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Article Excerpt
While disagreeing entirely with Wendy Varney's assessment of the images of a young woman immersed in a huge 'Heaven' ice cream in the Peters' 'Heaven' ice-cream billboards as clever (see 'Choc Chicks', Arena Magazine No. 68), I agree with her analysis that the ads offer crude images of women with the aim of enticing both women and men into a world of tantalising, exciting, scrumptious and seductive consumption. However, another line of critique can be made, one that does not necessarily contravene Varney's insights into the ways advertising trivialises and objectifies women, nor diminish the value of criticism made against gender bias so common in advertising.
What is striking about these ludicrous images of near-naked women ensconced in ice cream is not simply that women are portrayed as sex objects 'there for the taking if/when the ice cream melts', but the model's self-absorbed, smirk-like expression. The women in the 'Heaven' advertisements represent the self confident, go-getting, "Gen X' neo-consumers concocted and pursued of late by marketing pundits across the developed world. The depictions in the 'Heaven' advertisements do not appear so much as submissive sex objects,...
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