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SEXUALITY FOR SALE 211

capitalist produc tion process. For example, a commodity cannot ‘buy’ you love
(with a man), but ads give just such an illusion of capital’s ubiquitous power:
‘Your face is your fortune: look after it with Outdoor Girl.’
Addressing us in our private personae, ads sell us, as women, not just
commodities but also our personal relationships in which we are feminine: how
we are/should be/ can be a certain feminine woman, whose attributes in relation
to men and the family derive from the use of these commodities. Femininity is
recuperated by the capitalist form: the exchange between the commodity and
‘woman’ in the ad establishes her as a commodity too. In ads addressing women
this process is insidious: it is the modes of femininity themselves which are
achieved through commodities and are replaced by commodities. A woman is
nothing more than the commodities she wears: the lipstick, the tights, the clothes
and so on are ‘woman’. Here the ads not only conceal the labour which produces
the commodity; they also, contradictorily, omit the work of femininity which
women carry out as they use commodities, yet always sell commodities for that
purpose. This is in striking contrast to ads directed at men, in which the terrain of
activity which is appealed to is that of leisure—leisure defined in relation to
completed work for capital Women, on the other hand, are sold commodities for
their work: the patriarchal work of domesticity and child care; the work of
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beautification and ‘catching a man’. This work, like that of social production, is
collapsed in the ad into mere consumption of commodities by us as individual
women. To consume the commodity (even just to consume the ad itself) is
already to have accomplished the tasks of femininity until, at its extreme, it
appears almost as if the commodity can replace femininity, can take on
femininity without female intervention.
We can conceptualize ads therefore as representing a particular articulation of
capitalist production and consumption. But in that articulation they also
particularly, if not exclusively, operate through ideological representations of
femininity. This ideological work relies on, but also constructs, an ideology of
femininity which is completed through our collusion as we read and consume the
ads. We are never just spectators who gaze at ‘images’ of women as though they
were set apart, differentiated from the ‘real’ us. Within the ads are inscribed the
images and subject positions of ‘mother’, ‘housewife’, ‘sexually attractive
woman’ and so on, which, as we work to understand the ad, embroil us in the
process of signification that we complete. Yet we do not come ‘naked’ to the ads
or to any ideological representation and simply take on those representations. We
already have both a knowledge of images of women from other discourses and
an acquaintance with ‘real’ women in our everyday lives. The signification of an

*This chapter is an extract from ‘Advertising in women’s magazines, 1956–74’, CCCS
Stencilled Paper (forthcoming).
† I would like to acknowledge my debt to Judith Williamson, whose own analysis has
generated many of the ideas I have taken up here.