Page 117 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Consumer Culture and Fashion Studies 101

of communist ideology ” become the “ Four Basic Rights of Enclave
Dwellers, ” and those are for fairly mundane things – a van pool, mail
delivery, installment payments, and a green setting. But they are also daily
creature comforts that make life for people easier, especially if they are the
middle income people targeted by this housing development who cannot
afford the taxis and drivers that more wealthy Shanghai dwellers can. The
ads for housing addressed to the wealthy emphasize values such as privacy
( siren ) that would have been quite alien to Communist China just a few

decades before. In the past, siren connoted selfishness of a kind condemned
by both Confucianism and Communism. The ads promote images of
abundance made possible by the new consumer economy, and as with such
ads in Western capitalist countries, the images are of happy families made
happy by consumer goods. The new reality of economic class difference
disappears and shifts to the unacknowledged background of ongoing life
in such advertising culture.
In a similar way, ads in the 1970s inverted gender practices by showing
women in business suits patting handsome young men on the bottom.
This form of sexual harassment had been practiced only by men. The
clever inversion of the stereotype nevertheless left the idea and the pos-
sibility of sexual harassment intact as a practice. More recent advertise-
ments with gender themes go further, as one would expect. In a recent
Alka - Seltzer commercial, a man takes out a small packet of Alka - Seltzer
after a meal with a young woman at a restaurant; he drops the package,
which resembles a condom package. A man on a date might be expected
to carry such a condom package “ just in case, ” but to show it to his
date would be considered bad form. She looks at the package and says,
“ What kind of girl do you think I am? ” The implied statement is “ How
improper of you to presume we would have sex after this dinner. ” We

then see the seltzer in water fizzing away, calming the man ’ s now very

upset stomach. And in the final image, the woman holds up a condom
package and says, “ Dessert? ” The joke is that she is in fact “ enlightened ”
regarding the possibility of sex with a man she is dating for the fi rst
time. And she herself initiates – an uncharacteristic gesture in a culture
in which men are still largely supposed to take the lead in courtship.

The ad works by inverting the stereotype it first presents as true – the
idea that a young woman might or should be offended by sexual interest

or presumption on the part of a male on a first date. A past cultural
assumption is preserved and cited, but only in order to be comically
revised and undermined.