talent and strong lower back muscles.
Amazing. Just amazing.
Speaking about male sexuality, I am reminded that there is more to sexism in ads than mere naked women’s bodies. For one, more women are in ads than men because marketers continue to regard men to be the majority if not the only purchasing power, i.e. women are not the ones who make decisions about a car, or a laptop. Obviously, this is stupid and discriminating because it almost expects women to be house-wives or devoid of the agency to make decisions. And then, why only naked women? What about the woman with a veil making soup to make the men of the family happy? what about a whitening cream that makes you get a job? Doesn’t that imply that a woman is expected to seduce the employer to get a position, that is half as paid as a man?
In my humble opinion, ad companies use those girls not to u know be sexist, but to seduce people since seducation has been the most effective way into convincing people of an idea. So any bb on the road is watched quickly for less than 10 sec max (assuming there is no traffic), therefore, when u are on a road where you find 30 ads per square meter (am exaggerating a bit), you need to be seduced into a specific ad becz u dnt have time to read them all which lead to the basic game of seducation. If u put naked girls, all people would wanna look, but then if all 30 ads in that crowded place have nudity then it wont work (its like having 30 demons each telling u to do smth) so they came up with the clever idea of “Image de Marque” which is a girl/boy who is famous or notorious enough to have all eyes fixed on the ad represented. The hole system is understandable but not compatible with the way I think not becz it is “sexist” but becz it promotes savage unwise uncounscious consumption and its a vicious circle. As for the article above, it is amazing, but the 5 questions define a failed or disaster ad and not only a sexist one. Let’s be more creative about our own lifestyles and use more art and less skin! Leather eras are way before us.
P.S: You cannot stand against displaying “so thin” models in the ads for many reasons:
- first, the women in the ads are prototypes that most girls look up to.they are the better versions of ourselves and this is important on the health promoting industries to stimulate people to get thinner since obesity is the most non-infectious spread disease.the change in our lifestyle have cost us our health and one way of restoring a better zen attitude is to look up to something better than we are, to which we would wanna look up and imitate.
- second, models displayed in a “perfect” way on ads, or TV or movies etc. are very indispensable nowadays.many psychological studies showed that with people adopting a more liberal way of living, violence and psychological attitude can result.one of those attitudes are the tendancy to neglect one’s body (auto-mutilation, anorexia, boulimia, excessive use of drugs and consq etc.) and this thingy is clearly used in the gaga industry where the same outfits and attitudes, if showed years ago would look dumb but now they look fantastic. So in order to stimulate people to be more than they are, we need to push them into it by selling the clever illusion that they can be better by taking more care about themselves.
- third, though ads like that are hidious, and mostly useless, we cannot always fight them becz the time in which we live nowadays is a time that links 2 periods of history (am talking abt lebanon): the victorian-inspired period and the futuristic period. ppl are passing by and trying to adapt to the fast change of mentality between the very stubborn old way of thinking and the very liberated futuristic one (this is also observed in the change that happened to many bands).
This is as much as I can type and my fingers started to hurt but it was worth the cause.
i agree – except i’m not sure that only 50% of the population will find men/women naked bodies attractive – i think it might be more
Dear H,
I am not sure I follow everything you said, but do you mean that having thin women in ads can be useful for the mere fact that we need to have an incentive to take better care of our own bodies and that we need an extreme image of perfection to look up to? What about this giving young girls a constant sense of dissatisfaction with their bodies, low-self esteem, peer pressure and bullying among other things? What about the fact that the image of our bodies never shapes our intellect? and what about the fact that such images are about consumption of images. I think this article is important in opening a discussion on how we live through the media in a world of images. We see our bodies fragmented into tits, hips, belly buttons, thighs, lips, ab muscles etc. just like we see our daily life as a movie with cuts, montage, climax and perhaps music as well. hehe. I agree that there is rarely any art in the advertising industry, and that a lot of those ideas are copies from other campaigns somewhere else in the world. On a very practical and business level, advertising companies need a cheap idea that stimulates fast (which means they get more profit when they are commissioned with less time and less creative staff) and what is better than a naked body?
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