Ads that piss me off: Nokia

So while Mark and I were in Vancouver, I spotted this ad on the ceiling of a city bus.




I think you can guess what pisses me off about it. The ad itself is for a phone that lets you copy an image from the world and have it appear as the skin on your phone. Which, okay, is pretty cool but come on. Where do I even start with this? I mean the most obvious is the boob thing. Of course, of course, it has to be a woman in a skin tight dress and of course the sample is going to come from her cleavage. And of course it's going to be big enough that we can see a bit of her sexy bra and the perfect globes of her boobs. Seriously? Breasts don't look like that. That is not a shape that nature created. That shape only results from silicone or push-up bras. And just once, just once I would love to see breasts with moles, scars, or even an uneven skin tone. Cause in real life, they just ain't so perfect. But whatever, realistic breasts in advertising only seem to appear in Dove ads and even then they look pretty good.

But back to the exposed cleavage - I mean, really, there is just no subtlety left. Let's use boobs to sell a cell phone. You might as well just have her stuff it in her cleavage and walk around like that instead. And I love the look on her face as she looks down at her own suddenly exposed cleavage. She's shocked but turned on. Her breasts are so gorgeous and she finds being exposed so sexy. The hand pulling at the hip/groin region of the dress down in the bottom corner lets you know how sexy she really finds the whole situation. I mean, if they have to use sex to sell phones (and really, don't they always have to?), they could be sensual and provocative and have the sample come from her shoulder or her back. It doesn't always have to be breasts and bums, you know.

And of course we have to use an animal print dress. That just sexes it up even more. Let's make her look primal and animal, associate her with basic instincts cause that's so hot. Women who wear animal prints are only after one thing. Especially women who wear skin tight animal print dresses.

But the thing that bugs me most about this ad is the thing that bugs me about the majority of print ads for camera phones - they always refer, either directly or obliquely, to taking sexy pictures of women. TV ads don't often go this route because I think it is hard to do without being really fricking obvious in a TV commercial but print ads always seem to have women in bikinis or bending over and pouting or things like this, where the women's picture isn't actually on the cell phone but still the her sex and the phone are linked. And it bugs me because of all the incidents where women's pictures are taken without their knowledge, the way girls are cyber-bullied with pictures taken of them in change rooms. The whole business of camera phones frankly reeks of sexual exploitation to me and that advertisers capitalize on that just really makes me sick. And this ad totally plays on it. The sexiness of the model, the cleavage, plus her own reaction to the exposure of the cleavage - which suggests it wasn't her that removed the sample from her dress - it just all presents the picture of "playful" and oh so disturbing sexual victimization and exploitation.

When I see ads like this, I just get really really angry. Because it's a fucking cell phone. Stress the communication functions. Stress the appearance if you want. But stop linking it with sex - especially non-voluntary exploitative sex. It's just a further example of how women's bodies are taken out of their own control and become objectified public property. The subtext of this ad and the actuality of what happens with camera phones underscore our society's totally lax attitude about women's rights to privacy and ownership of their own bodies. You may see this as a big stretch, but I don't. It's all the same thing. When women's bodies are objectified, sexualized, and treated without dignity, then women themselves are objectified, sexualized, and treated without dignity. And that opens the door for a whole range of negative outcomes from low self-esteem to rape and domestic violence.

And while here in North America these attitudes have enough negative impact (think rape, sexual harassment, the $11 billion diet industry, girls who are afraid to quit smoking for fear of getting fat, girls who can't go to school because of bullying and harassment) these attitudes have far more horrifying outcomes in other parts of the world, like the Congo where 8 year old girls are raped so violently they have to been sewn back together. And we just let it happen because we don't value women. So don't tell me ads like this don't mean anything. They signal an implicit approval of the poor treatment of women around the world and a devaluing of women here at home.