Tallulah Lines Protests Promiscuous Publicity

Sex sells. It’s a succinct phrase, expounded by media moguls particularly within advertising, which has filtered down through several social strata, with the result that it can now commonly be found upon the lips of your average man or woman on the street. It’s an easy retort, uttered nonchalantly with a shrug of the shoulders, a stock phrase which can be plucked out to defend advertising which objectifies individuals and reduces them to sexual entities. It is a concept which has become increasingly normalised. But, is it as robust an idea as its extensive usage would suggest? And what implications does it have for gender relations today?

I consider the point after an outing to a George Street bar, where I was confronted with a piece of advertising which utilised the concept especially gratuitously. A double sided flyer informed the potential customer of four themed nights to be held by the bar, as well as giving a brief biography of the bar’s resident VDJ. The flyer looked like a piece of soft porn, and made me feel as though I’d unwittingly stumbled into some kind of strip club. There were no images of men anywhere, not even the one which accompanied the biography of the male VDJ. Instead, next to his name was a topless woman, heavily made up and with dyed blonde hair, with her back to the photographer so that she could turn and pout in a seductive manner. The most offensive of the images was one which was set alongside a James Bond themed evening, where two very airbrushed women pose provocatively on a table top in a casino setting, one lying on her back while the other kneels beside her, touching the first woman’s thigh, dressed in dominatrix style black clothing and clutching what looks like a cane. Such blatantly sexualised imagery even penetrated the University of Edinburgh’s Societies’ Fair, where the Conservative society’s poster bore a pouting woman above the come-on “Life’s better under a conservative”

Rationalised, the concept of sex really had no logical place within the promotion of the bar’s themed nights, and so I wonder what the PR directors hoped to achieve by utilising those photographs. Surely, nobody would be stupid enough to believe that the women used on the flyer will be present on any of the themed evenings, slinking through the throngs in their lingerie, exposing vast expanses of their clearly airbrushed flesh, eyeing punters seductively in the manner they do in the images described. I also doubt that potential customers would choose to drink in a certain bar because of those images; instead custom would be lured by the theme itself. Other pull factors would be the music played by the famed VDJ, or the drinks deals which are also advertised.

In fact, I would guess - or optimistically hope - that such images would probably discourage more people than they would attract. Speaking among my friends, though, most said they would just accept and brush over the presence of the photographs, and that is, disturbingly, the key point. If people have come to expect their presence, that is not going to make a product more attractive. I could speak of subliminal advertising, but really the overly sexualised images of women displayed on the flyer were so blatant as to surpass the subliminal in any form. In reality then, due to their clear irrelevance to the nights advertised and peoples’ blind acceptance of them, all that the use of the images served to do was perpetuate the normalisation of women as sexual commodities, not figure as a main feature in attracting custom. The normalisation of women as sexual commodities is almost another stock phrase, akin to that of ‘sex sells.’ It is used often and applicable under many circumstances. Obviously, this is telling of the pre-eminence of the concept in our society. But it also detracts from the statement’s meaning - it makes ‘women as sexual commodities’ an elusive thing, ungraspable and irrelevant to our everyday lives; those women are the other. However, the nights promoted were student nights, which immediately involves us. The University of Edinburgh is an institution persistently ranked among the highest in the world, and therefore the intellects of its students are clearly sufficiently developed.

Steven Jhobbs The Student can reveal that many students are unhappy with the feedback they are receiving on their essays. The Student can also exclusively reveal that some of the complainants have breasts. One such sexy-student suffering from shocking delays in getting her work back is Hannah Riley, a third year history of art student, whose turn-ons include sexy lingerie and constructive feedback on her coursework. When probed, she had this to say: “I like it when a man takes his time, but not when it comes to returning my essays!” Continued on Page 3

Yet female students are subject to advertising which reduces them to sexualised commodities. These women theoretically should be confident in their intellectual abilities. Yet research shows that they are generally a lot less likely to speak in seminars or tutorials than their male classmates, or to hammer home an argument which is challenged in a group setting. There are a whole range of factors which contribute to this issue of female and male confidence, but that does not mean we should underestimate the power of advertising which consistently utilises women in an overly sexualised way. It is another tool to reaffirm the old but unrelenting idea that women are to be seen, men are to be heard.

PR directors might tell us sex sells, but actually when analysed the concept is rather thin. There is often no logic behind it, and when images are so blatant then psychological tools like subliminal advertising are redundant. So in the end, we are left with images which are unnecessary as well as dangerous, debilitating and offensive, and their perpetual use affects important aspects of gender relations. Both women and men buy into the myth that women are objects and men do the serious talking. Why have we become so apathetic to this sentiment? The sexual objectification of women hinders female development as a whole. And really, if the most socially advantaged group of women studying at university level are reduced to sexual objects, what hope do the rest of the female population have?