Page 225 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

214 LANGUAGE

Pittard’s gloves (19, March 1968, p.1—colour)
The caption, ‘Dress to kill’, draws on two opposing ideological referent
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systems, ‘femininity’ concerned with ‘dress’ and a form of ‘masculinity’
concerned with ‘aggression’, which are brought together. Visually, the
condensed signifier also embraces this contradiction: a woman, partly shown, her
one eye looking at us, has her arms round a man whose back is towards us. She
is ‘killing’ her man—but with her ‘dress’ (in fact, her gloves) and not with the
gun which the gloved hand holds; she is ‘killing’ him in order—we know ‘outside’
the ad—to catch him. The power of the gun has slipped over into the red gloved
hand. That colour is a signifier in a discourse organized around blood, killing and
danger, but it is also associated with a chain of meaning organized around the
danger of sexuality. Simultaneously, the gloves are both tough, ‘killing’, almost
masculine weapons and feminine—‘soft’ and ‘supple’ and daringly sexy.
She is in control of the situation, has power over the man who, vulnerably, has
his back towards us (imagine us with that gun/those gloves). She looks at us, almost
winking, woman to woman, knowing about men and how to catch them. She
controls him as if he were just another rather dangerous object: ‘Don’t be caught
barehanded. Whether you’re dealing with a man or a Mauser.’ However, she
does not have this power independently: she needs the gloves, not to be
‘barehanded’ (my emphasis). Paradoxically, ‘dressing’ herself, she becomes
more sexual: she has ‘the Pittard swing ticket’. Ostensibly the ‘swing ticket is
your guarantee of washability’ but in the underlying sexual discourse it
guarantees you a man: Pittard’s gloves ‘buy’ you a man.
The reciprocal emptying and exchange of meaning between the signs ‘dress’
and ‘kill’ create a new sign which conflates into a new referent—an ‘aggressive
femininity’. Even though such a masculinization of femininity exists ‘outside’
the ad, the means of signification permissible in the ad allows a heightened
signification (the gun as signifier) not possible in the ‘real’ relations between a
woman and a man: it is, in this sense, an ‘original’ construction. Nevertheless,
the ad must be seen as participating in those relations by ‘voicing’, making
explicit and setting the terms within which ‘femininity’ operates. ‘Masculinity’
retains its dominance, even while being subverted —woman is ‘aggressive’
precisely for the feminine aims of catching a man.

Fenjal bath oil (Cosmo, May 1974, p.146—colour)

Narcissism, here, is very private; almost without men, but with a public edge,
directed at men. On the one hand, it is a representation of woman that is typical
of soft porn: there is a movement in the ad from the ‘natural’ petals of the pink
carnation at her breast, to the caption, down to the carnation’s reappearance with
the product and finally to ‘A touch of Fenjal Silky’—a reference by this time
both to the product and to the woman’s sexuality, signified by her pubic area, her