At Red Tent Sisters’ in-store event last Friday evening, the film “Sexy Inc” was coupled with a presentation by my friend and fellow Women’s Studies MA graduate, Laura Cayen, on her thesis work on trends in birth control marketing. The pairing turned out to be even more fitting than I had anticipated. Considering the heightened presence of sexual representation in our cultural environment, stressed in the film—and its toxic effects on our youth—when situated against the peculiar absence of an explicit sexual discourse in birth control ads, made for a very alarming juxtaposition.
Sophie Bissonnette’s documentary, “Sexy Inc.” through interviews with pre-teenaged girls, and through the numerous examples shown, illustrates that the space of girlhood has been violently invaded, eroticized, pornified. Young consumers are no longer exceptions as targets of the longstanding and widely-uttered marketing mantra “sex sells”. Even the apparently toddler-aged baby “Bratz” dolls, are sold by being freakishly sexualized, and given flirty lashes, pouty lips and belly-tops. “Tweens”, as the film points out, is a corporate construction that functions to widen the span of the Teen market, bombarding pre-adolescent girls with products they do not need and more importantly, are perhaps not ready for. In one particularly resonant moment in the film, audiences were asked to trace images back to their origins in either a teen or porn magazine. Their failure at this task successfully proved the point that pornographic representation has shifted dramatically from the margins to the mainstream, and as a result, is tragically damaging the sexual identity development of our youth.
But while sex is being used to sell toys, toys are bizarrely being used to sell sex—or at least the implication of it anyway. The youthful design on Alesse-Canada’s interactive website, or Ortho-tricyclin’s ‘design-your-own pill-compact-contest’ are just two examples of what Laura has termed the “accessorization” of birth control, by which its aesthetic value is privileged over its sexual value. As she cleverly demonstrates in her presentation, the sanitization and concealment of sex in advertisements for oral contraceptives, despite the explicitness of sex elsewhere, makes this product guiltlessly marketable to a younger demographic; preparing girls physically but not socially or emotionally to negotiate healthy and consensual sexual relationships. So, regardless of the connotations of feminist empowerment that the mainstreaming of birth control might superficially signal, the messages in these ads fail miserably at equipping its consumers with a truly empowered conception of female sexuality.
The point that Laura’s research drove home, in conjunction with the film’s critique of our hypersexualized cultural reality, is that we are still far from being liberated when it comes to talking about, representing and expressing sexuality, contrary to the façade of empowerment that the media aims to promote. If anything, these hypocrisies remind us that sexuality— and female sexuality, most notably—is something that we remain deeply anxious, and disturbingly troubled by as a culture.
Mary, a former Red Tent Sisters staff member and blogger and close friend of Amy & Kim, commented that although the film provided an important critique of the pornification of our cultural climate and its invasion of innocence, it disappointingly re-inscribed the traditional denial that girls are in fact sexual beings with real desires and curiosity. But when the sexual-role models that girls have access to are limited to depictions of women who repeatedly attain their sexual gratification from being the objects and recipients of desire rather than informed sexual actors, the articulation of a more sex-positive feminist perspective is made increasingly dangerous.
I agree with the point that by disproportionately giving voice to the pro-sensorship/anti-porn side of the feminist spectrum of sexual politics, the film runs the risk of upholding negative stereotypes of feminists as “prudish” or “frigid”. In one particular sequence in the film, kids that looked as young as 5 or 6 were given the activity of clothing an ad of an almost-nude American Apparel model with arts-n-crafts. While the impact of this culture-jamming stunt was no doubt, quite resounding, I was left feeling unsettled when the children obediently uttered something to the shame-inducing effect of “its bad to show your private-parts”. I wholeheartedly advocate for the film’s overall remedy for this phenomenon of hypersexualization—that is, equipping our children with the critical thinking skills they need to begin intellectually and emotionally dealing with the representations they encounter. I remain unconvinced, however, that this particular example successfully accomplished such. In any case, though the event revealed some very disheartening realities about our still sadly anti-feminist cultural marketplace, the critical dialogue it inspired, and the efforts of Red-Tent Sisters preserves my faith in the power and persistence of feminist thinking, community and action.
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