Mainstreaming Sex by Feona Attwood

Author:Feona Attwood [Attwood, Feona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857731722
Publisher: I.B.Tauris

In a 1995 advert for a Gossard bra, a young woman is depicted lying dreamily in some straw or grass, wearing only a black translucent bra and pants. The text reads: ‘Who said you can’t get pleasure from something soft’. This emphasizes women’s pleasure, and directs us to the redundancy of men in achieving it, but uses a form of representation which is familiar from pornography: the woman is pictured from above, almost naked and pleasuring herself, or at least being pleasured by her underwear. In ‘pleasing herself ’, she is also of course pleasing the many heterosexual men who may have consumed very similar images in porn.

This apparent dual address to ‘new’ women and to ‘old’ or unreconstructed men is captured brilliantly in Jacky Fleming’s (1996) satirical cartoon about advertising of this kind. In the first frame a heterosexual couple is shown standing in front of two large images of young attractive women in their underwear. The woman says: ‘I don’t know why you’re staring like that, Adrian, these adverts aren’t FOR men. They are meant to be for WOMEN and they make us feel cheekily confident about being sexy in a raunchy but fun loving postfeminist sort of way … And there’s a lot of humour involved too.’ In the second frame, the same man is shown again in front of the posters, but this time with a male friend. We assume he has just reported his partner’s explanation. ‘Tell you what mate,’ says his friend, ‘if this is feminism we’ve been backing the wrong horse!’

Almost as central to midriff advertising as the notions of choice and ‘pleasing one’s self ’, is a discourse of feminine empowerment. Contemporary advertising targeted at the midriffs suggests, above all, that buying the product will empower you. ‘I pull the strings’, asserts a beautiful woman in a black Wonderbra; ‘Empower your eyes’, says an advert for Shiseido mascara; ‘Discover the power of femininity. Defy conventions and take the lead’, reads an advert for Elizabeth Arden beauty products. What is on offer in all these adverts is a specific kind of power – the sexual power to bring men to their knees. Empowerment is tied to possession of a slim and alluring young body, whose power is the ability to attract male attention and sometimes female envy. Wonderbra’s 2006 campaign, ‘Experience WonderYou’, signals this particularly vividly, in a shot of an escalator designed to allow the viewer to situate herself imaginatively as the object of universal male admiration and female mistrust, competitiveness and envy. A US advert for lingerie dares to make explicit that which is usually just implied. Showing a curvaceous woman’s body from the neck down, clad in a black basque and stockings, the advert’s text reads, ‘while you don’t necessarily dress for men, it doesn’t hurt, on occasion, to see one drool like the pathetic dog he is’.4 This is ‘power femininity’: a ‘subject-effect’ of ‘a global discourse of popular postfeminism which incorporates feminist signifiers of emancipation and empowerment as

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