So, London Underground have banned an ad featuring Jerry Hall holding 12 men on leashes.
LU said it “breaches our advertising code relating to the depiction of men, women and children as sexual objects.”
Which is quite clearly bollocks. Ads all over the underground depict women as sexual objects. At certain times of the year, depending on what kind of products are being advertised at the time, most women in ads are depicted as sex objects. There’s a huge double standard at work here. I have no desire to defend crass reality TV shows that have Jerry Hall ‘training’ men – it’ll be unwatchable shit anyway – but I do get really annoyed when advertising standards people pretend that women being sexually objectified hasn’t become the norm in advertising. Ads where it doesn’t happen are pretty rare. Yes, the occasional bloke gets in there too, but for the most part, men are portrayed as aspirational symbols to other men (equally destructive in its own way, given that their airbrushed adonis bodies are utterly unobtainable to 99% of blokes, in the same way that the huge-boobs-tiny-waist look is impossible for all but a handful of women, and for celebs is pretty much always airbrush enhanced).
Advertising is an almost entirely morally bankrupt area, and it’d be great to see LU – who own an enourmous amount of ad space – take a sensible stand on what’s acceptable and what isn’t. This time, they’ve missed the mark by miles.
Soundtrack – Andy Thornton, ‘The Healing Darkness’ (a great bunch of songs, that I first heard in their infancy months and months ago (maybe years ago, even!) – I’m not on this one, more’s the pity, but it’s still fantastic, and well worth getting)