Calgary Herald

Calgary Herald

The year is 1949 and, courtesy of the good people at Maidenform Inc., North America is about come face to face with a couple of things whose existence, while long-rumoured, had seldom been confirmed through actual daytime sightings. We're talking, of course, of breasts. Incredibly pointy breasts, as shaped by Maidenform's stiletto-like undergarments, proudly displayed in a series of stylized print ads that would run for the next 20 years, revolutionizing the burgeoning ad industry, and North America's tolerance of, and appetite for, sexual imagery.

Dubbed one of the top 100 ad campaigns of the 20th century by Advertising Age magazine, Maidenform's 1949 tag line -- "I dreamed I went shopping in my Maidenform bra" -- was the first of approximately 200 iterations used (I dreamed I was a knockout, I dreamed I was an autograph hound, I dreamed I barged down the Nile etc.) in a campaign that not only showed women their "dreams" of romance, independence and self-fulfilment, but linked them for the first time to overt sexuality.

Marshall McLuhan called advertising the truest reflection of society, and the social and cultural determinants that made the Maidenform campaign possible are easy to discern. Women had entered the workforce in large numbers for the first time during the Second World War, giving them a degree of financial emancipation and exposing them to career and lifestyle possibilities outside home and marriage.

Soldiers, meanwhile, had returned from Europe and Asia a great deal more worldly and sexually liberated. How are you going to keep them on the farm after they've seen the bright lights of Paris?

What Paris started, the GI Bill finished. By funding the university educations of thousands of returning soldiers, the U.S. government helped transform an equal number of blue-collar social conservatives into white-collar liberals.

Finally, it was a time of rampant, unfettered optimism. America had not only won the war, it had emerged (along with Russia) as an undisputed superpower -- wealthy, confident, unabashed.

The results soon showed up in another Ad Age Top 100 campaign, Miss Clairol's sly "Does she or doesn't she?" ads of 1957. Ostensibly referring to whether women dye their hair ("Only her hairdresser knows for sure"), the double-entendre escaped no one. It suggested promiscuity was a valid choice for women, that they could crash the hitherto male-only party and would be applauded for doing so.

Fuelling this brazen new attitude was a breakthrough on the pharmaceutical front. Clinical trials of an orally delivered, progesterone-based birth control had begun in 1954, and news of The Pill was spreading.

The seeds of the Sexual Revolution were being sown, and advertisers, as always, were paying close attention.

Someone, somewhere, said sex sells. For products like brassieres or hair colouring, which are by nature designed to enhance personal attractiveness and allure, makes intuitive sense. But advertisers also intuited that sex could also be used to sell everything from cake mixes to chainsaws.

In the 1960s, researchers George Smith and Rayme Engel attempted to quantify the sex effect in advertising. They went door to door with a photo of a late-model car asking people for their impressions of the automobile. They then took the same photo and added a scantily clad woman. The people who viewed the second photo consistently rated the car as being more appealing and more expensive than those who had seen the car-only shot. Why the discrepancy? Biology. The imperative of reproduction -- sex, in other words -- is second only to self-preservation as a genetic driver of behaviour, says Washington State University professor Richard Taflinger.

By showing images of attractive women with unrelated products, advertisers rely on the sex drive to draw attention to the ad, and psychology to transfer the positive feelings engendered by the woman -- desirability -- to the product.

The '60s saw an explosion in this type of advertising, and a concurrent rise in complaints from the burgeoning feminist movement, which viewed the ads as objectifying women's bodies, denying their voices, and promoting impossible ideals of feminine beauty.

A quick perusal of perfume ads in a current issue of Vogue magazine, or beer commercials during Monday Night Football, is to conclude the feminists lost this battle spectacularly during the intervening 40 years. The reason, says University of Alabama professor Tom Reichert, is that sexual imagery is an equal opportunity sales tool, appealing to the instincts of both genders.

"Of the ads with sexual content, three-quarters promise to deliver some kind of brand-

related benefit, says Reichert, who has been studying sex in advertising for a decade, and has written a book on the subject, The Erotic History of Advertising. "Buy this product, and you'll either get more sex or better sex, you'll be more sexually attractive to others, or you'll just feel sexier for your own self."

Feminist theory never was able to quench women's desire to be attractive and sexy, and the trend in the 1960s and '70s was toward ever-more-aggressive, explicit and provocative use of sexual imagery. "Does she or doesn't she?" gave way to "take it off, take it all off," the purred invocation from former Miss Sweden Gunilla Knutson in Noxema shaving cream ads that ran on network TV from 1966 to '73.

Feminism did, however, begin to alter women's perceptions of themselves and their tolerance for blatantly exploitative imagery. Advertisers responded by cranking up the humour quotient in sexual ads as a way of de-clawing feminist attacks. The Noxema ad, complete with burlesque music, was meant to be over-the-top funny, as well as enticing: how can you seriously attack something that's essentially goofy? Since then, the pairing of sex with humour, most often at the expense of men, has been a standard gambit of the ad industry. "If you package sex with humour, you can definitely get away with a lot more," says Reichert, "and the standard joke is to make fun of the guy who's looking at the hot woman, to reduce the male to a panting idiot." This context ostensibly gives women the upper hand in the sexual tug-of-war, while still allowing advertisers to deliver images men will pant over.

Advertisers also began to exploit male sexuality for an increasingly assertive female demographic.

"Women were demanding a more active role in society and in the sexual realm," says University of Ottawa sociologist Dianne Pecom. "We didn't want to be treated as passive females lying half-naked on cars anymore. The idea was 'we're consumers now, show us the goods.' "

In 1976, women got the goods, in the form of Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Jim Palmer, dressed only in Jockey underwear. It was the first instance of beefcake advertising, and it would lead to dozens of male sexploitation campaigns, the most famous being Calvin Klein's 1983 and 1993 underwear ads featuring Olympic pole-vaulter Tom Hintinaus and rapper-cum-actor "Marky Mark" Wahlberg.

By using edgy, in-your-face sexuality -- both ads were prominently displayed on giant billboards in New York City's Times Square -- to sell men's underwear, Klein was merely copying a shock-and-awe formula that had worked to great effect in 1980, when he had used 15-year-old Brooke Shields to hawk women's jeans. ("Do you know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.")

While the Shields ads sparked a general public outcry over the sexualization of children, they were also hugely successful, and for a number of reasons. First, by pushing the boundaries of jaw-dropping sexual imagery, they were able to cut through the clutter of competing images from rival designers. Second, and more to the point, they targeted a youth market that by definition is rebellious and suspicious of the status quo: if parents hate the ads, so much the better.

"Advertising attempts to pick up on cultural trends, to say 'hey, we're hip, we're right here with you, we know what's going on,' " says Reichert. "It picks up on what the fringe is doing and introduces that to the mainstream."

Klein was the master of fringe, breaking virtually all society's remaining sexual taboos in an advertising career that reads like a rap sheet: sexualization of kids, introduction of homoerotic imagery, introduction of pornographic imagery, lesbian chic, heroin chic. And virtually all Klein's themes were picked up by other fashion houses and pushed to their logical extremes, and by 2000 Gucci was running ads featuring scantily clad women grovelling at the feet of powerful-looking men -- standard fare, except the male models were now sporting visible erections.

Interestingly, the ads most often criticized for being degrading to and exploitative of women are for women's products; lingerie, sexually charged clothing and accessories, perfume -- the tools of seduction. But why should, say, a Christian Dior ad featuring supermodels Gisele Bundchen and Rhea Durman entwined in a sweaty, sexual embrace be effective in selling halter tops to young women? Part of the answer, says Reichert, is that women get different messages from these carefully crafted fantasy tableaux than do men.

"We did some focus groups on lesbian chic ads, and whereas men viewed them as erotic, women didn't really see them that way. Instead, the ads communicated other messages to women, like 'hey, you don't have to be a slave to a guy, you can express your sexuality how you want to, you can have more freedom, you can be a little taboo and avant-garde."

Whereas advertisers were essentially given a free ride in marketing sexual imagery and fantasies to women, the same couldn't be said for ads purporting to illustrate male fantasies. In 1991, the Stroh Brewing Company experienced a strong backlash to its Swedish Bikini Team ads, which attempted to lampoon the beer industry's notoriously sexist advertising by having a bevy of Scandinavian blondes materialize each time a group of dim-witted frat boys cracked an Old Milwaukee. Several of Stroh's own female employees sued the company, claiming the Bikini Team posters and other marketing materials contributed to a sexually harassing work environment.

The Old Milwaukee debacle had a chilling effect on the ad industry and, for a while, animated ants, frogs, lizards and the like replaced bikini-clad nymphettes in suds ads. But with men accounting for 85 per cent of beer sales, and the 21-year-old to 24-year-old market being especially significant, it was only a matter of time before advertisers returned to their dyed blond roots. The most controversial ad of 2003 involved another supposed send-up of male fantasies: a "catfight" between two women over whether Miller Lite tastes great or is less filling. The women tear off each other's clothes, get soaked in a fountain and end up wrestling in wet cement. The punch line comes when one of the combatants turns to the other and asks, "Wanna make out?"

Miller's catfight ads were a pop-culture phenomenon, sparking a strong backlash from women, generating tons of press and buzz and transforming the models into media celebrities. What they didn't do was move beer: Miller pulled the ads after a couple of months when brand sales declined.

Brewers such as Molson, meanwhile, were trying to have it both ways. In Canada, the company recently unveiled racy, ads for its Bavaria brand, which saw a couple of guys on the beach manipulate a Brazilian model using a bottle of beer as a remote control. Molson's U.S. marketing agency, Crispin Porter & Bagusky, went the other direction and created a campaign featuring a Kurt Cobain look-alike cradling puppies and a bottle of beer, then used schematics to illustrate how the image will appeal to female viewers, who will in turn transfer warm, fuzzy feelings to the next guy they spot drinking a bottle of Molson. Clever and self-referential, the campaign was a tacit acknowledgement that even beer-guzzling kids were by now "onto" advertisers' manipulative techniques, and wanted to be appealed to at an intellectual, as well as a hormonal level.

"Today's consumer, these younger guys, are a lot more sophisticated than brewers give them credit for," says Carter Nance, Crispin's managing supervisor on the Molson campaign. "They expect to be marketed to, they know how advertising works, and you get points for letting them look under the hood with you."

Fuelled by increasingly raunchy depictions of sexuality in music videos and shows like Sex and the City, Reichert says we can look forward to the mainstreaming of pornographic imagery in advertising, the ongoing sexploitation of men, women, children, couples, same-sex couples, inter-racial couples and any combination of the above -- punctuated by brief backlashes whenever ads stray too far outside acceptable norms. Dianne Pecom agrees.

"Right now we're in a period that's like a lab. There's a plethora of competing messages and images out there, and until it gets sorted out, anything goes."