Thinking Kink by Catherine Scott

Author:Catherine Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2015-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

No comment? Ms magazine criticized this advertisement as sexist, but a BDSM reading may suggest otherwise (Daffy’s).

Until this changes, say feminists, nothing will improve for women—we will always be considered passive objects and will always be judged on our looks rather than our deeds. This means anything that appears to be objectifying the female form is, by default, seen as deeply negative for women. So how do women who want to practice BDSM, especially that which explicitly and literally practices objectification of the human body, reconcile their desires with these objections? And do pop culture depictions of BDSM deserve any more of a “pass” when it comes to objectification, or are they necessarily just as sexist as any other picture or film which renders women as decorative rather than active?

Ms. magazine, the original U.S. feminist magazine founded in 1972, regularly critiques aspects of popular culture for anti-feminist content. Its “No Comment” segment at the end of each issue takes to task sexist advertisements, and gives contact details of the offending publisher so that readers can complain to them. In its winter 2012 issue, it featured an advert for Daffy’s, a fashion label, which depicted a woman in a tight black dress, elbow-length gloves and knee-high spiked boots on all fours, posing as a human table under a sheet of glass. The tagline read “What’s even more absurd is that her dress is only $29.99.” Kinksters may be more bothered by the idea that human furniture play is necessarily viewed as absurd, but it was clear what the grounds for feminist complaint were meant to be—the woman was being sexualized and objectified in a world where women are already too easily treated as discardable objects, all in order to sell a thirty dollar dress.

I agree that as advertisements go, this one certainly deserves to be entered in the Fail column. I’m of the belief that if a product is good, it shouldn’t need sex to sell it. Even from a hard-eyed capitalist viewpoint, the mantra “sex sells” no longer even washes, as studies13 have shown that viewers have no greater product recall after watching adverts that use sexual content than after watching those that don’t, and that using sexualized imagery to sell a product that has nothing to do with sex can actually decrease product recall by 10 percent.14 The female form is far too readily used as window dressing to sell products, and the insincerity present in labeling the woman/table as absurd while still using her to push your fashion label shows to me the high level of contempt advertisers still hold for women. Add to that the fact the woman in the advert is young, white, slim, able-bodied and cisgendered, as nearly every woman in fashion advertising is, and you have pretty much everything that is wrong with the advertising industry. So, I’m with Ms. so far on that point.

Where I can’t fully condemn the advert, however, is the notion that objectification is necessarily sexist. It’s certainly misplaced and

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