Now here’s a story that needs a photo illustration
Today’s pearl from the Google news feed:
Kids see too many anti-impotence ads: doctors. Now why in the hell isn’t this illustrated with a picture of a limp dick?
UPDATE 12/5/06: The omission has been rectified. See comment #7 below.
19 Responses to “Now here’s a story that needs a photo illustration”
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Paul Tergeist says:
FINALLY! Something for which I can be the poster boy!
December 5th, 2006 at 2:58 am EST -
ehj2 says:
Ummm, at the risk of being sent to the back of the class, I’ll give what is possibly the wrong answer. Hasn’t our experience (and the consensus here) been that the picture should be positive and uplifting (which is a deliberate pun on “perky”)? I.e., wouldn’t the same picture of the breasts work better? And again, believing this was the consensus here, don’t we loathe the mechanisms by which this is true?
The pictures aren’t “about” being appropriate for the text; to work, they’re about drawing our attention (by echoing our desires). Whether to enjoy them aesthetically, to chuckle at them, or simply note (as we do here) that they aren’t there.
Please don’t make me go to Landover Baptist if I read the wrong text, or if, in including this long excerpt from another text (edited down considerably), I’m violating the unwritten rule regarding post length. This seemed like it might be a quiet thread and a reasonable place to stash this … if not, please delete.
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Excerpt from Common Culture: Reading and Writing About American Popular Culture. Ed. Michael Petracca, Madeleine Sorapure.
Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals
We are confronted daily by hundreds of ads, only a few of which actually attract our attention. These few do so, according to Fowles, through “something primary and primitive, an emotional appeal, that in effect is the thin edge of the wedge, trying to find its way into a mind.” Drawing on research done by the psychologist Henry A. Murray, Fowles describes fifteen emotional appeals or wedges that advertisements exploit.
Underlying Fowles’s psychological analysis of advertising is the assumption that advertisers try to circumvent the logical, cautious, skeptical powers we develop as consumers, to reach, instead, the “unfulfilled urges and motives swirling in the bottom half of [our] minds.” In Fowles’s view, consumers are well advised to pay attention to these underlying appeals in order to avoid responding unthinkingly.
The nature of effective advertisements was recognized full well by the late media Philosopher Marshall McLuhan. In his Understanding Media, the first Sentence of the section on advertising reads, “The continuous pressure is to create ads more and more in the image of audience motives and desires.”
Over the past century, the American marketplace has grown increasingly congested as more and more products have entered into the frenzied competition after the public’s dollars. The economies of other nations are quieter than ours since the volume of goods being hawked does not so greatly exceed demand. In some economies, consumer wares are scarce enough that no advertising at all is necessary. But in the United States we go to the extreme. In order to stay in business, an advertiser must strive to cut through the considerable commercial clutter by any means available — including the emotional appeals that some observers have held to be abhorrent and underhanded.
The use of subconscious appeals is a comment not only on conditions among sellers. As time has gone by, buyers have become stoutly resistant to advertisements. We live in a blizzard of these messages and have learned to turn up our collars and ward off most of them. A study done a few years ago at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Business Administration ventured that the average American is exposed to some 500 ads daily from television, newspapers, magazines, radio, billboards, direct mail, and so on. If for no other reason than to preserve one’s sanity, a filter must be developed in every mind to lower the number of ads a person is actually aware of — a number this particular study estimate at about seventy-five ads per day. (Of these, only twelve typically produced a reaction — nine positive and three negative, on the average.) To be among the few messages that do manage to gain access to minds, advertisers must be strategic, perhaps even a little underhanded at times.
There are assumptions about personality underlying advertisers’ efforts to communicate via emotional appeals, and while these assumptions have stood the test of time, they still deserve to be aired. Human beings, it is presumed, walk around with a variety of unfulfilled urges and motives swirling in the bottom half of their minds. Lusts, ambitions, tendernesses, vulnerabilities-they are constantly bubbling up, seeking resolution. These mental forces energize people, but they are too crude and irregular to be given excessive play in the real world. They must be capped with the competent, sensible behavior that permits individuals to get along well in society. However, this upper layer of mental activity, shot through with caution and rationality, is not receptive to advertising’s pitches.
Advertisers want to circumvent this shell of consciousness if they can, and latch on to one of the lurching, subconscious drives.In effect, advertisers over the years have blindly felt their way around the underside of the American psyche, and by trial and error have discovered the softest points of entree, the places where their messages have the greatest likelihood of getting by consumers’ defenses. As McLuhan says elsewhere, “Gouging away at the surface of public sales resistance, the ad men are constantly breaking through into the Alice in Wonderland territory behind the looking glass, which is the world of sub-rational impulses and appetites.”
When enough advertisements are examined in this light, it becomes clear that the emotional appeals fall into several distinguishable categories, and that every ad is a variation on one of a limited number of basic appeals. While there may be several ways of classifying these appeals, one particular list of fifteen has proven to be especially valuable.
Advertisements can appeal to:
1 The need for sex
2. The need for affiliation
3. The need to nurture
4. The need for guidance
5. The need to aggress
6. The need to achieve
7. The need to dominate
8. The need for prominence
9. The need for attention
10. The need for autonomy
11. The need to escape
12. The need to feel safe
13. The need for aesthetic sensations
14. The need to satisfy curiosity
15. Physiological needs: food, drink, sleep, etc.///
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Paul Tergeist says:
It depends upon who you are and what you are attempting to accomplish. Advertisers use what works. Sex for males and the desire, in females, to inspire love. As many more subliminal messages as you can present in your 30 second spot the better, but you have only about 7 seconds to grab someone’s attention or they will switch the channel.
That same list is, interestingly, very close to what a criminal profiler looks at during the psychological profile because the same needs are at play, but in very imbalanced ways.
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Isobel says:
I did once hear one mother complain that during the 2004 Superbowl, her kids didn’t even notice the nipple, but were afterwards bombarding her with questions about the viagra commercials. (Really, anyone who thinks the superbowl is really family entertainment ought to take a look at what they sell the advertising space to!)
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ehj2 says:
My comment above [2] contains my own palmed card — the conflation of the selling of objects with the selling of ideas. While this is a focus of study for me (particularly in the marketing of political ideas and national myths), I’m uncertain how similar the “market” for things and the “market” for ideas actually is — and the underlying mechanisms.
The factoid that’s always stood out for me regarding this listing (and it is similar in this respect to others like it) is that sex (item 1) is not only separate from the list of generalized physiological needs (item 15) it is considered and handled vastly differently in marketing and psychology.
There is a distinct tendency in secular (logical, real-world based) thought to regard sex as just one more physiological need, and to ignore all the evidence of the actions of billions of people and their buying habits to the contrary. To believe, if we could just educate them all the way we were educated, this would not be. That may not be possible.
Conversations about religion and ritual revolve around the same axis of unconscious and neurobiological drives. People do in fact give their treasure to the Landover Baptists of the world, and to the George Bush’s of the world, and until we understand more about how how motives and desires are grounded, I don’t see much hope of addressing media integrity, the public education of the civic populace in its political responsibility, a solution to the anti-reality “thinking” of the organized churches, or any hope for democracy.
Democracies, with their tendency to build extremely efficient free-market economies, build really effective war machines, that they then turn over to “strong men” in times of crisis. The war of democratic Germany was not an accident, nor that of democratic Italy. The actions of democratic America in the past few years (the country in which — at least for a moment — resided the hopes of the world’s dreams) was not an accident. Our species is prone to madness, to a willingness to ignore protections of the minority and balance of powers when somehow frightened. The American Constitution has now been diminished in both word and action by a purposively elected “strong man” executive (and symbolic leader what we used to call the free world) to “just a fucking piece of paper.”
We can certainly blame the Patriarchy, and are advised to continue doing so. But (and I think it was our poltergeist Paul who said this not long ago), that really means changing the very nature of our species, the very core of who and what we are — as men and women. And that may not be possible. Other ways must be found to simply be able to live with what we are.
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Jeff says:
Here, in the second or third paragragh, is the meat of the story. It is absolutely true, and because it is, it will never be addressed: “If we taught kids media literacy, you can essentially immunize kids against advertising,” said statement author Dr. Victor Strasburger, a pediatrician at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.” Can you imagine the apoplexy of corporate America if there was any chance at all of that happening?
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Violet says:
For grins and also to balance the gratuitous boobie picture from the other day, here’s a very famous penis:
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Violet says:
Or is it slightly erect but just pointing down? Hard to say.
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Mandos says:
I have no idea who that is. Why is that famous?
(code: 855555)
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Violet says:
Good lord, child, how old are you?
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Mandos says:
*suspiciously* Is this some ballerino again?
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Violet says:
It’s Rudolf Nureyev. Do you really not recognize his face? I know you’re only 19, but surely you know who Nureyev is. One of the superstars of the 20th century.
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Mandos says:
I could be 80 or whatever you are and not recognize the face. I know nothing about ballet. I know about ballet *music*, I know about opera, but I know nothing about ballet. Really.
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Violet says:
No, Nureyev was such a superstar that he completely transcended the ballet world. If you were a sentient being in the Western world during his heydey, you knew who Nureyev was. Even if you didn’t know anything about ballet, you knew who Nureyev was. Trust me.
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Mandos says:
Oh, now the name rings a bell. Was that the celebrity defector guy? However, I contend that I still wouldn’t recognize the face.
My parents immigrated to Canada quite a long time ago now. I doubt that they would remember Nureyev. Western art flows through their brains like water through a sieve, and as soon as they might have heard “ballet dancer” their memories would certainly have stopped recording it, no matter how important it was.
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Violet says:
Yes, he defected very dramatically in 1961 I think (maybe 62), running into the arms of some Western officials at the airport when he was supposed to be boarding the plane to return to the Soviet Union. He was already famous in Russia as the most exciting male dancer there since Nijinsky, and when he defected to the West it was a tremendous deal. For the next 15 years he was just a huge star and absolutely dominated ballet in the West (until Baryshnikov). And he was more than a ballet star: he was truly an international superstar, like Princess Diana or something. One of the Beautiful People of the 60s and early 70s. I knew the name Nureyev from childhood, even though I’d never seen a ballet or knew anything at all about it. His name and image were just in the air, part of the culture.
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Mandos says:
I knew very few performing arts names of any kind until high school, really. And in high school I mostly focused on music, which I did *quite* a bit of. I’m pretty certain that any such thing could easily have skipped over me, seeing as so much else did.
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ehj2 says:
Violet [comment #7],
I’ve been meditating on this periodically since you posted (I’m caulking and painting here and generally covered with sawdust and insulation) and I don’t find the photograph gratuitous or in any way jokeful (the phrase you used was “for grins“) — but a crucial insight (or alternate view) into a very relevant part of your ongoing meta-conversation. We might say there are no accidents.
The photo is iconic of masculine beauty, competence, capacity, and even virility. Appropriately contexted, it would be a natural presence in a living room or bedroom.
First, we can be certain that Nureyev did not feel demeaned or used in posing for this photo — as, I imagine, none of the women in the Sports Illustrated photo shoot posted by PT felt demeaned or used. There is a part of a person that is deeply complimented to be chosen as a suitable hook for the mass cultural projection of people’s hopes and dreams of beauty, competence, capacity.
This complicates but enriches our conversation about pornography. I posit that images themselves are not inherently pornographic, but the way they are made and the way they are used may be pornographic (objectifying).
Secondly, we also cannot say the nature of other people’s projections on an iconic image. For me, feminine beauty is inextricable from competence, capacity, and wisdom (Sophia). I spent a few moments basking in the photos of the Sports Illustration shoot, and for those photos that enraptured me, I projected music, angelic danceful movements beyond the capacity of any human Nureyev, and a soft and wise relation with the world that breathes life into all things.
We need to note that just as the photos of the women do not confirm or deny any of my projections about their actual human capacities or wisdom (even as they inspire me to live a deeper life), neither does the photo of Nureyev tell us he is the very exemplar of human glamour (a term whose origin is magic) on the stage (yet with every sinew he tells us we can fly).
I remain powerfully persuaded that, while our culture is saturated with patriarchically framed images of the feminine in distorted ways (and for distorted ends) and this demands balance, women themselves must individually be supported in their individual choices about what is right (on the razor’s edge, the golden path) for them.
I will repeat my point that the very reason for the ubiquitous presence of the feminine in imagery (nothing is sold without the presence of youthful feminine beauty) is the unbalanced lack of feminine consciousness in the mass culture. Until men and women honor the youthful feminine within (by allowing feelings to balance and sometimes win against logical efficiency, reasonableness, and productivity), we will live out this need unconsciously, in the endless devouring of images and the lives of real women out there.
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richard cherry says:
‘during the 2004 Superbowl, her kids didn’t even notice the nipple’ – blimey, me neither! playing offence or defence?
bizarre as it may seem to Vi, my knowledge of dancers’ dicks is limited…but i’m sure i recently demanded pictures of ballet dancers, so it serves me right. when the doctor wishes to destroy you, she first answers your prayers…for the doc my goddess is a vengeful goddess..
