Every single one of The Affair‘s ads features fancy hetero white people enjoying wine or blandly chic food, and this whole thing leaves a terrible, terrible taste in my mouth. I mean, I could ignore it, but their ads are all over the Heavy Table’s website, so what can I do? Someone’s got to call them out, I guess.
Representation is the most pertinent issue here — how can anyone justify the racial content of these ads? The ads are (typically) all about sexual desire, so perhaps the ad agency thought it would be too tricky to throw a racial minority — let alone a brunette — into the mix. Instead, the undesirable physical presence of racial minorities is sublimated onto the food-spectacle, which is the only colored element of the photos. The work of the underclass is presented to the white male to finger, consider, and devour. To put it simply, who’s cooking the food that rich white Americans love? Hint: they don’t all look like Bobby Flay!
I could go on and on about the willful racial ignorance of this ad, but I didn’t want to forgo touching on its sexual dysfunctions as well. The humor in the photo depends on a comparison between a woman and food. Both are presented as sensory stimuli for the man to choose between. And the winner, of course, is food, because it won’t ask you to cuddle after you consume it. We are in truly good company when we’re being compared to cocktail shrimp.
Boo on you, Affair! However, I’m sure someone out there disagrees with me, so feel free to leave a comment and turn this into something more constructive. Should this kind of advertising be shoved into our faces without protest?
Based on the intense back muscles on the woman on the left, it seems like she might be transgender, which makes this whole ad a lot more interesting.
The shrimp symbolizes male/male desire. Oooooooooh.
I like your thoughts here. I can’t say I’ve paid attention to the ads, but you bring up an interesting point.
Thanks for humoring me
This is just one drop in the ocean of stupid advertising!
I don’t mean to be insulting, but the criteria you use to determine “offensiveness” seem to be so broad, subjective, and arbitrary that they could apply to any conceivable ad. The mix of inclusion, exclusion, appropriation, metaphors that can be read into presentation, and context-as-framed-by-viewer as the basis for deteriming legitimate targets for offense strikes me as effectively universal. I may be caricaturing your arguments, I know. Could you describe for me an ad that would not be offensive under the terms you use here?
Hey Raka, thanks for the criticism! You’re right in that what I’ve written here is really broad, and that I don’t define my terms as well as I should. To be frank, I wanted to make this as accessible as possible, which meant glossing over a lot of theory that would have been useful to cite.
Here, I’m using Marxism as a totalizing theory, and applying the theories of objectification and reification to racially hegemonic representations. The underlying assumption that I’m taking on is that advertising is an attempt to access the racial/sexual unconscious in ways that uphold really problematic stereotypes.
And to answer your question, I think every ad has something to say about race and gender and class and sexuality. It’s not about whether something is “offensive”; rather, it’s about what part of your mind an ad is trying to access with its imagery, and whether or not what it’s upholding denigrates minority groups of people.
Yes, I imagine we would want to be more accessible than that, in general. I pray you’ll pardon me if I don’t respond in kind; while I’m quite conversant in academese, it never sat quite right in my own mouth. So to speak. I should also apologize for putting words in *your* mouth by bringing up “offensive”, which you did not ever say. Perhaps for the purposes of this dialogue alone we can recast “offensive” as a term of art: shorthand for that which denigrates minority groups of people, renders women into consumables, and can generally be assumed to leave a terrible, terrible taste in one’s (metaphorical) mouth.
That established, I must compliment you for composing an approachable construction of your argument that remains so true to the jargonslaught above. Unfortunately, I don’t feel that either approach addresses the core of my concern. Not that you are beholden in any way to said concern, of course. But I’m downright compulsive in my questing for clarification, and I do appreciate the attention you’ve already offered up.
I’m afraid I don’t see any objective methodology for what elements you reify, and in what way. Nor am I convinced that the particulars of the perceived objectification come from the presentation, as opposed to the predilections of the audience. If I want to find something objectionable in a work, and I’m allowed to interpret any element that is included (objectification! appropriation!), and any elements that are excluded (any finite work must exclude infinite peoples, efforts, aspects, and elements of every abstract sort), as well as anything that can be conceptually associated with problematic stereotypes… well, like I said. I think that by these criteria, I could find offense (as defined above) with absolutely any conceivable work, including blank sheets of paper. Perhaps especially blank sheets of paper.
Obviously, this is a caricature of your actual position. But it does, I think, accurately convey my impression that your analysis has gone beyond “creative” and into “caprice”. When I see a formulation like “the undesirable physical presence of racial minorities is sublimated onto the food-spectacle, which is the only colored element of the photos”, I have trouble finding a non-arbitrary application of this logic that spares any imagery at all. It also engenders entertaining speculation about how you might plumb the hidden class implications of other conspicuous colorations: say, for example, the red dress in Schindler’s List. But now I fear I’m wandering off topic and into snark, so I’ll call an end for the evening. Thank you again for your time.
That’s the thing, though — I think we are both operating on different assumptions. I truly believe that you are allowed to “interpret anything.” And yes, I think the example I chose in my post was pretty silly, and it was meant to be silly. But it’s an offshoot of other questions that I have had about representations of a white supremacist world: why are God, Jesus, cowboys, Adam, Eve, the entirety of Manhattan in “Friends,” everyone in my high school history books (barring a mere handful of minorities) etc. all white?
And yes, I do view the baseline theory behind white sheets of paper — the association of whiteness with clarity, nothingness, and purity — racist.
Raka, I truly appreciate your thoughtful comments. Thanks internet bro.
“…What’s really going on here: in each case, the director needed a gimmick, a red dress or a plastic bag, to allow us to identify an otherwise anonymous, fungible corpse among the mass of corpses. In each case, its not hard (while acknowledging some real-world problems for the story-teller, to make a corpse noticeable, among so many) to detect a racist subtext: just as the other director may have needed the plastic bag because he feared that, to his audience, all Cambodians look alike, Spielberg may have feared that all his Jews (little girl included) would blend together, while only Schindler, the Gentile, stood out. And for the most part, the Jews in Schindler’s List do blend together.”
http://www.spectacle.org/195/schindl.html
“In general, commodity fetishism tends to replace inter-human relationships with relationships between humans and objects: for example, the relationship between producer and consumer is obscured. The producer can only see his relationship with the object he produces, being unaware of the people who will ultimately use that object. Similarly, the consumer can only see his relationship with the object he uses, being unaware of the people who produced that object. Thus, commodity fetishism ensures that neither side is fully conscious of the political and social positions they occupy. The object of Marxist critique is to reveal the social relations that are hidden behind relations among objects, and to reveal the creativity of the worker hidden behind the objectification of human beings.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism
There is really no need for anti-intellectualism; it really doesn’t take but two seconds to wikipedia “reification” or “fictional representations of race” and get even the jist of it. Shying away from ideas just because they’re not immediately recognizable or immediately conceptually gratifying does nothing for this debate but make it impossible to access a realm of discussion that would be actually pretty useful if you gave it a chance.
I believe the old saying was “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach”?? haha…perhaps taken a little too far with this add. Nonetheless, I like your writing, you have wonderful potentials to be a food critic….a novelist….or a sitcom writer?? haha…just kidding…