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SEXUALITY FOR SALE 215

hair, which hides the site/sight of her female genitalia, her ‘petals’, the ‘heart’ of
her sexuality within patriarchal relations.
Thus the text and visuals can be read as suggesting that you bathe in Fenjal to
await a man’s touch. But we also have to recognize that the ad is directed to
women and we can therefore read a contrary meaning: she is touching herself in
the photo, privately, behind the mistiness; eyes directed at herself, she is self-
sufficient, though dependent on the commodity: ‘As you lie in a Fenjal bath you
can feel the gently cleansing action beautifying your skin and when you step out
one touch tells you how effective the Fenjal moisturiser has been. A touch of
Fenjal Silky.’ Even though that kind of pose is a sign in a patriarchal discourse—
and since we still live within patriarchal relations, its meaning must over-
determine and carry over into any oppositional signification—we should not
refuse to recognize it as also, contradictorily, establishing a difference from that
patriarchal representation. We must, however, be wary of our assessment of it.
As Griselda Pollock, writing of feminist attempts to create ‘an alternative
imagery outside ideological forms’, relevantly argues:

The attempt to decolonize the nude female body, a tendency which walks a
tight rope between subversion and reappropriation, often serves rather to
consolidate the potency of the signification rather than actually rupture it. 12

It is finally as a ‘reappropriation’ of feminine sexual independence within
patriarchal and capitalist relations that we must understand this ad.

Guinness (Honey, November 1974, p.99—colour)
Concisely and illustratively, this ad not only brings together many of the
tendencies in the representation of ‘femininity’ in ads but also poses the limits to
such a representation. It constructs and works through fetishistic relations in both
Freudian and Marxist forms.
The ad is surreal, its surrealism constructed by the camera: a close-up shot
obscures the shape and dimensions of the face, merging it into the foam of the
Guinness, so that the vivid, glossy, red lips stand out above the flattened, labelled
glass of dark Guinness. It is a condensation involving absence and contradiction
which ‘Ladylike—Guinness’ denies but also demands that we necessarily
decipher. When we set in play the signifying chain we move from the ‘inside’ to
the ‘outside’ of the ad; we ‘fill’ the absences and recognize the contradictions.
The absences concern ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ which we already know
about, which the ad presupposes and which are in contradiction with each other.
The one bit of woman, the vivid red lips, signifies the whole of ‘femininity’
(woman) through a metonymic relation—in that sense the ‘lips’ are ‘ladylike’.
But metaphorically their colour and texture and shape signify daring, excitement,
sexuality, in contradiction to the sober connotations of ‘ladylike’; ‘masculinity’,
in its difference from these red lips, is signified by the dark drink. We participate