The op-ed by Hayley Morrison from the Oct. 17th Comment section objected to an ad depicting a model being whipped while wearing Diesel jeans. In it, she argued that harming others was against the principles of ordered society, as she learned in sociology class, and shouldn’t be promoted and glamourized by Diesel. As much as her worry was endearing, a few of her arguments worried me.
I’m actually surprised that Diesel succeeded in shocking anyone, with their cutesy tic-tac-toe marks instead of, you know, the bloody whip marks that whips usually make. Are we supposed to infer that the two topless chicks got bored of whipping the passive male model fellow and decided to play a game instead? What’s next-leather daddies playing tiddlywinks?
Pop culture and advertising have long been suspected of feeding subliminal messages to the masses. They’ve been blamed for everything from a rise in teenage promiscuity to U.S. nationalistic brainwashing. But the idea that you could put up an ad outside the Yonge-Bloor subway station, the sight of which would compel an army of Holt’s shoppers to do your bidding, is a fleeting, if potentially exciting, dream. Unfortunately, the ad will merely make them buy jeans.
But, to address Morrison’s main argument, even if the ad could somehow convince unwitting citizens to pick up a couple of bullwhips on the way home from the Sears jeans department, this wouldn’t actually contravene the idea of a coherent society that she wishes to defend-it would, in fact, be perfectly in line with the concept of individual freedom within democratic society. The man getting whipped is not the victim of others’ selfishly pursued deviance. He’s a consenting adult.
The behaviour being promoted in the ad is technically “deviant.” But even if we decided to start relying on advertising for our moral code, we could also get from this image a message of tolerance of alternate forms of self-expression. Yes, there is a social contract, but our culture includes alternative elements whose practices can’t be fully incorporated into the mainstream. Mainstream culture is defined by them, and eventually incorporates these “deviants” into itself-in the form of provocative ads, for example.
The result of deviance getting taken up by the mainstream, of course, is that it’s no longer deviant. The ad has entirely drained S&M of its subversive value, and put another value in its place-commercialism.
Really, the fact that Morrison finds the fact that individuals have the “free will” to make bad decisions “worrisome” is what worries me. Perhaps another article by her where she reassures us that her prof told her free will is a good thing will soothe my nerves.
