A glamorous woman dressed in what appears to be a down filled strapless dress is lying on her back, arms akimbo, knit scarf carefully thrown around her shoulders and across her neck on a bed of snow-covered leaves. Her left leg seems to be in full stride and her back leg or boot is thrust backward. In the orientation of the photo as it appeared in a half-page ad in today’s Boston Globe, her head is down, giving the impression that she is upside down on the page.
What is Moncler Boston at Copley Place advertising here? My first guess would be lipstick, as her bright red lips are the first thing to catch my eye. Moncler, however, doesn’t make cosmetics. Is she wearing a dress or a jumpsuit? Is it down-filled? A search of the Moncler web site (www.moncler.com) doesn’t produce a garment that looks remotely like what she is wearing, though the company, which first produced sleeping bags for climbers, still makes down-filled outer garments, in prices hovering around $1000.00 up to $3000.00. By process of elimination, then, they must be advertising the scarf, though I can’t find a white one like this on the web site either.
Aside from whatever the product may be, what is also being conveyed in this picture? In the post-truth, post-factual, post-feminist era of president-elect Trump, where women have been demeaned and objectified and sexual harassment has been portrayed as “boys being boys,” this picture returns us to the world of the 1970s or earlier in its depiction of women in advertising.
We see here a woman who looks as if she has just become the victim of an assault. Her right arm is up in a defensive posture and her lower body is twisted in such a way as to suggest she is, or was, trying to run away from her assailant who is looking down at her. She is in an extremely vulnerable pose, and is lying helpless on the ground in a wooded landscape, far from help. Her scarf, which might have kept her warm, is now available to strangle her.
For those who think my imagination has run away from me, what other story can be told by this photo? Who in her right mind would be voluntarily lying down in an expensive strapless dress on snow-covered woods? I’ve tried a number of scenarios, but I’m sorry to say, I can’t come up with any plausible plot line other than the one I have suggested above.
In case you missed it, which apparently the advertising execs at Moncler Boston at Copley Place did, and the Advertising Editor at the Boston Globe did, Jean Kilbourne in a remarkable talk turned documentary film “Killing Us Softly,” revealed the violence, objectification, and demeaning of women ROUTINELY employed by advertisers in the media. The first documentary came out in 1979 and it has been revised four times since then, and sadly, not much has changed, as witness this morning’s ad.
As the cliche goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. The story this one tells is, in one word, horrifying.
1 comment:
Right on, Big Red! As Riane Eisler so acutely articulates in Chalice and The Blade, when/wherever the feminine finds fuller expression and builds partnerships in society (read: 8 years of a compassionate man of color at the helm followed by a woman in his stead) negative masculine attributions intensify in reaction and wield the knife/play with nukes. Time to reread Betty Reardon's Sexism and the War System.
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