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What is the billboard doing?

By Helen Pringle - posted Wednesday, 24 November 2010


The advertiser Calvin Klein, however, disputed that the billboard narrated a story of rape, saying:

Our response to the complaint is that the models are partially unclothed however not nude. The woman in the image on the left is not struggling, nor does she look distressed. There is no violence as the men are holding her. In the image on the right, which clearly follows as a narrative from the image on the left, the woman is relaxed and comfortable, clarifying for the viewer that there has been consent and no violence within the narrative and the imagery.

Similarly, the Sydney Morning Herald fashion police saw "group sex" on the billboard, not gang rape. The advertiser reported to the ASB that it had removed the billboards, and had "no plans to use this creative [sic] in the future". (The ASB did not ban the ad or order its removal, contrary to Kellie Hush and many other commentators on the case, such as Lauren Rosewarne.)

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All of these responses to the billboard are primarily concerned with what it shows. And it is actually difficult to say definitively if there is consent in the billboard's story, although the seemingly wordless scene and blank-faced actors give no intimation of explicit and meaningful communication of consent. Calvin Klein, in defence of its interpretation of the narrative, uses the tired rape defence that there is indeed consent because the woman looks like she is enjoying it and is too relaxed to make any complaint after. And of course, "the men are holding her" (whatever that signifies).

So let's admit that there is some ambiguity in what the billboard shows. However, the complainants' case against the billboard becomes more compelling if we ask the different question of what the billboard does.

The advertiser did in fact broach this question in its response to the ASB, saying: "This image is in a public space, and this billboard has been selected to target the Calvin Klein Jeans consumer, and is not actively directed toward children." In other words, unsurprisingly, Calvin Klein claims that the billboard is selling something (jeans, d'oh!). Kellie Hush similarly claims that the billboard was "pushing the envelope" in selling those "seriously good jeans". Some of the complainants expressed that they were unsure of exactly what product the billboard was advertising, which is actually a very keen insight into what the billboard is doing, at least from the perspective of Calvin Klein.

Calvin Klein is the most frequently bought fashion label in the world, with 21% of global consumers claiming that they buy Klein products, according to a 2008 AC Nielsen Luxury Brands survey. The Nielsen survey notes, "For the price of underwear, consumers from all walks of life can experience a share in the Calvin Klein brand." The Nielsen writer has hit the point here: Calvin Klein advertises and sells not underwear or jeans, but rather a brand, a mood, a state of mind and of desire.

In regard to public advertising, Deborah Lott has posed the question: what do we want when we look at ads like a Calvin Klein billboard? She writes,

Advertising uses images to evoke a state of desire. Less and less often these days do ads even direct that desire toward a specific product; more often their intent seems to be to evoke a sort of dreamy trance of diffuse desire, to keep us in a state of prolonged yearning that may attach itself to any number of different material objects over the course of time. The standard image employed to invoke this state is the beautiful face, the tender body of a young woman. Usually she looks right at us; implores us to enjoy her, provokes us with the plea in her eyes. What is it that we want when we gaze at her? To be her? To have her? To have what she has? Or to merge with her image in some kind of hazy, adrenalin surge of continuously sustained consumption, continuously sustained desire?

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Lott points to a "Calvin Kleining" of our desires, a phenomenon beginning around 1981, with the Brooke Shields "Nothing comes between me and my Calvins" advertising campaign.

Our desires and even our very sense of what is erotic have been formed, not merely affected, by the way in which Klein has pushed his envelope. A Youtube parody of a Calvin Klein Underwear ad conveys extremely well the distance that his envelope has traveled and how tacky ordinary lives and ordinary underpants now look in contrast. The Calvin Klein "creative" is a powerful aesthetic within which the life of the passions is formed, a life that 21% of the world's population directly buy into and share. Given the pervasiveness of that aesthetic, it is not surprising to me that the complainants to the ASB have difficulty in articulating what is so wrong with the billboard, and not surprising how it is then so easy to ridicule them as prudish moralizers, even in such a measured recent piece on On Line Opinion as that by Jay Thompson.

But the problem is not the sex that the Calvin Klein billboard shows, or even that the display is in public. And the problem is not only that the billboard glamourises sexual assault. The billboard takes our erotic gaze, "Calvin Kleins" it and sells it back to us as what we really deeply yearn for.

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About the Author

Helen Pringle is in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales. Her research has been widely recognised by awards from Princeton University, the Fulbright Foundation, the Australian Federation of University Women, and the Universities of Adelaide, Wollongong and NSW. Her main fields of expertise are human rights, ethics in public life, and political theory.

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