So Coke is now selling expensive milk. Wut? I have no idea, but it is. And guess how it advertises its new expensive milk.
Yuuuuuuuuuum, right?
Laura Bates sees more good old everyday sexism.
Is this milk for drinking, or are you just expected to pour it lavishly over your head as you sit at the breakfast table, pouting sexily at your dry cereal? Why don’t men seem to be invited to partake in this new gastronomic experience? And given the enormous levels of dairy wastage likely to ensue, can you really justify charging double the price for it compared to normal milk?
Joking aside, seeing these images of women’s bodies being used, once again, to advertise an unrelated consumer product (“Drink what she’s wearing”) is a tedious reminder that when it comes to the objectification of women in advertising, we seem to be slipping backward instead of moving forward. Yes, there’s a tenuous argument to be made that the link is valid if the milk is being promoted as healthy and good for your body, but that doesn’t explain the sexualisation of the women, nor the lack of any male counterparts.
This is just the latest in a never-ending stream of examples of women’s bodies used as advertising fodder with scant regard for relevance or originality. Examples are tweeted to the Everyday Sexism Twitter account with depressing regularity. Want to promote a new games console? Why not use a headless woman’s bodywith two pairs of breasts? Advertising a restaurant? What you need is a picture of a naked woman covered in spaghetti! Trying to spread the word about green electricity? Go for a picture of a sexy woman with a lightbulb in her mouth. Decorating a van to spread the word about your curtain and blind business? Don’t forget to pop a lingerie-clad model on there! And everyone knows nothing says “LED technology” like an enormous picture of a woman’s naked arse.
Everyday sexism is post-feminist sexism, I guess. We’ve had feminism, and it fixed all the things, so now we’re post it, and sexist advertising is fine again, because we know all about it, and we can always just say it’s “ironic.”
First comment on the spaghetti one:
Sigh.
Except milk is neither healthy nor good for your body. So not even that (extremely tenuous) argument holds up.
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/healthcare-triage-the-milk-emperor-has-no-clothes/
I liked that faux-mercial done on….The Daily Show? Last Week Tonight?…where they took sexism in commercials to task and replaced the women with guys. Dammit. I gotta go see if I can find the one I’m talking about.
Well, at least the middle and right-hand pair seem surprised at the milk shooting out of their asses. And the puddle of mess below them? Well some lucky son of a gun is gonna have to clean that up before it sours.
The thing is, I don’t even see the imagery as being supposed to be milk. It’s a convenient and easy excuse… but what it reminds me strongly of is pictures of women covered in ejaculate.
Well, I for one am completely put off by the idea of drinking women’s ass-milk.
Looks like one of the androids from Alien having a severe malfunction.
I’m sick to death of seeing objectified images of women to sell anything and everything.
Well, I’m sure someone defending these ad’s has already come up with the old chesnut that is ‘ sex sells’.
Yeah right! They can’t seem to get their heads round the fact that sex is an act between two people (in this case men and women) and not something that a man does to a woman. I mean constant images of sexualised women to appeal to men is sex because we all know that women arn’t really bothered about sex ,right? (probably something to do with nuts and berries)
After the ‘sex sells’ might come the ‘you’re just a prude’. They seem to think that saying ‘I want to be recognized as a sexual being’ one day and ‘ I don’t want to be sexually objectified’ the next day is hypocrisy.
Ok I admit that the above is rambling but I think you get the gist and I think you’ll know the sorts of people that come under ‘they’.
*throws up hands in disgust and walks away*
This seems very much like the bizarre association advertising always makes between women and yogurt: apparently yogurt is a feminine food. Except Go-Gurt, which is for Active Boys™ (and one tomboyish girl sometimes).
Rowan @5,
Now that you’ve mentioned it, we can’t help but notice the tagline seems to support your interpretation: 50% more protein* & calcium**.
(*) ejaculate = protein, and (**) one can’t spell calcium without c, u and m.
How can they get away with this? Isn’t there any sort of oversight or does someone need to start a change.org petition or boycott or what?
PZ Myers @6
If someone’s feces is so liquid as to have the consistency of milk then they are very, very sick. Cholera can produce liquid feces like that. The font of all knowledge says:
Those images ought to be on photoshop disasters. Arms and necks don’t work that way. Neither does shitting milk, of course, but we can’t have everything. Digitally contorting women to sell milk seems wrong in every way. Isn’t milk delicious all by itself? All the more delicious when it’s not shat.
Why is everyone assuming the milk followed the normal oral path?
The third model looks like she’s just been shown that photo.
The UK satirical magazine Private eye used to have a regular feature, “Cam-pain”, highlighting particularly egregious examples of this sort of thing, with £10 paid for examples sent in. I haven’t seen the feature for quite a few years though. I assume they discontinued it because it was in danger of bankrupting them.
I was going to say “but hey, things have got better in recent years”… but to be honest, the ass-milk adverts look like nothing’s changed since about 1958. /shakes head despondently/
And OF COURSE the woman on the right is on a scale, weighing herself.
These morons need a lesson in anatomy — If they’re going to draw milk (if that’s really what we’re expected to imagine it is) coming out of some part of a woman’s body, can’t they at least draw it coming from the two parts where milk really does come from? I guess this is just another indicator of how totally messed-up their thinking about female bodies is.
Looks like one of the androids from Alien having a severe malfunction.
A robot drinking milk because that was its best source of energy? That only made sense as another ad-campaign for milk. Stupid, to be sure, but not as sexist or near-pornographic as what we see above.
…what it reminds me strongly of is pictures of women covered in ejaculate.
Yeah, I’ve seen such pictures too, and the fluid in question is drawn almost exactly the same way. I find it almost impossible to believe that none of these ad-men had ever seen such a picture.
Shooting milk from your arse? Is this one of those things, now illegal to stream video of in the UK?
Sleeper: those new regs are ALLEGEDLY crafted to ban depictions of truly harmful actions — but they include a lot of acts that are clearly not at all harmful, like spanking and female ejaculation; so images like the ones above could easily be in violation of something in that dog’s breakfast of nanny-state nonsense. Even though they don’t really depict milk shooting out of anywhere — they depict clothing items turning into milk, just like those bottled-water ads that showed baseball bats and tennis raquets turning into water and exploding in a cute (and hopefully thirst-inducing) burst of CGI.
Maybe the images above would be illegal because the women aren’t wearing any undies — which could be unsafe if your dress suddenly turned into a splash of milk.
Okay, I think I know what happened here.
I’ve seen several artistic pieces that consisted of a model, almost always a woman, being splashed either from the side or above, with a liquid, and a still image removed from the high-speed video at just the right moment to make it look like she’s wearing a dress made out of floating liquid. It can be striking and dramatic and playful, and yes, in most cases has a bit of prurient appeal, as well. Normally, the effect is that the woman herself is somehow commanding/controlling the liquid to wrap around her and flair dramatically. Done well, it’s like capturing a photo of a nature spirit of some sort.
(In all honesty, I think the selection of female models for this is a case of reflecting sexism in society–the effect usually does create the appearance of a skirt or dress, and our society insists those are clothing for women, so women are used for the models. It’d be interesting to see if they could create a water-kilt or similar effect on a dude, though.)
So what happens here is an ad exec sees this artistic depiction, and decides to commodify the look created. However, in so doing, he also objectifies the woman herself, making her a passive figure rather than the central figure–a prop for supporting the product, rather than the one in charge of it. The “drink what she’s wearing” tagline makes it that much worse.
It’d be interesting to see if they could create a water-kilt or similar effect on a dude, though.
Good luck getting the pleats right.
That’s nothing. You should see the one with the ironing board. And I am not making that up. You can Google it.
These are actual (though heavily photoshopped) photos of nude women in paint. Nipples clearly visible.
Trebuchet: those are serious allegations. I’ll have to take a long, hard look at the evidence as soon as I get home from work.
You’re saying that women splashed with WHITE PAINT, and inviting us to “drink what she’s wearing,” is an ad for MILK? How many more layers of wrongness are in this ad campaign?
This reminds me a bit of an ad campaign in Canada. Those milk ads involved naked women and men being covered in milk.
The inclusion of men in the same position as women in the ad campaign seems less sexist to me. But the thought of eating or drinking something that was all over someone’s naked boy never makes me want to buy that something…
It was harder to find pictures than I thought, but here are a few:
https://web.archive.org/web/20020118195930/http://milkgives.chatelaine.com/
http://www.clock.org/~chris/eyeview/2001-04-04_00/stations.jpg
http://www.americaninventorspot.com/files/images/fresh_milk.preview.jpg
http://www.clock.org/~chris/eyeview/2001-04-04_00/subway.jpg
This can’t be a real thing…can it?
@24, Ragiing Bee: I’ve got it a bit wrong, I think. The images are from an “art” calendar from artist Jaroslav Wieczorkiewicz. Linky: http://firstwefeast.com/eat/milky-pin-ups/
The ironing board one is part of that series but does not appear to have been used by Coke. The middle one in Ophelia’s post, however, originally held a mop. So there’s that. And according to the “artist”, they actually throw milk onto the model.
I’ve checked Snopes to see if they’re calling it a hoax. So far, no.