A Sexist Advertisement? Lesbians and the Politics of the Male Gaze
Not technically Korean sorry, but then this recent Nikon advertisement from Singapore was enough to get me out bed at 5:30 this morning (yawn). No, not because of the subject matter per se, but because since seeing and being amused by it and others in the series here nearly two weeks ago, I’ve also noticed and been a bit taken aback by the sometimes quite scathing attacks of it over at Feministing, and it was only then (of all times) that I happened to resolve my mixed feelings about those.
I’ll probably regret typing the following comment there on only four hours sleep (after a wild night of, well…reading Feministing), but then my muse doesn’t like to be kept waiting, and the sunrise over the ocean was more than worth any embarrassment I’ll feel over typos later. Before reading it though, in all seriousness please do click on the image for a bigger version and take a good look at it first, as there’s many (well, literally five) things that are easy to miss at first glance, and I’m also interested in your own unbiased first impressions.
Here’s what I wrote then:
Forgive me for resurrecting an old thread (by the standards of Feministing that is!), but I must confess to being nothing more than mildly amused by this series of advertisements when I first saw them on another site, and was a bit taken aback to find such scathing critiques of them here. While reading this thread has certainly been thought-provoking and has made me look at them in a new light, and I would echo other posters’ points that “racism” and “sexism” are hardly uncontested terms and that Nikon could certainly have chosen other subjects (and did – see its one with ghosts), I find the notion that the second advertisement with lesbians is sexist, well…patronizing, first as a man and then as a consumer. Dealing with each in turn:
While some may see this as reading too much into what other posters have written, I think the argument that the advertisement is sexist relies heavily on the notion that the lesbians are unwitting, innocent subjects violated by a voyeuristic male gaze. Against that, firstly is the fact that they are knowingly being photographed by a third party; sure, that doesn’t give anyone else the right to invade the privacy of the trio, but then they left the curtains open, and so such attention is to be expected. Consider the natural reactions of people that could see them if this happened in real life then: as my sister can confirm, who has worked in offices downtown for much of her working life and has thus had the (mis)fortune of sometimes seeing people unwittingly or wittingly publicly having sex in neighboring hotel rooms and apartments, men and women can and do choose to be disgusted, offended, bored, alarmed or aroused and intrigued by seeing the act, and while undoubtedly more men than women feel the latter, and are more likely to openly leer too, as per cultural expectations many women initially express disgust and disinterest…but then end up staring just as much as the men.
Pray, what makes this natural behavior by both sexes sexist?
Which brings me to my second point: if the advertisement was realistic, then of course the boy(?) behind the curtains would be absent, and there would be many female faces amongst those watching the women in the background as I explained…but then it’s supposed to be a joke, not provide an accurate (and usually rather more mundane) portrayal of events. People can tell the difference, and while the advertisement in itself may make some men more likely to leer at women, and think women automatically enjoy this form of attention, such men are hardly likely to need much persuasion in the first place. While I’m usually hesitant to give much credence to a (by definition) inferior “other” class of people that I naturally don’t belong to, it’s patently true in this case: I’m not stupid, I’m not sexist, and I don’t leer at women or think that seeing them in an advertisement (or pornography for that matter) enjoying that form of attention means that they do in real life. Nor, do I think, do most men and women, and so we can see it for what it is: a joke, which the boy and exclusively male observers in it make both less realistic and more humorous.
Here are the other two in the series, the first one of which was described as racist by the original poster at Feministing, and the latter…I think rather tellingly absent, for uncontroversial humor would have detracted from creating a sense of outrage at the first two:
While in the above comment I’m not at all merely being polite when I say that reading the thread at Feminsting “has certainly been thought-provoking and has made me look at [the advertisements] in a new light,” nor am I pulling my punches because it’s my first ever comment there, on the other hand I really do think that the critiques lack a certain sense of perspective, and would echo other commenters in saying that the charges of sexism in the first advertisement and particularly those of racism in the ” naive jungle explorer” one after that seem somewhat forced.
But what do you think? I’m only on my second, sorely needed cup of coffee as I type this, so certain subtleties rather escape me at the moment…(yawn again).
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Nice. Eye catching opening pic as well. I’d have to agree with you for the most part and suggest that in humorous contexts one has to more carefully pick apart the message (if one were to be so inclined). A lot of humor is derived from those parts of society which are in need of a good critique, often based off common fears or ignorance. I’m having trouble hashing out this idea here, but I hope you get my drift. These images are funny because they are a rather unpretentious mirror of what most people would rather not talk about, at least in polite company.
And of course, humor is 100% contextual. For example:
‘ooh, watch out for those natives’ <- Being racist
‘ooh, watch out for those natives’ <- Making fun of you for being racist
‘ooh, watch out for those natives’ <- Making fun of racism in general
‘ooh, watch out for those natives’ <- A contextual joke my dad might make without the slightest hint of racism.
Having just written that I decided to go read the original thread and see what others were saying. That made me want to punch myself in the face, but I did have a final thought on the matter. One of the posters mentions how the image with the explorer and natives was a reference to older humorous images of the same content, which were racist and were referencing rather old school understandings of the world. I’m sure I’ve seen these same jokes in Archie comics somewhere. So, I guess that’s a valid point, but in our remixed postmodern age, where everything is a reference to something else, at what point does it cease to be promoting the original idea and start being its own concept. At some point the joke becomes the joke… The 1980s summer comedy feel to the lesbian picture certainly reminds me of movies I saw when I was a kid and the jungle image certainly has tones of Gunga Din(which I recognize wasn’t supposed to be funny), what seems to be the overarching theme to all of these images is classic gags. Something conspicuously un-suggested over on feministing. I seriously doubt that anyone is going to make Porky’s 4. But we do remember 1-3.
You learn a lot growing up on a dairy farm.
The female cows, when they are in heat (ovulating), perform various lesbian acts.
The bulls see this, and then they know which cows to hump.
Plain and simple…men are attracted to visions of lesbians because it tells us which women are ready for mating.
There’s something uncomfortable about any image of an explorer with natives, especially one that seems to be emphasizing how menacing, hidden, and literally dark they are. But I wouldn’t call it more than uncomfortable. I just certainly would have tried to be a bit cleverer if I were an advertising executive.
The lesbian one is far more interesting. It’s got more layers than the “natives, eek!” one, because the point of it seems to have become finding the voyeurs, rather than looking at the object of their interest. It’d certainly be pretty loathsome without them, though. Faux lesbians on a hotel bed is more liquor advertising than camera.
Mark, I did indeed have a deprived childhood it seems. I’d hesitate though, to draw too many parallels to humans. Although women are indeed much more likely to have sex when they’re fertile (and, from the Institute of Taking a Great Deal of Time and Money to Confirm the Completely Obvious, are more receptive to pick-up lines then too), it’s regularly pointed out that humans are quite exceptional in their lack of a mating cycle. And so, while I confess that even I never asked any of my lesbian friends back in New Zealand how often they had sex, nor the specifics of their menstrual cycles, I doubt that they only did it when one or either of them was fertile either.
While I’d rather not get bogged down in lesbians’ and heterosexual males’ sexual drives, I will say that the greater appeal of lesbian sexual acts to heterosexual men than of gay men’s sexual acts to heterosexual women (or men) surely lies more in: a) the simple nudity element, men despite their awareness on an intellectual level of lesbian women’s disinterest in them of course instinctively finding exposed buttocks, breasts and vulvas arousing (as they’re designed to – see the end of this post); and b) in a jealousy of access to forbidden fruit sense, lesbian women not only having ready access to their own, always-craved-by-men body parts, but also of those of other women also.
Hmmm…probably too simplistic and yet an overanalysis of your comment at the same time(!), but still, I’m not seeing the cows in there sorry
(maybe the camera only picks up human faces?). And regardless, just like women shaving their pubic hair, I think that much of the supposedly widespread appeal of lesbians is more apparent than real, generated more by trends in the pornography industry than anything innate in humans. Or in other words, even if both trends are prominent and popular in the pornography industry itself, ironically this tells us more about the tastes of the producers and regular consumers of it than of the people who are actually regularly having sex, with correspondingly less interest in and thus influence on it.Nik,
thanks, and indeed, although I must confess that sometimes I do worry that I overrely on images like that to grab reader’s attentions.
Ironically, my reply to your comment will be much shorter than to Mark’s one (edit: or at least, I thought it would be), but that’s because you cover the subject so well. I did get what you meant in your first paragraph, and it made me realize the importance of the humor element in the three advertisements can not be stressed enough. One critic mentioned, for instance, that instead of jungle dwellers or lesbians that:
But as occurred to me after reading your comment, but already pointed out by the next commenter there
dammit, there’s the minor point of none of those ideas actually being funny:Other than that, I also liked your reference to postmodernism and jokes about old jokes (to put it crudely on my part), and it reminded me of Baudrillard’s notions of Simulacra and Simulation, although I won’t pretend to have read any of his work. But even better was:
Very well put, and it is something for advertisers and observers to always bear in mind. With the case of the lesbians specifically though, they didn’t actually remind me of, well…anything, for I’ve only heard of and not seen Porky’s and *cough* had no idea what Gunga Din was until I just looked it up. And bear in mind that the advertisement is/was to be used in exclusively Singapore (I think), with no such cultural references to be called upon (there may be other, Singaporean ones that I’m unaware of, but I doubt it…especially not of Porky’s!), although that doesn’t detract from the validity of your point in general.
And having said that, I still find the advertisement humorous, the situation itself rather than the lesbians or even the male voyeurs being the source of that humor. As such, I really do fail to see the sexism, although as Sarah notes, and whose comment I’ll have to get to after taking my daughter for an afternoon walk sorry, the faux lesbians in isolation are indeed more reminiscent of a liquor advertisement.
Sarah, I’ll reply soon!
And here I am…although getting home in the pitch black and biting wind at 6:15 with an extremely bright Venus (I think) behind our backs was hardly the “afternoon walk” intended! Said daughter is getting warmed up with a microwaved panini as I speak.
But after all that, now that I can take a proper look at your comment rather than a quick, pre-stroll one with my daughter saying “Daddy, 밖에 가자 (let’s go outside)” like a mantra in my ear, I realize that I’ve already covered it above really, and in sum I completely agree with your take on the lesbian advertisement. Before leaving it though, something I should have mentioned earlier: it is just me, or does anyone find the head of the women in the red/orange lingerie strange? Seriously, it almost looks like a candidate for the Photoshop Disasters blog.
As for the jungle explorer one, I’d rather not get into it for the sake of avoiding rehashing comments in that original thread at Feministing, although I will say that personally at least it doesn’t make me uncomfortable at all, nor strike me as racist. Actually I found it much funnier and uncontroversial too, and was a bit surprised at how it seemed to attractive more negative attention than the one with the lesbians. I do agree that the advertising executive could possibly have been cleverer or done in a different way and still have retained the joke…but then again that would dilute the self-effacing link to earlier ignorant savages and the Heart of Darkness-esque cultural references and so on, and so with all things considered then I’d have kept it the same regardless. If people in real life were still going into the jungle all naive and/or with such stereotypes of the natives like the man is here then I would say it is racist, but in 2008? No, it’s laughing at cultural representations of an earlier era like Nik said. Which is not the case, say, of Benetton’s advertisement from the 1980s of an African child soldier holding a human femur behind his back.
Okay, maybe I did get into it then(!).
(Edit: Not that I think anyone is worried, but for the record I started this comment at 6:55 but didn’t finish it until just after Nik’s one below arrived, so he didn’t see it. Hope that puts everyone’s minds at ease!)
James, Thanks for the reply. I have a hard time making my thoughts coherent to others, but you seem to have gotten my point exactly and, in addition made a really good point (though perhaps inadvertently). These advertisements were directed at Singaporeans (if that’s how they’re called) in which case, how does the change in observer affect the message of the image? One comment I seem to remember from the Feministing post was that the hands were clearly of a white person (man?). Well, If I’m Singaporean-Chinese or Malay, what the hell do I care what white people think of ‘natives’? For that matter, the change in dynamic with the lesbian photograph is gigantic. Are these now Asian voyeurs watching ‘white’ women bump uglies? Is that a East-West thing now? In the original Feministing thread, that this issue was never really addressed, and it suddenly seems essential. Having said that, these are just funny and I hate over-intellectualizing things that are just standard tropes.
In addition to the ideas you quote about alternate situations that could be in this ad, may I suggest: Puppies! Seriously…
No, Not seriously. What if we all just held hands?
I don’t know if those people have every read a magazine, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never stopped to ponder a picture of “A group of people standing, surrounded by a bunch of balloons”.
And not to use up all the goodwill I may have generated by accidentally saying something quotable before but, In reference to the lesbian image looking like a liquor advertisement, I’d have to agree except for one essential element. These images are about people consciously being observed by a camera/photographer. The s#@$eating grin on the explorers face is equally the grin of the two women who are all too proud to be getting their picture taken in their birthday suits. In a liquor ad, the implication is ‘drink this and this will happen’. These ads are more of a folly-narrative, playing on the self absorption of people who know they have a camera trained on them. If anything, if I REALLY had to read that lesbian image, I would say ‘These are not lesbians, these are two rather young looking girls [as pointed out a number of times in the original thread] who are hamming it up for the camera, wanted to look super-sexy for the person behind the lens.’, So the question becomes do these images essentialize the larger group, or specifically the vain(sp?)? Again, if these were bound for a Singaporean audience, I stand by my question, does the observer affect the meaning of the image?
And to be honest, I’ve only seen small bits of Gunga Din.
No I also find that head of her strange, but I also know from some friends in the ads industry that they sometimes do this on purpose because it focus the human eye very quickly, even if it’s going for the shoop disaster award, negative publicity is also publicity and the budget might not have been all that large, at least all the photo’s are severely been digitally edited so the whole style of the entire shoot is quite the same, for example the jungle native on the far right, his had with spear is a bit too low compared to his shoulder and the way it should be bend and the third is as obvious as it can be, ghost are of course shoop work.
Actually now that I look more closely at the faces of the two “lesbian” models in the picture and playing around in shoop myself I think the girls are actually the same girl (which saves cost for a 2nd model, shoop is cheaper and faster) and they shooped the head to make it look a little bit different but it hasn’t gone that well and shadow and light correction takes about 5 min. or less.
Nik, you’re welcome, you have some good points yourself, and I’d only disagree on just the one really. While I think that it was erroneous for commenters over at Feministing to draw any additional meaning from the Caucasian hands of the photographer in the jungle explorer advertisement, seeing as there’s nothing at all strange about his companion also being Caucasian and all, I do think that given Singapore’s colonial history then Singaporeans would be fully aware of and have interest in the stereotype or joke alluded to, albeit without the sense of cultural guilt that may often accompany a Westerner’s viewing of it. On top of that, there’s Singapore’s often quite problematic race-relations both within the country and with its neighbors, Singaporeans often seeing their as a first-world haven in the still decidedly undeveloped “lake” of Southeast Asia and all.
Which may contradict what I said earlier a little, but then it only just occurred to me. Two more things while they’re still in mind: first (not that you mention this), that despite our image of Singapore as quite a conservative country socially and politically, I recall from my undergraduate days that the pervasive Singaporean state has quite a no-nonsense approach to sex, regularly exhorting (and providing generous tax and housing incentives for) its citizens to procreate for the sake of (really) national defense, although I don’t think that average Singaporeans heed the call as much as the state would like. It also means that quite explicit advertisements like the above and this are quite normal there…so…(sorry, I’m tired)…to sum up, I think we shouldn’t make too many assumptions about the context in which the lesbian advertisement was received. In this department at least, Singapore’s public (if perhaps not private) liberalness may well surprise many outside observers.
Second, that this:
was very well put!
Crusnik, the more I look at it, the more persuaded I am by your arguments. But still, it seems counter-intuitive to prominently display a young, attractive women in her underwear, whose body Nikon presumably wants viewers to linger over, but then also have something like the head that deliberately detracts from that? I’m still inclined to believe that it’s accidental then, but to make sure I’ve sent a sleepy email to the experts at Photoshop Disasters to ask them what they think.
Geez…racist??? People are going way too far on this assumption. This world is getting a dark place to live, come on, what’s racist about that? Don’t you know that indians like these are still alive and kicking and may be still reluctant about “civilized” men?
Put your weapons down, people…allow us to breathe…no bloody racism there, at all!