Why Would Sex Stop Selling:
Categorising of Women and the Inner Disunity amongst Themselves
The reader going through the first lines of this reflective account on ‘sex’ as a tool to ‘sell’, as the writer assumes, should be familiar with the issue; either from reading about it, hearing about it, or at least subconsciously having pieces of this narrative settled in the back of one’s mind. This rhetoric about the devilishness of advertising and related business industries using sexually appealing imagery that objectifies the body, sets up questionable beauty standards and generally stereotypes gender roles has been swirling around for a while. We are not so blind, deaf or unaware as to say that anything of how visual manipulation on sexuality renders the importance of personality, sounds new today. This discourse has seemingly wrapped us so tight, that we can start questioning if our organs of comprehension haven’t yet become numb and desensitized to the stimulus of how much we should care and be able to do something about it, apart from mere willingness to agree with it.
In a way, the widespread criticism about the shady dark side of sex commercialization is impacting the problem in seeing less of it, motivating different, broader portrayal that emphasizes the importance of intimacy, gender, race equality, and body diversity. Certain changes are taking place, so to speak.
However, does that suffice to inspiring mutual respect, appropriation of humanity and understanding that a body, used as a part of advertising scheme, is not only of a physical nature? That it’s a subtle entity with a mind, which belongs to a person who has a life of his/her own, and that the consent to have one’s body employed for commercial reasons does not entail acceptance of humiliation or being objectified?
From here onwards, I want to focus explicitly on talking about women: why our understandings of them in general, and between women themselves in particular are so tangled, estranged, ambivalent, stigmatizing and, why the issue of whether sex will or will not stop selling is only the top of the problem. By doing so I am going to offer my approach towards the actual roots of it, part of it being a thoughtless, general tendency to separating women into two categories, and the other part on competition and hate, revolving inside the inner circles of women themselves.
First of all, let’s look at the issue of categorization.
In a way, we appeal to our female counterparts basing our first impression completely on their looks. The visual attraction, likeability, determination whether they’re worth of attention is deeply grounded in the way we perceive their exterior. We sometimes go as far as to assume their personal characteristics according to the way they look, as if women were generally meant to visually please us, or at least to not disturb too much by looking less than acceptable, whatever the definition in our minds has been formed of this ‘acceptability’, that, I’m sure, has a lot to do with a particular imagery of sex as a means to sell that was going around for over a century.
In another way, the women are those we think of as a mother, a daughter, a dear friend, girlfriend, sister, anyone of sacred importance that deserves unquestionable respect, a category, where the looks and appeal have no accountable importance, as if allowed into questioning in the first place.
Sadly enough, by looking at women the first way, we forget, or more accurately — we don’t think, being naturally absent minded to acknowledge — that they are family members, or having close and personal ties to someone else, just like us. We don’t apply being gentle, supportive and compassionate to those women of ‘others’, as why would we, they are not anyhow sacredly related to us. However, as soon as someone dares to share an inappropriate comment about our own close kin, be it from an other man or a woman, we suddenly become preachers of morality, judges of indecency and expressive about such inadequate behaviour in no time.
What I mean here is that there is a true rupture, a gap that has naturally created itself in the positioning and talking about ‘women’ as in general, and the difference in the narratives we apply, or allow to be applied to the women who are close family members or in relationship to ourselves. A gap between how we behave with the women we know, and the women we allow ourselves to presume according to their looks.
And in this gap, I would argue, falls all the educational and moralising talks about all the wrongs of ‘sex’ as a tool to ‘sell’. Once we have agreed it’s traumatising and incorrect, it hasn’t simultaneously changed our behaviour, our mentality. And it hardly will, unless we apply our views and behaviours towards all women the same way we do (or at least majority of us tends to) to those deeply related to us. Can you think of allowing someone to body shame your mother, sexually harass your sister, best friend or humiliate your daughter? If no, why would we do that to someone else’s?
The second issue I want to speak about is the merciless, sometimes even harsher and deeper emotionally harming competition between women themselves. Reluctantly, but slowly, we get more and more information about how loving and caring for one another is healing and has deep historic roots in ancient societies; however envy, bullying, looking down, gossiping and mentally harassing each other is still more prominent to this day. It seems that where media and publicity has made us insecure over our bodies, social ruling stigmatised and injured understandings about our nature; where sisterhood can step in to offer means of mutual support, unconditional care and help reclaim our pride in our nature, women are yet fighting and harassing each other, becoming alienated and choosing to suffer alone. What’s the point, may I ask?
It has become so normalised to hear from female counterparts how they don’t like to be friends with women as they are so dramatic, crazy, emotionally unstable; to shame them for not looking good enough and hate for being ‘too beautiful’, dangerously intelligent, and probably more dangerously making us feel insecure and feel worse about ourselves. Either too much or too little, never enough, never perfect, always something more, or in certain cases a little bit less. Of course it is of no question that in cases of sensitive discourse, such as about sex as a tool to sell, it can get confusing and almost impossible not to agitate any criticism from any groups of women, whatever tone one may choose to approach issues concerning femininity, sociality, sexuality, or its portrayal. Women, amongst themselves are so divided, distributed and split into such number of groups, which can be considered natural, since we all have different interests; and yet, if once united, they would become able to encourage, inspire, promote self-esteem and unleash their true loving and healing energy, the one suppressed with jealousy, and imprints of unhealthy visions of what they could be instead of preciously accounting and respecting them for who they are. The prolonged and still escalating questioning of whether malicious campaigns and abuse of portraying intimate and sensual side of ours are wrong might even become irrelevant, as the change has to happen from the inside out, rather the outside in. Masking and modifying the exterior is definitely a move forward, but if the interior is fractured and disintegrated, it might not last too long before next big issue takes it’s place.
In terms of women in particular, and finally both, men and women in general, if we don’t understand how to treat each and everyone the way we would like to be treated ourselves, then maybe let’s think of how we would like to see our mothers, daughters and close friends being treated. Maybe that is a different perspective that to some might make more sense. Maybe that is the glue for the fractured pieces to stick together, in order to make changes, concerning our social conditioning, to last a bit longer and, therefore, enable us to move forward from same old tunes, such as ‘sex sells’, that have been stuck around for a bit too long now.
