Page 227 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

216 LANGUAGE

in a ‘joke’: the red lips are not ‘ladylike’, although it says they are; Guinness is
not ladylike either, but the ad dares the impossible and declares that it is. Unlike
the Benson and Hedges ads, for example, which rely on a similar joke that is
fantastical because there is no way in which the ad can bring about what it
signifies (that is, a Benson and Hedges packet can never be a pyramid, a fountain
pen nib, and so on), Guinness can be ‘ladylike’; the ad may generate ‘Ladylike—
Guinness’ because women will drink it. Benson and Hedges remains at the level
of a joke, at the level of signs; Guinness, on the other hand, potentially
intervenes in the reality to which initially it only refers— ‘femininity’.
Reading the ad as women, we are constantly caught in its contradictions,
oscillating between ‘ladylike’/‘not ladylike’ (masculine), and not drinking
Guinness/ drinking Guinness, but are finally ensnared within its imaginary unity:
not either/or but both—the dare of ‘ladylike’ and drinking Guinness which
empties ‘ladylike’ of its referred meaning and fills it with the product, Guinness.
However, that engagement with the meanings of the ad involves submitting
ourselves to the means of signification—to fetishistic relations. First, the
‘human’ element of face, to which the lips belong, has been obliterated; yet we
understand those lips as representing women’s lips, even if they are only a thing
—painted lips, a sign of women, like a lipstick. It is another ‘thing’, the
commodity Guinness, which is the sign for masculinity. The relation between
‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’, in its particularity of the gender-organized social
conventions of drinking, is set up for us to see as ‘the fantastic relation between
13
things’: a pair of lips and a glass of Guinness, which appear ‘naturally’ to have
the characteristics of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’. Marx writes:

The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply
in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s
own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour
themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. 14

But here both capitalist commodity production and patriarchal ideological
construction are hidden.
Furthermore, we have to engage with the representations of a fetishistic sexual
relation structured in masculine dominance. The (closed) lips represent a
displacement from the genital area of the lips of the vagina, a displacement
which does not bring to light the absence of a penis and women’s castration.
According to Freud, the fetish is substitute for the penis which the little boy
15
believes his mother has and the absence of which he refuses to take cognizance of
when he observes her lack. However, he both retains the belief and gives it up:
he affirms and disavows castration of women by appointing a substitute, which
takes over his sexual interest, while avoiding the site/sight of female genitalia for
which he has an aversion. In the ad the fetish is obviously not a literal one in the
sense Freud meant it; nevertheless, the signification of the ad works in a mode
very similar to the operation of these fetishistic relations for men. The ad