Non-stories
Stop the presses! Hold the front page! An advertising billboard featuring a near-naked human body has been erected in inner-city Melbourne and there has been no protest!
Oh yeah, big news.
On a railway hoarding in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond the image of a young man, clad only in a pair of spotted boxer shorts — around his ankles — smiles down on passers-by from an underwear advertisement. His genitals are modestly obscured by a sign which reads, "Every day every man should drop his pants, look down and smile".
Somehow a non-story, a story about something which has not happened, made the front page of the Australian on May 12. "Unlike recent controversies over the 'sexploitation' of young women by billboard advertisers, protesters were noticeably absent yesterday", wrote investigative reporters Michelle Gunn and Ben Hutchings, in a story headed "Protest depends on who wears the pants". What a scoop!
What prompted the story? Did the news editor drive past the billboard and notice that it, like the majority of such eyesores, has been suffered to continue to exist? Or, more likely, did the paper receive a media release from the advertising company who masterminded the billboard in question? Was the billboard part of a calculated campaign to obtain free advertising from the likes of the Australian, tabloid TV current affairs show Real Life and the host of other media outlets who last week ran the story of the event that didn't happen?
Much as one hates to give credit to the advertising industry, credit is due here; this is a clever campaign. It gives the mainstream media all they could wish for: titillating visuals, pseudo-psychosocial controversy and a biff around the ears for the ratbag feminists. You can just hear the advertising copywriters as they came up with the "concept": "Let's put this one out on the back porch and see if the cat licks it up". It worked. The painfully predictable set-menu media have almost sprained their tongues licking it up.
There is a story in the increasing use of male nudity to sell everything from underwear to packaged lifestyles. As usual, it is too unfamiliar, too complicated and too political to be told by our monopolised mainstream media. Platitudes about "evening up the score" in the "war of the sexes" can be churned out thick and fast, and will assuredly be more acceptable to the journalists' employers.
But among the real stories that rarely get told is one that starts like this: The challenges thrown down by feminism, and by the gay liberation movement, have, in exploring "femininity" and gay identity, posed some previously unasked questions about the nature of masculinity and male sexuality. Stripped of its born-to-rule mystique, begun to be revealed as a far more fluid, far more subjective, far more socially constructed concept than the John Waynes of yesteryear made it out to be.
Phallic imagery has long been used to depict strength and virility. Frequent mainstream depiction of actual male flesh, in all its rather less impressive glory, is a more recent phenomenon. In itself it is not a step forward, just a cynical and inadequate response to feminist demands by big business.
The struggle for women's liberation is not a war of the sexes, and we will not be sidetracked onto a "tit for tat" agenda. The systematic oppression of women remains a fact. Our struggle against that oppression will liberate both men and women from restriction, commodification and caricature of our many and varied sexual identities. Try fitting that on a billboard!
By Karen Fredericks