Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

So the other day in class we watched the third revision of social theorist Jean Killbourne’s classic lecture, Killing Us Softly III, Advertising’s Image of Women, on the pernicious, generally degrading messages advertising presents to and about women, shows a young supermodel-type bride exuberantly kissing an elegantly white-tuxedo’d, visibly verging on senescence geriatric man at what, from the muted background, appears to be the culmination of a wedding.

The approximate tagline: “She’s marrying him for his money. Like he cares!”

Killbourne correctly points out one of the overt and covert subtexts of the ad: the dangled reward for bending one’s self to conform to the exacting standards of beauty the more one is likely to marry a millionaire who’ll indulge your every (financial) whim, with the even less savory messages about men, money, women, beauty and it’s impact on heterosexual sex and marriage. Eww!

I’d like to add to, rather than subtract from, Killbourne’s point about the impact of the implications about the beauty imperative on women in that ad (and countless others like it) by pointing briefly to the implications about the worthiness imperative on men who might see that ad: without money or other accomplishments you’re nothing…

...and more to the point, without money or other accomplishments you’re not going to get that girl because she’s going to marry that rich geriatric instead of you.

The point, again, isn’t that ads like the ones Killbourne points to adversely influence women — that’s a complete given, a case she makes extremely clear. What’s overlooked is that those ads instruct men too. They teach women what they’re supposed to look for, to sacrifice to achieve, to measure themselves against and… they also teach men what we’re supposed to strive for as well, what we’re supposed to prove ourselves worthy in order to get. That’s all bad enough — obviously two rats in a squirrel wheel is not an improvement over only one. What’s particularly bad, however, is that those ads teach men is how to use women to measure our achievement. In other words if there’s a continuum for men that ranges from young man who’s to shy to ask anyone out because he has no car, to the old man in the ad who’s affluent enough to “have” women clamoring after him, then at each stage of that progression women in media are used, objectified, buried face down and legs up, stripped of humanity in favor of their utility as mile markers.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, good or bad, to like to dress up or to have a nice car. Not at all, at all. But the ads we see in medium after medium push way past fun and towards a totally false “survival of the fittest” mentality where, we’re supposed to believe, only the hottest woman and the worthiest men will be worth hooking up with and everyone else must settle for “second” best. When, in fact, beauty and worthiness aren’t maximum values but fairly low threshholds to be crossed, and past that threshhold real people begin to be way, way more influenced by, oh, say, love and romance, compatibility out of and in bed, ability to communicate, and all the other countless qualities this course is helping us scratch the surface of.

In other words what I hope is that next time we watch Killbourne’s older films, or open Rolling Stone or Vogue or GQ or Maxim we’ll swallow back our bile at the frankly abusive, commodifying, objectifying use of women… and at the same time whisper a bitter curse at the message they’re simultaneously sending to men.