Through Salon’s Broadsheet, originally from Copyranter, I found two French safe sex ads, one for women and one for men, that I keep going back to because they’re pretty and thought-provoking, like a starlet working a good cause. (They’re Not Safe for Work, so I’ll put them after the jump.)
First, they’re beautiful in a children’s-book-illustration kind of way, very dreamy and fun with overtones of danger, but they’re definitely R-rated. The juxtaposition of the style and the NSF content make for look-again pictures, so that’s a good ad.
Then the crowded details make you stay there once you get there (as in “how many breasts can you find in the picture?”), especially the play-on-images-instead-of-words (or as Catherine Price of Broadsheet put it, “I will never look at a sea turtle the same way again”). I’m still trying to figure out if that’s a cow butt in the man’s illustration. And if you ask me, there are way too many penises in the woman’s ad and not nearly enough tongues, although she still looks delighted. Well, it’s a phallocentric world we live in. Another puzzler: there’s only one face in these illustrations besides those of the two protagonists, and it’s in the man’s illustration. Why? I’m not complaining, I’m just wondering.
Third, they’re very narrative in that the central characters are moving through a landscape, clearly active, over the tag, “Explore. Just Protect Yourself.” That’s goal and conflict, just begging you to look at the picture and tell yourself a story. Not too many safe sex ads work as erotica, too, so that keeps you looking.
Fourth, I’m still trying to figure out why the woman is deep sea diving and the man is traveling through space. For awhile, I tried to tie it to sex, but I think it’s more that men go out and conquer new worlds (thrusting through the cosmos maybe) and women explore their deeper emotions. Maybe. Or maybe it’s just there were more phallic symbols underwater and more vaginal symbols in space. Nah, there’s a subtext there, I just haven’t puzzled it out yet.
Then there’s the obvious: these couldn’t be published here without screaming, tearing of clothes (non-sexual) and demands for censorship. These illustrations show sex to be a great adventure, something fun and fascinating and interesting which I think makes them powerful. Just as we’ve gotten so used to our government lying to us that we don’t trust anything they say anymore (FISA, anybody?), I think our Reefer-Madness approach to sex education has created a credibility gap that we can’t afford. These ads don’t say “sex is bad, don’t do it,” which half of all teens will ignore anyway even in the face of the ridiculously ineffective and expensive abstinence programs we’ve thrown at them, they say “yes, sex is a whole new world to explore, but you don’t know what’s lurking in all the excitement, so be careful out there.” Which is so smart. And possibly even effective. That’s the kicker, I don’t know how effective they’d be. But they do tie condoms to excitement and exploration so maybe they shift perception and make condoms cool.
But the thing that really got me is that, to my eye, the picture of the woman’s adventure is shockingly explicit whereas the picture of the man’s exploration could be an illustration in Psychology Today. That tells me how we’ve shrouded men’s naked bodies while we’ve used naked women to sell damn near everything. I know, I know, that’s been obvious in movies for decades, but I consider myself pretty open-minded, and I looked at the woman’s illustration and thought, “Whoa,” and at the man’s illustration and thought, “Ordinary stuff.” I’ve decided I’m all for it. Anything that demystifies the penis is good for our phallocentric culture. Or as the protagonist of The Bell Jar wrote, when her boyfriend exposed himself to her, all she could think of was a turkey neck and giblets. Or an octopus with a bad thyroid.
Or maybe they’re just an R-rated picture game. How many breasts can you find in outer space?
And watch out for those sea turtles.
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