Another disturbing example of carniverous misogyny, pointed out on feministing. What seems bizarre is that this image is being used to sell cosmetics to women. The logic of the ad is that women want to be eaten as if they were shrimp or sushi. Or is it that women want their sushi eaten, and will bend over backwards buying cosmetics in order to get oral sex? Hmm. Maybe this ad campaign isn't quite so bizarre as I thought . . .
4 comments:
I can remember a few years ago seeing a trend in fashion advertising that used themes of woman on woman violence (in addition to scenes of bruised, battered, and bound women by themselves) as a the attention-getting shock factor strategy. This, of course, functioned to glamorize, aestheticize, and coolify violence on women.
But woman as food (outside the la leche crowd) is really creepy. Are there any taboos left after you cross the line on things like violence and canibalism? Oh, maybe in a future add women will ask why 9/11 happened--perhaps that is the (current) final taboo.
Although your interpretation is clever, it is unlikely that such a subtle message would reach a broad audience. The problem is that 99% of people are not reflective enough to see anything beyond sex appeal in this picture. If the goal of the ad campaign is subtle indoctrination, it is not going to work: non-academics are rarely going to "get" it. At most, the average male viewer is going to see this and think, "What I wouldn't give for a bite of that, ho ho!" This in itself may repulse you, but the truth is that you find this kind of thing in Shakespeare all the time. In other words, there is probably no disturbing, new trend in male lust, except maybe that every impulse is less restrained these days than it was 400 years ago.
I worry about similar things, but oddly enough, it is consoling to realize that worrying and naysaying accomplishes very little. You can work yourself into knots fretting over things, or you can envision what you want yourself to be and set out to become it. The best teacher exemplifies what she teaches: a yeasaying versus a naysaying mentality. I have learned to identify naysaying with reactionaries, who, however well-intentioned, are rarely taken seriously by future generations.
The only analysis I can manage right now is "Argh!"
I wonder how we can have the possibility of "yaysayers" without the necessity of "naysaying" - which I might rather call thinking critically about the world.
Anyway, this one strikes me as one of those ones that's really playing off a homoerotic gaze - so many fashion and cosmetics images work this way (which I'm not the first one to point out). So it's also women desiring and eating other women. Argh, indeed.
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