Porno-Chic and Advertising in Women’s Magazines
Since the inception of advertising, advertisers have realised that sexual appeal and the desire to find a partner were more effective than any discourse about the advantages of purchasing a particular product. Consequently, the depiction of sex has been a key element in any sort of advertisement.
Always bordering between what was inappropriate and what was not, advertising has been flooded with pin-up girls (mostly ‘white’ and slim) ready to offer to (mostly) males a paradise of the senses. This proliferation of references to sex and sexuality has been constant, increasing hugely in the last 15 years to become an important part of our daily social encounters. Today, the relationship between marketing and sexuality is even more extended and sophisticated, with ‘global sexualising’ being a phenomenon that has spread to most social and cultural spaces.
Despite the reconfiguration of gender roles experienced in the West over the last half century, advertising has remained anchored within a conservative and sexist frame. On the one hand, advertisers have attempted to devise campaigns addressing a self-sufficient and independent woman, while on the other they have repeatedly argued that society demands from them the display of nude women selling themselves through a pornographic lens.
In advertising, sex is presented to the viewer, yet he/she (more often it is a ‘he’) is denied this access to sex, so triggering his desire. Advertisers, then, hope that the consumer, not being able to access ‘having sex’ with the model, craves for the product to complete the circle of desire (Gifford Broke, 2003: 143).
The pattern is endlessly exploited: the object of desire is a woman promiscuously presented for men’s enjoyment. She interacts with the audience, directly addressing him through flirtatious and provocative body language.
In a world saturated by visual culture, advertisers are under pressure to produce more provocative and flashy images to attract the viewer’s attention. Within this trend is a deliberate attempt to combine sex and transgression, with artistic elements to make it acceptable to the majority. McNair (2003) or Taflinger (1996) call this trend: ‘phornography’. Another term frequently used is ‘porno-chic’ or ‘porn chic’, understood as a depiction of sexual rites through a combination of art and glamour. To make pornographic images appropriate in advertising they must be filtered first, then ‘sanitized to remove its graphic rawness’ (McNair, 2002: 67). Through this new filter the misè-en-scene, the poses and vocabularies of porn culture, have gone mainstream. Advertising has appropriated these images where sex is not real but staged and where worn out clichés, nude women in pornographic poses, continue to appeal to men.[1]
Two hundred years have elapsed since the advent of advertising and the same assumption remains: a woman’s body is a commodity that must be on display to be sold. Yet some authors see a change in the representation of women. Rosalind Gill points out that there is a ‘shift from sex objects to desiring sexual objects’ (2007: 84). This tendency is clearly exemplified in advertisements for bras, such as those for the brand Wonderbra.[2] Within this discourse, sexual objectification is understood as something with which women freely engage to obtain power (Heywood, Leslie & Dworkin, L. 2003: 78). Others see in this argument a high level of risk. In Merchants of Cool (Drenzin, 2001), writer and producer Douglas Rushkoff believes that advertising is disguising old sexual stereotypes and presenting them in a new wrapping: that of women’s power. He argues that the women represented in advertising are still trapped in their bodies and he compares this with conventional pornography.
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