PERSPECTIVE ON ADVERTISING : Bikini Team: Sexism for the Many : Sex harassment is considered wrong in the workplace, but ads relentlessly sell an image of subservient women.
When a single voice badgers or degrades women in the workplace because of their gender, we call it sexual harassment. When that voice is amplified for millions of people by millions of dollars, we call it advertising. The former is a legal wrong, the latter a legal right. Yet, both acts exploit women, injure them and attempt to impose male power over them. Why then do we tolerate a dichotomy that makes the larger harm the lesser evil?
Five women in St. Paul, Minn., turned to a court of law to get an answer to this question. To borrow a thought from noted feminist Catharine MacKinnon, these women are asking the law to “adjust a bit to accommodate the realities of sexual harassment.” The everyday reality is that women’s sexuality is used to sell things, their commodified bodies are plastered on advertising to stimulate men to buy things. Their very identity as autonomous persons is electronically transformed into media images of marketable chattel.
What the company voice says outside of the office carries into it as well. That’s part of what the St. Paul women were saying when they filed a lawsuit against their employer, Stroh Brewing Co. In Stroh’s “It Does Not Get Better” television ad, bikini-clad young Swedish women parachute into a male campsite bearing six-packs of beer. (Tellingly, the “Swedish bikini team” will be featured on the cover of the January issue of Playboy magazine.) Buxom women convey the same message in the company’s promotional posters. The advertising fantasy is that men can have both the beer and the “broads.”
A spokesman for Stroh says that the company has a “very definite and strong policy” against sexual harassment and other forms of sex discrimination. It “simply won’t tolerate it.” But the very thing that it purports not to tolerate in the workplace, it promotes in the marketplace.
Men get mixed messages. The law tells the men at Stroh not to treat women as sex objects, while company ads tell them to revel in the thought. The law says that they must be sexually civil, while Madison Avenue says that they must be sexually uncivil. The five women of St. Paul have turned to the courts to reaffirm a single message--sexual oppression in all of its forms is an affront to civilized society.
If Stroh’s management displayed its girlie posters at its work sites and if it broadcast its Swedish fantasy ads on company monitors, few would deny that such messages create an environment conducive to sexual harassment. But Stroh’s “very definite and strong policy” does not pertain to its openly sexist ads. The five women in the lawsuit claim that it should. When, in an overt way, men verbally and physically confront women in the workplace, as is alleged in this case, their behavior only actualizes the fantasies in mass advertising that feature women as sex objects. In this sense, sexist advertising compounds the injury against women.
Culturally speaking, the key point is not whether any particular ad or ads directly caused Stroh’s workmen to act in ways allegedly degrading and injurious to women. What is important is the infrastructure of sexism, the systematic and unjust exercise of male power over women. In this system of commercial exploitation, Stroh is one of many players. Its voice is part of a chorus of commercial forces using women to sell everything from booze to batteries. In a larger sense, what is really being sold and bought is a sexual image of subservient women. Such ad-porn shapes men’s conception of women, and to that extent influences their behavior at work.
If not in the St. Paul case, then in the next, those who champion the commercial exploitation of women in advertising will wrap themselves in the First Amendment’s flag. Any government action on this issue (like the Ontario, Canada, campaigns to outlaw sexist liquor ads) is incompatible, they claim, with our system of freedom of expression. Here, again, we confront a paradox. The constitutional guarantee does not categorically protect the worker’s sexist voice in the workplace, but the same guarantee is said categorically to protect the company’s sexist voice when it is amplified for the marketplace.
In a more noble First Amendment tradition, the women of St. Paul summon us to begin a dialogue about an ideal of gender equality free of the shackles of commercial exploitation. It is high time that we amplify their voices and their message.
