Well, at first glance this ad looks like your garden variety perfume/lingerie/shoe commercial--sexy half naked woman being caressed by naked guy (although he seems to be much more interested in her shoes above). I guess Brian Atwood is a shoe designer. My high end shoe fantasies are more along the lines of John Fleuvog, so I'd never heard of him before. Well, he's got my attention now!! As the Huffington post just reported, Mr. Atwood's new ad has been banned from his NYC Madison Avenue store and on Taxi cab TVs. Shocking, just shocking. We must think of the children.
I'm not going to rant right now about the problematic ratio of violence to sex in terms of representations and the banning of all sorts of stuff. BUT once you watch the actual ad, I started thinking that the following things in it were really getting the powers that be in a froth:
--a woman is a voyeur
--she's being serviced by many men at one time
--this makes her feel hot, and she's fantasizing about it
A little different than your garden variety male hetero porn, even though we've still got the racial and body image beauty culture problems still hanging around. Nevertheless, it reminded me of Zalman King's Red Shoe Diaries series, which has some similar tropes. (If you're interested in a feminist take on softcore porn, check this out).
I'm NOT saying that this ad is empowering, okay. I'm just suggesting that for some folks, including me, what's going down here might be kind of hot. This guy's selling women's shoes, and I think the interest of his target audience will be piqued.
