Article

Abstract This article argues that the notion of the sexualization of culture is too general to be a useful conceptual tool. The article has two main objectives. First, it seeks to interrogate the notion of sexualization as a way of understanding the proliferation of sexually explicit imagery within contemporary advertising. Rather than taking up a position for or against sexualization (in the familiar way), it seeks to open up the notion in order to explore the diverse practices that are commonly grouped together under this heading. Using advertising as an example, it argues that sexualization is far from being a singular or homogenous process, that different people are sexualized in different ways and with different meanings and indeed that many remain excluded from what has been called the democratization of desire operating in visual culture. Secondly, the article develops a feminist intersectional analysis to critically read some of the different ways in which advertising might be said to be sexualized. It looks at three different and contrasting, but easily recognizable gures within contemporary advertising: the goodlooking male sixpack, the sexually agentic heterosexual midriff and the hot lesbian, usually intertwined with her beautiful double or Other. The aim is to highlight the point that sexualization does not operate outside of processes of gendering, radicalization and classing, and works within a visual economy that remains profoundly ageist and heteronormative. The article argues that an attention to differences is crucial to understanding the phenomena, practices and scopic regimes that are often lumped together under the heading equalization of culture. Keywords advertising, feminism, intersectionality, masculinity, sexualization

Rosalind Gill
Open University, UK

Beyond the Sexualization of Culture Thesis: An Intersectional Analysis of Sixpacks,Midriffs and Hot Lesbians in Advertising
Sexualities http://sex.sagepub.com Copyright 2009 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) Vol 12(2): 137160 DOI: 10.1177/1363460708100916

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Scenes from advertising: Beyond sexualization

An attractive man reclines in the sun, by azure waters, his muscular chest oiled and exposed, and his crotch occupying centre shot; a woman on an escalator becomes aware that all eyes male and female are on her perfectly shaped cleavage; two scantily clad lesbians writhe erotically together in the mud; a tethered man on his hands and knees, his pants pulled down, is shown submitting to a leather-clad dominatrix; four well-dressed men stand looking down at a beautiful woman who is lying on the ground, held down at the wrists by a fth man; a sexy kidult gazes at us while sucking suggestively on a lollipop . . .

All these scenes come from recent advertisements seen in the UK and elsewhere. All of them mobilize sexual meanings in a vivid and explicit way, and would be taken by many commentators as evidence of a more general sexualization of culture (APA Task Force, 2007: 11; McNair, 1996, 2002; Paul, 2005; Rush and La Nauze, 2006). For some, this would be cause for alarm, signs of the degradation and profanity of popular culture (Hitchens, 2002; Paul, 2005); for others, it would be reason for celebration, read as an index of increasing cultural maturity and openness in relation to sex, perhaps even as a democratization of the visual eld (McNair, 1996, 2002); and for others still, a matter of urgent feminist concern (APA Task Force, 2007; Caputi, 2003; Kilbourne, 1999; Levy, 2005). Proponents of each position would agree, however, that, what they were seeing in such advertisements could be understood as part of a wider phenomenon understood in terms of the rise of raunch (Levy, 2005) the development of a pornied culture (Paul, 2005), or the expansion of the pornosphere into everyday life (McNair, 2002). The aim of this article is to challenge, complicate, perhaps even queer, such a reading, and to argue that it is necessary to go beyond general claims about sexualization to understand these transformations in visual culture. This article has two main objectives. First, it seeks to interrogate the notion of sexualization as a way of understanding the proliferation of sexually explicit imagery within contemporary advertising. Rather than taking up a position for or against sexualization (in the familiar way), the article seeks to open up the notion in order to explore the diverse practices that are commonly grouped together under this heading. Using advertising as an example, I will argue that sexualization is far from being a singular or homogenous process, that different people are sexualized in different ways and with different meanings and indeed many remain excluded from what McNair (2002: 11) has called the democratization of desire operating in visual culture. Second, I will develop a feminist intersectional analysis to critically read some of the different ways in which advertising might be said to be sexualized. My point will be to highlight that sexualization does not operate outside of processes of gendering, 138

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racialization and classing, and works within a visual economy that remains profoundly ageist and heteronormative. In short, my aim is to bring a focus on differences to discussions of sexualization, and to look at the specicity of different kinds of sexualized representations. By focusing on advertising in a predominantly UK context I am choosing a eld that is highly structured and highly regulated by codes of taste and decency.1 Moreover, I am selecting my examples largely from within mainstream media terrestrial television, general interest newspapers and magazines, and outdoors advertising (on billboards, bus shelters and other public spaces) rather than from adult media, LBGTQ publications or the internet, where much more sexually explicit material is to be found. Notwithstanding this, there exists considerable diversity in what we might understand as sexualized representations from adverts using the iconography of BDSM to the adultication of child models, and from the eroticization of heterosexual rape to the playful depiction of lipstick lesbians. I will look at three different types of representational practice within advertising: sexy or eroticized depictions of young mens bodies; postfeminist constructions of active desiring heterosexual women, and adverts which feature sexualized depictions of hot lesbians. None of these are new; indeed, each of these visual constructions has been well established for at least a decade. However, my aim is less to say something about how advertising is changing now, than to deploy these three easily recognizable gures in an argument intended to interrogate the usefulness of the general notion of sexualization. In the next section I will consider briey some of the claims about the sexualization of culture, will introduce the notion of intersectionality and will set out the gurative methodology I plan to use. The main body of the article will then examine the gures of the sixpack, midriff and hot lesbian in advertising. Finally I draw together the strands of the argument to highlight the importance of going beyond sexualization as a way of thinking about contemporary visual culture. Throughout, I use the term sexualization in scare quotes to highlight my scepticism to the notion when it is used within a violent generalizing logic that renders differences invisible.

Advertising and the sexualization: An intersectional analysis

In the last few years there have been a growing number of discussions of the sexualization of culture. This phrase is used to denote something more than the Foucaultian-inspired idea that sex has become the big story (Plummer, 1995: 4) but speaks to a range of different things: a 139

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contemporary preoccupation with sexual values, practices and identities; the public shift to more permissive sexual attitudes; the proliferation of sexual texts; the emergence of new forms of sexual experience; the apparent breakdown of rules, categories and regulations designed to keep the obscene up at bay; [and the] fondness for scandals, controversies and panics around sex (Attwood, 2006: 77). Media are contradictory locations for exploring sexualization since they are sites both where the phenomenon can (arguably) be observed and where it is discussed and dissected, usually as a matter of concern. Not infrequently these two can coexist in the same space, as when newspapers and magazines print outraged or concerned readers opinion pieces about toys featuring the playboy bunny or the selling to children of T-shirts bearing the legend Future Porn Star (to take two recent examples), amidst a range or other content (photographs of topless women, adverts for telephone sex lines and so on) which itself might attract the label sexualized. The media, then, are paradoxically perhaps both the biggest source of sexualized representations, as well as the primary space where debates about sexualization are aired. There is a surprising degree of consensus about the sexualization of culture as an empirical phenomenon both in media/popular writing and in more scholarly texts. Writers from divergent perspectives tend to agree that something has changed, that the late 20th-century and early 21stcentury media in the West are characterized by an unprecedented degree of sexual revelation and exhibitionism in which public nakedness, voyeurism and sexualized looking are permitted, indeed encouraged, as never before (McNair, 2002: ix). Where commentators disagree is about how this should be understood (including what gave rise to it) and interpreted. It is possible to identify three broad positions, which we might call the public morals position, the democratizing sex position, and feminist approaches. The rst regards the sexualization of culture from a concern with standards, taste and public decency. It sees sexualization as producing a dumbed-down sexual culture that panders to and celebrates the basest instincts of humankind (Hitchens, 2002; Kupfermann, 1996). Religious views are often cited (particularly by right wing variants of this position), and sexualized culture is regarded as profane and debased. From the left, the commodication of private, intimate experience and the entry of commerce into profound human relationships is lamented (Freedland, 2000). The main criteria by which sexualization is judged by the public morals position are the volume of representations and their explicitness, with few, if any, distinctions made between the kinds of material being considered. Sex education material can fall foul of proponents of this position, and in the UK a private members Bill proposed by Peter Luff MP in the late 1990s, sought to have all sexual material removed from magazines targeted at girls and young women but not, it 140

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should be noted, from their male counterparts, thus, making clear the gendered subtext to arguments from this position, which also frequently indict feminism for ongoing cultural degradation see (Tyler, 2007). Diametrically opposed to the public morals position is the democratizing sex approach, which regards the same phenomena from an optimistic, sometimes celebratory perspective. Brian McNair has articulated this argument most fully in his books Mediated Sex (1996) and Striptease Culture (2002). McNair argues that a communications revolution has inspired a more pluralistic sexual culture and thus promoted a democratization of desire (2002: 11). For McNair the current everydayness of porn gives everyone access to the pornosphere without the negative social and psychological consequences that used to be associated with it. Porn is transgressive and liberatory, for women as well as men, McNair argues. Indeed, he claims that the more open and diverse a countrys sexual culture, the more established and hegemonic its womens rights are likely to be. From this perspective, the spread of porno chic, regarded with alarm by moral guardians, should in fact be seen as a sign of cultural maturity, openness and sexual liberation. Thirdly, we can identify some broadly feminist approaches to the sexualization of culture. These differ markedly from the anti-porn positions taken by some in the 1980s (Dworkin, 1981; Dworkin and MacKinnon, 1988) but are nevertheless concerned with articulating a specically feminist response to current shifts in representational practice and popular culture. Some third wave positions build from the sex positive feminism of the 1980s (Calia, 1994; Chancer, 1998; Johnson, 2002; Rubin, 1984) Some examine contemporary sexualization as a postfeminist phenomena linked to discourses of celebrity, choice and empowerment (Gill, 2003a, 2008, 2009; McRobbie, 2004; see also Gillis and Coleman, 2008) One of the most fully developed feminist arguments about sexualization is Ariel Levys (2005) searing attack on raunch culture. Levy argues that the sexual objectication of women is being repackaged as empowerment, but contends that raunch culture is not essentially progressive, it is essentially commercial. Raunch culture isnt about opening our minds to the possibilities and mysteries of sexuality. Its about endlessly reiterating one particular and particularly saleable shorthand for sexiness (2005: 29). One important point made by Levy concerns the gender asymmetry of sexualization: proving that you are hot, worthy of lust, and necessarily that you seek to provoke lust is still exclusively womens work (2005: 33). This might seem an obvious point, self evident even, yet it is notable how many writers discuss sexualization through a generalizing logic that conceals the uneven power relations at work. Thus we have the pornographication of everyday life, the sexualization of children, corporate paedophilia, (McNair, 2002; Rush and La Nauze, 2006) and 141

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so on which mystify the real situation by occluding the gender, race, class, and age relations at work in sexualized visual culture. Outside feminist work there is still little attention to gender, and it is primarily feminist researchers, too, who have begun to open up the notion of sexualization to greater scrutiny, through attention to other axes of difference, such as class (see Arthurs, 2004; Attwood, 2006).2 It is this lack of attention to differences, this failure to move beyond a general, homogenizing notion of sexualization that makes an intersectional approach particularly urgent. The notion of intersectionality, though only coined in 1989 (by Kimberl Crenshaw), articulates a set of ideas that have informed feminist work for decades, namely the understanding that social positions are relational rather than additive and the need to make visible the multiple positioning that constitutes everyday life and the power relations that are central to it (Phoenix and Pattynama, 2006: 187). As Brah and Phoenix put it:
we regard the concept of intersectionality as signifying the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple axes of differentiation economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential intersect in historically specic contexts. The concept emphasizes that different dimensions of social life cannot be separated out into discrete and pure strands. (Brah and Phoenix, 2004: 76)

In the analysis presented here I will seek to provide a (feminist) intersectional analysis that pays attention to gender, class, age, sexuality and racialization within practices of sexualization in advertising. I draw from visual/semiotic approaches within cultural studies. The approach adopted will be a gurative one. Following Tylers important work on the gures of the chav and the asylum seeker (Tyler, 2006, 2008), I use the term gure to describe the ways in which, at different historical and cultural moments, specic bodies become overdetermined and publicly imagined and represented (gured) in excessive distorted and/or caricatured ways that are expressive of an underlying crisis or anxiety (Tyler, 2008). This approach is a material-discursive one that understands representations as not merely representing the world but as constitutive and generative. It focuses on the repetition of gures across different media sites in such a way that they seem to take on a life of their own. In looking at the gure of the chav, for example, Tyler is able to explore the ways in which class identities are mediated, and how the affective and emotional qualities attributed to this gure slide into corporeal qualities which literally materialize him or her. In this sense the work examines how the ideological-affective is made real, gured, and materialized. In this analysis I will be examining the gures of the sixpack, the midriff and the hot lesbian. Rather than tracking them across different 142

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media or genres (which would be an interesting and worthwhile project), I will be focusing on their repetition and materialization in multiple types of sexualized advertising, examining the forms of in/visibility they make possible and using an intersectional approach to go beyond the tendency to speak of sexualization as if it were a singular, unmarked process.

Men as sex objects: The sixpacks

One of the most profound shifts in visual culture in the last two decades has been the proliferation of representations of the male body. Where once womens bodies dominated advertising landscapes now mens have taken their place alongside womens on billboards, cinema screens and in magazines. However, it is not simply that there are more images of men circulating, but that a specic kind of representational practice has emerged for depicting the male body: namely an idealized and eroticized aesthetic showing a toned, young body. What is signicant about this type of representation is that it codes mens bodies in ways that give permission for them to be looked at and desired (Cohan and Hark, 1993; Gill et al., 2000; Jeffords, 1994; Mulvey, 1975; Nixon, 1996). This transformation has prompted much discussion, with claims that we are all objectied now and that idealized-sexualized representational strategies are no longer limited to womens bodies. Indeed, many concerns have been raised about the impact of this representational shift on mens wellbeing their self-esteem, mental health, and the possibility that they will become increasingly susceptible to eating disorders and other body-image-related conditions (Grogan, 1999; Wykes and Gunter, 2005). There is a growing sense in much writing that visual culture has become equalized, and that we are all today subject to relentless sexualization.3 I want to contest this and to argue that there are good reasons for going beyond general claims about sexualization to look at the specic ways in which mens bodies materialize in visual culture. I want to suggest that, despite the apparent similarities, there are in fact profound differences in the ways in which mens and womens bodies are represented sexually. Moreover, these patterns of sexualization have different determinants, employ different modes of representation, and are likely to be read in radically different ways because of long, distinct histories of gender representations and the politics of looking. The catalysts for this shift in visual culture have been considered by a number of writers (Beynon, 2002; Chapman and Rutherford, 1988; Edwards, 1997; Mort, 1996; Nixon, 1996; Wernick, 1991). At a general level the representations can be understood as part of the shift away from the male as norm in which masculinity lost its unmarked status and 143

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became visible as gendered. Sally Robinson (2000) argues that white masculinity was rendered visible through pressure from black and womens liberation movements, which were highly critical of its hegemony. A variety of new social movements galvanized the creation of the new man, the reinvention of masculinity along more gentle, emotional and communicative lines. More specically, the growing condence of gay liberation movement in western countries, and the increasing signicance of the pink economy helped to produce a greater range of representations of the male body in gay magazines and popular culture. Part of the shift can be understood in terms of these images going mainstream and, as they did so, opening up space for an active gaze among heterosexual women (Moore, 1988). Moreover, the shift had signicant economic determinants: retailers, marketers and magazine publishers were keen to develop new markets and had afuent men in their sights as the biggest untapped source of high spending consumers (Edwards, 1997). Style magazines like The Face helped this enterprise by producing a new visual vocabulary for the representation of mens bodies, and this too opened up space for eroticized practices of representation (Mort, 1996; Nixon, 1996). As Rowena Chapman (1988) argues, new man was a contradictory formation, representing both a response to critique from progressive social movements, and a gleam in the eyes of advertisers, marketers and companies aspiring to target young and afuent men. Perhaps the gure of the metrosexual that has come to prominence more recently symbolizes the extent to which marketingdriven constructions won out over more explicitly political articulations of new masculinity.4 The radical transformation in the portrayal of men in mainstream visual culture began more than 20 years ago (see Nixon, 1996). By the early 1990s the eroticized representation of male bodies was well established, particularly in fashion and fragrance advertising and the emerging market for male grooming products. But rather than a diversity of different representations of the male body, most adverts belong to a very specic type. The models are generally white, they are young, they are muscular and slim, they are usually clean-shaven (with perhaps the exception of a little designer stubble), and they have particular facial features which connote a combination of softness and strength strong jaw, large lips and eyes, and soft looking, clear skin (Edwards, 1997). As Tim Edwards (1997) has argued, this combination of muscularity/hardness and softness in the particular look of the models allows them to manage contradictory expectations of men and masculinity as strong and powerful but also gentle and tender they embody, in a sense, a cultural contradiction about what a man is meant to be. The famous poster Lenfant, showing a muscular, bare-chested man cradling a baby, perfectly exemplies this, and 144

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was Athenas (the poster company) best-selling item for many years (Chapman and Rutherford, 1988). Older bodies are strikingly absent and there are strong and persistent patterns of racialization to be found in the corpus of eroticized images. White bodies are over-represented, but they are frequently not AngloAmerican or northern European bodies, but bodies that are coded as Latin, with dark hair and olive skin, referencing long histories of sexual Othering and exoticism (Nixon, 1996). Black, African American and African Caribbean bodies are also regularly represented in a highly eroticized manner, but these bodies are usually reserved for products associated with sport, drawing on cultural myths about black male sexuality and physical prowess. It is also worth noting that adverts depicting black men frequently use black male celebrities (e.g. Tiger Woods, Thierry Henri), in contrast to the unknown models who are used when the sexy body is white. Peter Jackson (1994) has argued that this does nothing to challenge the underlying racial logic of representation, but in fact reinforces it by presenting the acceptable face of black masculinity shorn of the more threatening associations of a stereotypically anonymous black manhood. For many commentators, the representation of men as objects of the gaze rather than as the ones doing the looking constituted a major shift. Frank Mort (1996) argued that it was nothing short of the visual reassembly of masculinity and claimed that the cropping of male bodies to focus on selected, eroticized areas e.g. the upper arms, the chest and the sixpack represented a metaphorical fragmenting or fracturing of male power. Mark Simpson argued that, quite simply, male dominance and heterosexuality would not survive this transformation in visual culture:
Mens bodies are on display everywhere; but the grounds of mens anxiety is not just that they are being exposed and commodied but that their bodies are placed in such a way as to passively invite a gaze that is undifferentiated: it might be female or male, hetero or homo. Traditional male heterosexuality, which insists that it is always active, sadistic and desiring, is now inundated with images of mens bodies as passive, masochistic and desired. Narcissism, the desire to be desired, once regarded as a feminine quality par excellence, is, it seems, in popular culture at least, now more often associated with men than with women. Sexual difference no longer calls the shots, active no longer maps onto masculine, nor passive onto feminine. Traditional heterosexuality cannot survive this reversal: it brings masculinity into perilously close contact with that which must always be disavowed: homosexuality. (Simpson, 1994: 4)

In advertising, a number of strategies were developed to deal with the anxieties and threats produced by this shift. On the one hand, many adverts used models with an almost phallic muscularity the size and hardness of the muscles standing in for male power. Indeed, writing 145

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about an earlier generation of male pinups, Richard Dyer (1982) talked about representations of the male body having a hysterical feel. Likewise, Susan Bordo (1997) argued that many male striptease routines tend to eroticize the teasing display of male power rather than the sexiness of the bodies themselves (but see her later argument in Male Bodies, 1999, and see also Smith, 2007). The use of photographic conventions and mise-en-scne from high art also served as a distancing device to diffuse some of the potential threats engendered by sexualizing the male body. Giving the representations an arthouse look and feel through the use of black and white photography or sculpted models that made reference to classical iconography, offered the safety of distance, as well as connoting afuence, sophistication and class.5 The organization of gazes within adverts also works to diminish the transgressive threat discussed by Simpson. Men tend not to smile or pout, nor to deploy any of the bodily gestures or postures discussed by Goffman (1979) as indices of the ritualised subordination of women in advertising, and nor are they depicted in mirror shots so long a favoured mode for conveying womens narcissism. In contrast, in what we might call sixpack advertising men are generally portrayed standing or involved in some physical activity, and they look back at the viewer in ways reminiscent of street gazes to assert dominance or look up or off, indicating that their interest is elsewhere (Dyer, 1982). They are mostly pictured alone in ways that reference the signicance of independence as a value marking hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995), or they are pictured with a beautiful woman to reassure viewers of their heterosexuality. However it is not simply the case that these representations must disavow homoerotic desire. On the contrary, gay men are a key target audience for such advertising representations, being acknowledged as fashion leaders and early adopters in clothing, grooming and the purchase of fragrances. Indeed, through the gure of the metrosexual marketing professionals sought to rearticulate these interests in looking good to a heterosexual agenda. The representations advertisers construct have to appeal simultaneously to (at least) three different constituencies: gay men, heterosexual women and heterosexual men in such a way as not to antagonize, alienate or frighten straight men. Discussing the way advertisers managed this, Tim Edwards (1997) highlights the paradoxical nature of mens magazines as a site for such images, pointing to the fundamentalist assertion of heterosexuality in written texts juxtaposed with page after page of homoerotic images of the male body as one example of how this contradiction was managed, through a splitting that operated between the visual and written texts. In addition to the threats posed by homoeroticism, there are also anxieties related specically to gender hierarchy namely to the 146

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presentation of male bodies as objects of a heterosexual female gaze. The anxieties threatened here are often dealt with through humour. This can be seen in a long-running advert for Diet Coke on British television (and elsewhere). In this advert a number of attractive women (in their mid30s) turn up in an unspecied ofce environment claiming to be there for their 11 oclock appointment. The camera cuts between their arrival in reception and their seat in the waiting room in which each of them is depicted in a state of obvious sexual anticipation (licking lips, breathing heavily, rearranging hairand so on). Only then does the camera reveal the cause of their arousal an attractive labourer, sans T-shirt, pausing to drink his Diet Coke on a scaffold outside the window. The choice of labourer is an interesting one since men in the building trade have become iconic signiers of a particular kind of in your face sexism. This is profoundly racialized and classed, located as white, working class and distinguished from the more seemly or respectable sexism of other groups. Where once building workers ogled women, the advert playfully suggests, now women ogle them! However, the camp and exaggerated desire of the women and the comic nature of the 11 oclock appointment serve to place the advert in humorous, ironic quotation marks. The exchange of looks between the females and the male are not equivalent, and are not straightforward reversals of patterns of power involved in mens looks at women. This is partly because each individual gaze operates in the context of our collective knowledge about the politics of looking men look at women and women watched themselves being looked at as John Berger famously put it and is also weighted by a long cultural history of the beauty myth (Wolf, 1990) in which women are subject to constant scrutiny and assessment of their appearance. No single instance of women looking at men could reverse that, nor, without this history, does it have the authentic, referential quality of examples of men looking at women though this is changing in the context of cultural shifts in which women do look back in certain sites and as McRobbie has argued in which among young women in particular, feisty girl power discourses can include ogling men, catcalling and giving them marks out of 10 for tness or buffness. (See also Smith, 2002 on women at Chippendales shows.) In multiple ways, then, advertising images of the last two decades have been designed to offset or diffuse some of the anxieties and threats generated by presenting men as objects of an undifferentiated sexual gaze. Neither hegemonic masculinity nor the institution of heterosexuality have been destroyed though we are seeing more fractured hegemonies perhaps and sexualized representation of the male body has not proved incommensurable with male dominance. Rather it appears that a highly specic set of modes of representing the male body have 147

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emerged which are quite different from sexualized representations of womens bodies.

Sexual objectication postfeminist style: The midriffs

If advertisings representation of men has undergone a dramatic shift, then so too have sexualized representations of women been reinvented. In the last decade or so a new gure has been constructed to sell to women: a young, attractive, heterosexual woman who knowingly and deliberately plays with her sexual power and is always up for sex. Following Douglas Rushkoff (n.d.) I will call her the midriff, but note that she goes under various appellations: David Machin and Joanna Thornborrow (2003) have identied her as the fun fearless female an increasingly globalized gure who appears in different transnational sites in magazines such as Cosmopolitan, while others simply refer to the new, condent, powerful, sexy femininity she embodies (Arthurs, 2004; Lazar, 2004; Macdonald, 1995) Where once sexualized representations of women in advertising presented them as passive, mute objects of an assumed male gaze, today women are presented as active, desiring, sexual subjects who choose to present themselves in a seemingly objectied manner because it suits their (implicitly liberated) interests to do so. A mid-1990s advert for Wonderbra pictured model Eva Herzigovas cleavage, and hailed us with a quotation from Mae West: Or are you just pleased to see me? The rst part of the quotation is that a gun in your pocket? with its implication that the male viewer had an erection was left out, for us as viewers to ll in. This was no passive, objectied sex object, but a woman who was knowingly playing with her sexual power. Similarly, the condent, assertive tone of a Triumph (bra) advert from the same period is quite different from earlier representations: New hair, new look, new bra. And if he doesnt like it, new boyfriend. Such adverts employ a feminist tone and target their address to both men and women. A crucial aspect of the shift from objectication to sexual subjectication is that this is framed in advertising through a discourse of playfulness, freedom and, above all, choice. Women are presented as not seeking mens approval but as pleasing themselves, and, in so doing, they just happen to win mens admiration. A South African advert for She-bear lingerie in 1999, for example, featured an attractive young white woman wearing only her lingerie and a nuns habit and rosary. The slogan, Wear it for yourself, ties the brand identity to women who dress for themselves rather than for men even if they are not nuns. If hes late you can always start without him, declares another lingerie advert in which the mise-en-scne constructs a picture of seduction, complete with carelessly abandoned underwear, but in which a sexual partner is absent. 148

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A discourse of empowerment is also central. Contemporary advertising targeted at the midriffs suggests, above all, that buying the product will empower you. I pull the strings asserts a beautiful woman in a black Wonderbra; Empower your eyes, says an advert for Shiseido mascara; Discover the power of femininity. Defy conventions and take the lead reads an advert for Elizabeth Arden beauty products. What is on offer in all these adverts is a specic kind of power the sexual power to bring men to their knees. Empowerment is tied to possession of a slim and alluring young body, whose power is the ability to attract male attention and (sometimes) female envy. As with representations of the male body, this change in sexualized depictions of young women had a number of different determinants. Womens increasing nancial independence throughout the 1980s and 1990s meant that they became targets for new products, and also forced a reconsideration of earlier modes of representation: showing a woman draped over a car to take an emblematic image of sexism from the 1970s may not be the best strategy if the aim is to sell that car to women. Moreover by the late 1980s and early 1990s advertisers had begun to recognize the signicance of many womens anger at being objectied and bombarded with unattainable, idealized images of femininity, and also sought to appropriate some of the cultural power and energy of feminism. Many writers have explored the ways in which feminism was recuperated by the media (Baehr and Dyer, 1987; Douglas, 1994; Hollows, 2000). Robert Goldman (1992) argues that the result was commodity feminism a bid to incorporate feminist ideas whilst emptying them of their political signicance and domesticating their critique of gender relations. Susan Douglas notes:
[A]dvertising agencies had gured out how to make feminism and anti feminism work for them . . . the appropriation of feminist desires and feminist rhetoric by Revlon, Lancome and other major corporations was nothing short of spectacular. Womens liberation metamorphosed into female narcissism unchained as political concepts like liberation and equality were collapsed into distinctly personal, private desires. (1994: 2478)

The construction of the midriff represented one of a number of different ways in which advertising responded to feminism, and picked up and amplied other selective trends (Gill, 2007). This gure is notable for opening up a new vocabulary for the sexualized representation of women in advertising, which aimed to banish the emphasis on passivity and objectication in favour of a modernized version of heterosexual femininity as feisty, sassy, and sexually agentic. This new set of meanings was produced through the combination of sexualized representations of womens bodies (focusing in particular on breasts, bottoms and owing 149

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hair, made-up lips and eyes), juxtaposed with written or verbal texts that purported to speak of womens new sexual agency. I bet I can get a taxi on New Years Eve 1999 declared a woman clad only in a black, cleavageenhancing bra, raising her arm in the internationally recognized gesture for hailing a cab. Look me in the eyes and tell me that you love me says another similarly attired knowingly highlighting the fact that her breasts might win out in the attention stakes. Femininity here is powerful, playful and narcissistic less desiring of a sexual partner than empowered by the knowledge of her own sexual attractiveness. Like the erotic presentation of mens bodies, the sexualized representation of womens is highly patterned and with multiple exclusions. It is clear that only some women can be sexual subjects: women who are young, white, heterosexual and conventionally attractive. Sexual subjectication operates within a resolutely heteronormative economy. It is not that lesbians are not presented as sexy (see next section) but that their sex appeal is not constructed in lying in the agentic, knowing playful I of the midriff. Moreover older women, fat women, and any women who do not live up to the increasingly narrow normative judgements of female attractiveness are excluded from the pleasurable, empowering world of midriff advertising. It is also worth considering the patterns of classing and racialization that are evident in this form of sexualization. As a phenomenon it is striking to note how white the gure of the midriffs is. Black womens bodies are sexualized in advertising, to be sure, but mostly in ways that differ sharply from the gure of the active, knowing, desiring sexual subject examined here. Rather, black womens bodies still seem more likely to be portrayed as objects, signalling sexual promise, soul or authenticity. In a 2007 advert for Revlon cosmetics, for example, the black models face is cropped, her eyes, wet-look lipstick and half-open mouth semiotically encoding mystery, pleasure and seductive sexual promise. Is the advert suggesting that she, like the product, is molten? Unlike the gure of the sexualized midriff, this woman does not address us, does not make reference to her own pleasure or desire, and is not presented as a sexual subject. In a racist visual economy, the meaning of these types of sexualization is different depending if the bodies are black or white.6 In ways that are less evident I would also suggest that this form of representational practice is profoundly classed. It denes itself against both an outdated sexual puritanism associated with the old bourgeoisie and, simultaneously, against the looseness or sluttishness of contemporary constructions of (racialized) lower-class (white trash) female sexuality exemplied most vividly in the gures of the chav girl or pram face (see McRobbie, 2009; Tyler, 2008) circulating widely in other parts of popular culture. The female sexuality constructed in midriff advertising occupies a 150

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new space constructed around a middle-class respectable sexiness (Skeggs, 1997, 2004).7 As Feona Attwood (2006) has argued, discussing new constructions of female sexuality to be found in shows like Sex and the City, the classiness [my emphasis] of female sexual activity is extremely important as a way of establishing its legitimacy so that it is precisely not read as sluttish or trashy (see also Arthurs, 2004; Millward Hargrave, 1999).

Queer chic and sexualization:Hot lesbians

The nal gure I want to consider is that of the hot lesbian who is seen increasingly in contemporary advertising. Again, as with the previous two gures examined, the focus is not on representations of lesbians in general but on a specic and relatively stable representational practice for the sexualized depiction of womanwoman relations. The last 10 years have witnessed an increasing number of representations of lesbians in media and culture in popular TV series for example Friends, Bad Girls, Ally McBeal, Sex and the City, and, of course, The L Word, in mainstream lms such as Wild Things, Heavenly Creatures, American Pie 2 and Kissing Jessica Stein, and in celebrity culture more broadly from k.d. langs erotic encounter with Cindy Crawford (for Vanity Fair magazine) to Madonnas kisses with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera at the 2003 MTV awards. Increasingly, as Garrity (2001) has noted, lesbian sexuality is hot (as any number of neologisms attests: designer dykery, lipstick lesbianism, queer chic and so on) Advertising is no exception. In June 2007 commercial closet, a webbased organization that monitors gay-themed adverts, had identied no fewer than 3500 adverts from 33 countries. This proliferation is partly the result of ourishing LGBTQ creativity in the wake of HIV and AIDS, the growing condence of queer media, and a recognition by companies of the signicance of the pink economy. It is also a result of the cultural coolness currently accruing to queer sexualities; queering an advert or deploying lesbian and gay themes has come to be regarded within the industry as an easy way of adding desirable edginess to a products image, and instantly giving it a more trendy, contemporary feel. The same process can be seen in music, as evidenced by the phenomenal success of Katy Perrys single I Kissed a Girl. The gure of the luscious lesbian within advertising is notable for her extraordinarily attractive, conventionally feminine appearance. Women depicted in this way are almost always slim yet curvaceous, awlessly made up and beautiful. Whilst this marks a rupture with earlier negative portrayals of lesbians as manly or ugly, such representations have been criticized for packaging lesbianism within heterosexual norms of female attractiveness (Ciasullo, 2001). Ciasullo argues that such portrayals seem 151

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to work to annihilate the butch. Like the midriff, then, the hot lesbian seems to rest on multiple exclusions, and in this case those excluded are precisely those with visibility in establishing lesbianism as a political identity: women who reject a traditionally feminine presentation. In contrast, however, Linda Dittmar argues that such representations might open up a potentially positive and hospitable space for some particularly white, middle-class and femme lesbians in popular culture (Dittmar, 1998; see also Jackson with Gilbertson, this issue). The packaging of lesbians within conventional norms of heterosexual feminine attractiveness is one way in which the gure appears to be constructed primarily for a straight male gaze. Commercial Closet lists an entire category of ads centred on male fantasy lesbians. The manner in which the hot lesbian is presented also seems designed for male titillation. The gure never appears alone (unlike the midriff or the sixpack) but is almost always depicted kissing, touching or locked in an embrace with another woman. Two main strategies appear to dominate this kind of representation: either each woman will be shown with her other e.g. a black woman with a blonde light-skinned woman, in ways reminiscent of many soft porn scenarios in which men choose their type or ava. Or, alternatively, they will be shown with another woman whom they resemble closely. This doubling is, of course, another common male sexual fantasy which plays out in porn and is implicitly alluded to in many adverts. A commercial for Beefeater gin, for example, shows two, almost identical, attractive, young, long-haired, long-legged, blonde women together, with the slogan Make it a double. Other scenarios also draw on the codes of heterosexual male porn: in an online advert for FCUK clothing, Fashion versus Style, two scantily clad women are seen wrestling, until the ght inevitably becomes sexual play and the pair tumble and writhe together erotically. Not only is this notable for being a stock scene from soft porn, but it is also markedly different from the way in which gay men are presented in adverts. Whilst lesbian women rarely appear in mainstream adverts except in this highly sexualized manner, gay men are rarely portrayed kissing or even touching and the kind of erotic contact displayed between women in the FCUK advert would be unimaginable between two men, even in cinema advertising which is often more liberally regulated than that of terrestrial TV. Indeed, notwithstanding Calvin Kleins Guitar Kiss and a few other celebrated adverts in which two men embrace, albeit rather chastely, for the most part gay men are signied through stylish and attractive appearance or through a series of negative stereotypes rather than intimate conduct. The gure of the hot lesbian is therefore marked out from both representations of heterosexual women and from representations of gay men.

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The sexualization of lesbian bodies, then, seems to be constructed in relation to heterosexuality not as an autonomous or independent sexual identity. An example should make this critique clear. In this advertisement, Kiss Cool, a chewing gum is shown having electric and erotic effects. A young woman chews the gum and suddenly zooms to a haystack where she is kissing a man. The scene then cuts to a car where the man is kissing a different woman. After this kiss the new lover is suddenly transported onto a sofa, and is kissing a different man. And so it goes on until nally the young woman is in a nightclub kissing another man, before proceeding to kiss a woman to the mans intense surprise and then apparent amusement. It would be hard to sustain the idea that the woman featured in this advert is a lesbian or even that she is bisexual. Her kiss with another woman is clearly marked as transgressive in a way that the other kisses were not, and the cameras focus on her boyfriends shock and then amusement reinforces the heteronormative economy of gazes in this advert. We as (presumed heterosexual) viewers are invited to look to him to provide a guide to how to react to this kiss: it is sexy, to be sure, has produced a frisson, but is ultimately not to be taken seriously. This is an example of what Diamond (2005) has called hetero exibility to denote heterosexual women experimenting sexually with other women. It presents girl-on-girl action as exciting, fun, but, crucially, as entirely unthreatening to heterosexuality (see also Wilkinson, 1996). Deborah Bright (1998) discusses it in terms of the de-gaying of queer sexualities. Arguably, one of the pernicious aspects of this is that it allows advertisers to buy into the hot, now social currency of queer whilst erasing lesbianism as such. In a truly queer world in which sexual identities no longer mattered this might be welcomed, but in a context in which heteronormativity remains powerful, and non-normative sexualities are marginalized, it appears entirely cynical. Indeed a key facet of many constructions of the hot lesbian is precisely the stress on her inauthenticity something that young audiences, in a study by Sue Jackson with Tamsyn Gilbertson (this issue), articulated clearly. To them, such gures were not real but performances designed to titillate men or to annoy or punish a boyfriend. Such readings resonate strongly with adverts such as Kiss Cool. In this sense, lesbian identity is obliterated even before it can be imagined.

Conclusion
The aim of this article has been to interrogate the notion of sexualization by opening up questions of difference. I have argued that general claims about the sexualization of culture have paid insufcient attention 153

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to the different ways in which different bodies are represented erotically. Through an analysis of three key gures from contemporary advertising the sexy male sixpack, the active heterosexually desiring midriff and the hot lesbian I have sought to demonstrate that power relations of gender and sexuality remain pivotal to processes of sexualization. This is not just a matter of supercial variation, but rather through practices of sexualization people are discursively constituted as very different kinds of subject or object. By using an intersectional approach, I have tried to trouble generalized or neutralized accounts of sexualization whether they derive from moral panics about cultural debasement or optimistic readings of the democratization of desire. The representations of the sexy men and women we see in advertising are not equivalent: they have different meanings, different histories and are constructed in radically different ways. I have argued that eroticized representations of the male body are designed both to produce and disavow homoerotic desire, as well as to deal with the manifold anxieties occasioned by making the male body the object of multiple gazes. In contrast, in this postfeminist moment, the sexualization of womens bodies requires an emphasis on womens pleasure and empowerment. However traditional or objectied the visual representation of womens bodies, it must be framed within a discourse of fun, freedom and female agency. Indeed, there often seems to be an inverse relationship between the visual and verbal texts of midriff advertising such that the more closely an image borrows from the vocabulary of heterosexual soft porn, the more the advertisements written or verbal text will stress womens empowerment. Gay men and lesbian women too are sexualized in very different ways in mainstream advertising. Queer chic as it operates within advertising is not an undifferentiated practice, but one that is structured both by heteronormativity and by gender. Gender and sexuality have been central to the analysis produced here, but this intersectional reading has also paid attention to other axes of difference. In particular, age, class and race have been identied as central to the way in which sexualization operates. To a large extent, older people particularly older women have been excluded from what many referred to as the sexualization of culture. Sexual desire is frequently depicted as inappropriate indeed as repulsive and disgusting when the woman experiencing it is over 40, and there are many adverts which verge on the gerontophobic (Woodward, 1999) in their depiction of older women. Class, too, mediates sexualization in signicant ways, such that it makes little sense to think of representations of sexiness outside of class. In the gures examined here sexualization operates through, and is inected by, aspirational and bourgeois bohemian class discourses, and by minute distinctions of taste: the sexiness constructed is sophisticated, 154

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knowing, articulated through an ethic of fun and humour, and always coded as (effortlessly) respectable. I have also documented some features of the strong patterns of racialization operating in the sexualized visual economy of advertising. These intersect intimately with class, gender and sexuality. The midriff in advertising appears as an almost exclusively white phenomenon, a racialized postfeminist icon. Black women are not constructed in advertising as feisty sexually desiring subjects (despite the fact that popular music is a site where such constructions are found). The sexualization of black men, too, is highly specic. Black mens bodies are rarely rendered objects of the gaze except when celebrity status allows a gure to signify a particularized set of meanings, distinct from black masculinity more generally. Dark haired, olive skinned Latin-looking men dominate the advertising corpus of eroticized images of the male body, and it is notable how rarely Asian male bodies are constructed as sexy (Nixon, 1996). I have argued, then, that the term sexualization needs to be used with greater care, specicity and attention to difference. I have pointed to the differences between the ways in which the three gures examined here are sexualized, and have also highlighted some of the patterns and exclusions within these bodies of representation organized around class, race, gender, sexuality, age and appearance. In as much as the term remains useful it clearly refers to an ongoing, dynamic process. Although one can freeze the frame as I have done here and identify relatively stable patterned constructions easily recognizable gures that are mobilized repeatedly these representations are not ossied; they change. This is obvious if we look at changing representations of the male body. Although the muscular sixpack is still to be found in advertising and he represents an easily identiable gure, other, different eroticized representations of the male body have emerged in recent years. In 2003 an advert for Dior broke taboos by using a naked man to promote a fragrance. Almost as signicant as the showing of his penis was the presence of abundant facial and body hair on this model marking a departure from earlier, more typical representations of the male body (that are manscaped to use the current parlance). Thinner, more vulnerable-looking models have also become popular, alongside the male superwaifs in fashion. Similarly, men are increasingly pictured in repose or lying down. A 2007 advert for Light Blue, shows a man (model: David Gandy) reclining in the sun, his crotch occupying centre shot. While some features of the representation remain similar to the sixpack particularly the accentuated muscularity of the arms, and the nature of the models gaze this advert is notable for the relatively passive depiction, the centring of the genitals, as well as the more conventionally feminine pose adopted (in fact, an almost identical pose is adopted by a female model in 155

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the sister advert for the womens version of this fragrance).8 Another campaign for Dolce and Gabbana products broke the mould with a series of homoerotic locker room adverts in which, rather than being pictured alone, a group of men in their underpants are shown posing together (and in one case even touching!). These changing representations require new analyses to enquire about shifts in modes and meaning of eroticization. What is clear however is that a one size ts all notion of sexualization is not sufcient for understanding these shifts. Sexualization remains an ongoing process in advertising, but in order to understand it, we need to move beyond a generic, undifferentiated notion, to look at the ways in which advertisings commodied sexiness links to gender, sexuality, class, race and age.

Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful to Imogen Tyler for her stimulating comments on the rst draft of this article, and for her development of the gurative methodology which has been invaluable for the analysis presented here. Thanks also to Karen Ciclitira, Sadie Wearing, Risn Ryan Flood and Giovanni Pordo for their helpful feedback.

Notes
1. Jane Arthurs (2004) and Clarissa Smith (2007) both note the importance of the specic regulatory environment for understanding sexualized representations. 2. Others who have discussed class in relation to pornography are Laura Kipnis (1996), Mark Jancovich (2001) and Jane Juffer (1998). 3. Indeed, one of my most common experiences when exploring sexualized representations of women in a teaching context is that someone will say but men are objectied too, as if this meant that gender were no longer relevant to exploring sexualization. It is usually stated with the authority of one who feels they have spotted a fatal aw in the argument and dealt it a terminal blow with this observation. 4. See my earlier work for a discussion of constructions of the gures of the new man and the new lad, which highlights the extent to which a range of cultural intermediaries are involved in not simply representing new masculinities through such gures, but quite literally constructing and materializing them (Gill, 2003b). 5. A study for the British Broadcasting Standards Commission found that viewers were far more tolerant of tasteful depictions of sex than they were of tacky ones a distinction that is profoundly dependent on various kinds of class markers (Millward Hargrave, 1999; see also Jancovich, 2001). 6. It is notable that this argument does not work across all elds of popular culture, despite remaining true for advertising. In popular music, black female artists (but note these are usually light-skinned women in R&B) are accorded the sexual subjecthood bestowed on white midriffs in advertising. Moreover Carolyn Cooper (2004) argues that slackness in Jamaican ragga

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and dancehall gives women a powerful and liberating sexual autonomy that recalls Baktinian notions of the carnivaleque (see also Denise Nobles contrasting discussion, Noble, 2007). 7. This respectable sexiness is always, however, at risk, and celebrities thought to embody it can quickly become white trashed, as happened for example to Britney Spears. (Thanks to Imogen Tyler for this observation). 8. Though partner advert would be a better analogy since in the screen version the two are shown locked in a passionate kiss. The advertisement is thus one which has it both ways offering a potentially pleasurable homoerotic representation in the poster and magazine version yet presenting unambiguous heterosexuality in the screening.

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Biographical Note
Rosalind Gill is Professor of Subjectivity and Cultural Analysis at the Open University. She is author of Gender and the Media (Polity Press, 2007), and is currently writing a book about Mediated Intimacy. Her collection on Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process (co-edited with Risn Ryan Flood) is published in March 2009 in Routledges Transformations in Feminism series. Address: Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK. [email: r.gill@open.ac.uk]

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