The pornification of our culture and the concomitant commodification of the body took another giant step forward over the weekend, courtesy of Calvin Klein.
Calvin Klein Billboard In SoHo Creates Controversy
It's hard to offend a New Yorker with an advertisement, but that's not to say that people won't keep trying.
The latest racy billboard hoping to shock people is in SoHo, and it features four partially clothed models in a sexually suggestive situation.
A billboard is supposed to catch your eye, and in this instance, consider that mission accomplished."It's just completely out there," one mother said. "I don't want the kids to see it."
"I think it's telling people it's okay to do that, and it's kind of gross," Aleasha Stephens, a tourist from Houston, says.
I have no particular objection to whatever consenting adults do in the privacy of their boudoir, however, there are a great number of problems with this ad, presumably meant to be "edgy" and provocative, that are of great concern. First of all, it is a billboard, an image that is impossible to avoid. Adults who would prefer their children not be exposed to pornographic and quasi-pornographic images can use parental controls on their children's computers, keep them away from movies, magazines, TV shows, etc that they find objectionable, and in general make efforts to protect their children from pornography until such time as the children reach adulthood (or, more often, attain the capabilities required to circumvent their parent's efforts.)
The worst effect of such ads is to normalize behavior that is amoral and detrimental to the mental health of our children and young adults.
A perversion is a sexual act that fundamentally diminishes the humanity of the participants. Many sexual perversions reduce a person to a body part. Pornography explicitly does so, for example when a scene never shows the face of the performers but merely their genitals. The sexual act is then a confluence of body parts rather than an intimate relationship between two people.
The billboard's celebration of a menage a quatre reduces the young woman to a mere object of the young male's interest.
Many years ago a young woman in analysis was struggling with her tendency toward promiscuous sex. She had a desperate "object hunger", ie a deep seated desire for intimacy based on a history of emotional deprivation. She would go to bed with any man who showed an interest in her and tolerated degrading sex in order to have a few moments of physical closeness that she confused with intimacy. As she became more aware of her desperation and its roots and the ways in which her behavior sabotaged her wish to be loved and to love, she began to alter her behavior; she started dating more appropriate men (ie, men with a future) who could offer her a future. In a moment of self-loathing, reflecting upon her promiscuity, she said, "all I was, all that time, was a sperm receptacle." She recognized that, in part because of the psycho-biological differences between men and women in terms of sexuality, she had allowed herself to be used as an object by men rather than insisting on being related to as a person.
By normalizing such expectations and behavior, our culture has devalued relationships, continued its infatuation with narcissism, and made adolescence and young adulthood even more difficult than they have traditionally been. Many of our young will avoid the ubiquitous temptations to perverse behavior that our culture offers and expects; many will succumb but ultimately navigate the transition to adulthood with minimal scarring; sadly, those most vulnerable, those on the margins who lack familial role models and requisite strength of character, will descend into a "Hell of Other People" in which they can only relate to others as objects, cut off from the possibility of intimacy and love.
[Note that I am not even discussing the danger of life threatening/altering effects of promiscuous sex, such as STDs, including HIV, and pregnancy. Even without such effects, the psychological impact of such behavior can be devastating and lasting.]
There has never been any question that "sex sells." There has also been an increasing awareness that when the need to "transgress" is a primal motivation, excess must always escalate. Adults have access to every sort of pornographic image and video imaginable (and adolescents increasingly have equal access) but the idea that the "adults" are normalizing pornography and the use of the body as a commodity is tragic. To inflict this upon the young in order to sell over-priced blue jeans is despicable.
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