Page 224 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

SEXUALITY FOR SALE 213

sense of fetish). Women are invited by the ads to respond to themselves through
the imagined fetishes of men— the tights/legs, the lipstick/lips which fragments
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or distortion of them stand for all of their womanness. Yet since men are absent,
there is an ambiguity: is it a sexual experience with men that is inferred, or are
women ‘masturbating’ with ‘phallic substitutes’ or through masculine fantasies?
‘Your lips have never looked this wet before’: we see just a woman’s red lips,
open, a lipstick resting against them, alongside an army of big shiny, erect and
partially encased lipsticks.
This ambiguity extends to the more obviously narcissistic representations in
which pleasure is self-induced rather than being reliant on men. ‘Imagine the
clinging soft caress of stockings’—a girl, nude, gently holds her ankles almost
suggestively, caressing herself and looking out at us (or at men?); or ‘A touch of
Fenjal Silky’ (see below). As John Berger discusses and Ros Coward takes up,
the naked woman is always a nude woman, ‘framed in the beautiful photograph’,
a representation comparable with soft-porn photos, potentially to be gazed at by
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men even if it is women who look at it. Thus women not only see themselves as
men see them but are encouraged in these ads to enjoy their sexuality through the
eyes of men. It is a narcissism which, at the moment of self-masturbation and
scopophilia (looking, in this instance, at one’s own body), is also exhibitionist,
inviting voyeurism from men. 10
There is a further narcissism which affirms women’s self-indulgence and
involvement but plays down the sexually exhibitionist elements. ‘Only drink it if
you never bathe before noon. Freezomint Crème de Menthe. Green, cool and
slightly wicked.’ It is an independence of sensual pleasure, however, which we
can translate into more heterosexual terms through the visuals of the ad: the
virginal white of the woman’s dress; the abundant fertile, as well as fresh, green
of the plants.
This ideology of sexuality is therefore disparate and contradictory for women,
though nevertheless contained within patriarchal relations: active/passive;
heterosexual/narcissistic; dependent on men/independent of men; fetishistic,
masturbatory. And it is set firmly apart from ‘motherhood’ and ‘domesticity’,
which admit to no sexuality even though premised on reproductive sexuality.
The three examples described below have been chosen to illustrate

(a) The construction of an ‘original’ femininity which we did not know about
until we read the ad
(b) its containment within patriarchal relations
(c) the ‘penetration’ of femininity by masculinity—the ‘masculinization’ of
femininity by the commodity form to create a dependence both on men and
commodities
(d) the contradictory modes in which we, as readers, are inescapably ensnared in
the signification processes and in those modes of femininity