Want to be taken seriously? Wear more make up.

‘You will take these red lips seriously.’ So runs the tagline on one of the posters for the current ad campaign by the Boots-owned cosmetics brand, No. 7. Predictably, the woman on the poster, below whom the tagline sits, has very red lips. Less predictable, perhaps, is the colour of her hair: grey.

A video on the No. 7 website tells the ‘story’ behind the campaign. In it, the grey-haired woman, Ali, who is 48 and contemplating 50, flicks through a series of adjective-bearing placards before choosing one and holding it up for the camera: self-conscious. She talks about feeling the same way she did when she was 18, the impossibility of her ‘aging body’ reflecting this feeling, and a desire to ‘make more of myself’.

After a sped-up makeover sequence, during which the bright red lipstick is applied, a relaxed, laughing Ali tells us she feels ‘empowered’ and that she wants to be seen out having a drink. She holds up another placard. This one reads: in charge. At the end of the video the poster and its tagline appear on screen, commanding the viewer to take Ali’s lips seriously.

Is it possible to take lips seriously? The answer must surely be no (lines of metaphysical inquiry unknown to me notwithstanding). Ideas can be taken seriously, as can arguments, relationships and works of art, but not lips. Lips can be admired, kissed, and used to play the harmonica. The phrase ‘these red lips’, then, in the context of the tagline, must act as a code for something else, something that can be taken seriously.

In order to try to understand what that something might be, it is useful to think about one of the strategies that has been used in advertising for nearly 100 years. In his brilliant documentary series, The Century of the Self, the filmmaker Adam Curtis tells the story of Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of the modern PR industry. In the series, Curtis describes one of Bernays’ first PR stunts (in 1929), which was for a campaign for the American Tobacco Company aimed at getting women to smoke. In coordinating his stunt, Bernays recognised two things: that there was a deep desire amongst women at the time to be freer of patriarchal control; and that a culture had been fostered by men in which it was deemed socially unacceptable for women to smoke.

The stunt ran as follows: first, Bernays hired a group of young debutantes to light up cigarettes at an Easter parade in New York; second, he told the press to be ready with their cameras, as a group of suffragettes were planning to stage a protest at the parade; and third, when the ‘suffragettes’ lit up and the newspapermen started taking photographs, Bernays gave cigarettes a tagline: ‘Torches of Freedom’.

After the stunt and the subsequent press coverage, sales of cigarettes to women soared. Bernays had made women feel that by buying cigarettes and smoking, they were challenging male power and were freer, as a result. Societal norms that prevented women from getting well-paid jobs and taking control of their own lives, of course, remained unchallenged.

Bernays’ strategy – of identifying a deep emotional need or desire within women and making them feel as if that desire can be fulfilled through the consumption of a product – is exactly the same as the one underlying the No. 7 ad. Back in May, the Guardian published a report on a study conducted by the Commission on Older Women showing that there is a huge shortage of women over the age of 50 visible in public life. According to the report, women make up just 18% of TV presenters over the age of 50 who appear on screen regularly for the main UK broadcasters. Also, women over 50 make up only 5% of all presenters appearing regularly on screen.

With no one to represent them on a public platform as widely disseminated and consumed as TV, the opinions and experiences of older women are being ignored. It might be said, then, that there is a desire amongst women in their late forties, early fifties and older to be more visible in public life and for their views and concerns to be taken seriously. Enter lipstick.

Because there is another way in which older women feel ignored, one that is articulated by the No. 7 model, Ali: in terms of their physical appearance. It is this desire, for one’s body to be noticed and appreciated, that No. 7 claims explicitly to be able to fulfil. For Ali, it works – she wants to give herself the opportunity to be seen in public, and her confidence in achieving some degree of visibility makes her feel empowered and in charge.

Just as US women in the 1920’s were made to feel as though they were winning some freedom by buying cigarettes, women nearing or over 50 – the No. 7 ad’s target market – are made to feel as though they are winning some degree of presence and visibility in public life by buying make up. But, like the American women, the objective circumstances of older women are not changed – their views and concerns are still excluded and ignored.

The implication of the No.7 campaign that its make up will not only make older women look better, but also younger, serves to heighten the expectation of a more visible presence in public life: according to the data collected by the Commission for Older Women, 39% of all TV presenters are women, demonstrating that younger women face less of a challenge in appearing regularly on screen.

When decoded, the apparently meaningless tagline ‘You will take these red lips seriously’ starts to make more sense: ‘You will take me seriously’, or ‘You will take my views and concerns seriously’. Above the tagline, the woman with red lips and grey hair continues to smile. 

Branded: the creeping objectification of people's bodies

Take a look at this picture. I'll bet your initial reaction was one of abjection, an instinctive recoiling at the sight of a baby being breastfed while covered in tattoos of corporate brands and logos. It is wrong for brands to be etched into the skin of someone's body, most viewers will think; the effects of the picture are heightened by the fact that the subject is so young and engaged in such a natural, human act.

The picture is a spoof ad, published online by the Canadian magazine Adbusters. Entitled Tabula Rosa (Borjana Ventzislavova, Miroslav Nicic & Mladen Penev, 2004), it seems to represent symbolically the indoctrination of young minds into cycles of consumption by advertising. Even while recognizing this metaphorical function, it is difficult to look at the picture and not to see a frightening glimpse of a future in which people’s bodies are turned into walking billboards.

Until you realise that that future is already here:

When I first watched this report, the young Tokyo women allowing their thighs to be branded reminded me of people elsewhere, in another story. Back in March of last year, Laurie Penny wrote a column about the Homeless Hotspots story that had been reported at the 2012 SXSW music and technology conference in Austin, Texas. Outside the conference centre, local homeless people were equipped with wearable Wi-Fi devices so that delegates could stand near to the ‘Homeless Hotspots’ and get online on their Smartphones.

Although BBH, the PR company that set up the scheme, has since claimed that Penny’s article and others contained inaccuracies relating to how much the homeless people were paid and who they were paid by, Penny’s central argument, that turning thinking, feeling human beings into nothing more than internet access points is objectifying and dehumanizing, is correct. This is evident even in the language of BBH’s statement attempting to explain and justify the scheme: the term ‘homeless people’ is never used, the article preferring to talk about ‘individuals’ that were ‘strategically positioned’ around the conference centre. BBH also claimed that the debate that ensued around the story ‘helps ensure these individuals do not remain invisible and ignored’, without recognizing the fact that the homeless people in Austin were ignored and did become invisible as the delegates standing next to them immediately became absorbed in their iPhones and BlackBerrys.

The story of the Tokyo women, however, represents a new development in the creeping objectification of people’s bodies for commercial ends. Outside SXSW, delegates would at least have had to exchange a few words with the ‘Homeless Hotspots’ by greeting them and negotiating payment. Consumers of the adverts printed onto the women in Tokyo need not talk to them at all, but simply gaze at their thighs from afar. As a result, the women are perceived less as people and more as ‘things’.

Watching the report also reminded me of another story, one that proves that the phenomenon of advertising on skin is not confined to Japan or to this one story. In 2011, the ‘punk’ Scottish beer company Brew Dog offered a 20% discount on its beer for life to anyone willing to get its logo tattooed on his or her body. Arguably, the objectification in this case is even more extreme than in that of the Toyko women, in that people actually sold, rather than rented, portions of their skin to a company. What is it, then, that is making young people in places as diverse as Edinburgh and Tokyo willing to have brands imprinted onto their bodies?

One cause may be the high youth unemployment brought about by financial crises and austerity measures. According to a recent article in The Economist, youth unemployment in Japan, which rose as a result of the Japanese financial crisis in the early nineties, is still high today. The Office for National Statistics estimates that, in early 2011, 19.9% of 16-24 year-olds in Scotland were unemployed, and its estimation of current youth unemployment there is still high at 17.8%. When there are few actual jobs around, people turn to other means of making money.

There is one aspect of the experience of the young women in Tokyo that sets it apart from that of the homeless people in Austin and the beer drinkers in Edinburgh in terms of its objectifying effects. In the report, the guy from the PR agency running the campaign explicitly states in his interview that women’s thighs were chosen as body parts on which to advertise because they are sexually arousing to men. The whole idea is thus predicated on the recognition that women are already sexual objects at which men look in the street, and that this makes it possible to also turn women into objects on which to advertise.

And advertising is responsible for not only the latter but also the former type of objectification in that images of women’s bodies have long been sexualized in adverts. A 2009 report by OBJECT, a human rights group that campaigns against the objectification of women in the media and violence against women, references an academic study in which 80% of adverts sampled were found to feature women in sexually explicit poses. In 50% of ads scrutinized by the study, parts of women’s bodies were obscured or excluded, concentrating attention on other parts (just as the attention of consumers in Tokyo is directed towards the women’s thighs and not their entire bodies). It is not hard to imagine which parts those probably were.

The sexualization of women in advertising (amongst other cultural phenomena including TV, film, fashion and magazines) has profoundly negative social consequences. The OBJECT report references studies that demonstrate the links between sexual objectification in the media and the proliferation of eating disorders and appearance anxiety amongst women and girls. It also cites evidence of the relationship between objectification and violence against women (a relationship that is apparently becoming cyclical – a recent Zoe Williams article in The Guardian references a line of t-shirts depicting rapists visible on high streets). When people are made into objects, they are not thought of in terms of their capacity to think and feel as subjects; they are, as a result, de-humanized, and more vulnerable to inhumane treatment.

And this is what is so disturbing about the Tokyo story: if women’s thighs are being rented and then literally branded with adverts, it is conceivable that a culture may be fostered in which some men believe it their right to use these women’s bodies in any way that they choose. 

This is England?

‘We all thought it was strange,’ my Dad told me, recounting his family’s response to the Queen’s 1977 Silver Jubilee after recently immigrating to the UK from Ireland. The erection of trestle tables in the streets, stringing up of bunting and feverish flag-waving – all to celebrate a remote woman born into vast wealth and privilege whom few would ever meet – must have intensified the experience of living in a foreign country. Strangely, my Dad’s experience has become my own: during the celebrations of the Diamond Jubilee this weekend, the country in which I was born and live will seem to become someone else’s.

This happened last year, on the day of the Royal Wedding. I was finishing up my final year at Falmouth, a largely arts and humanities-based (and, as such, left-leaning) university. ‘Who’s going to turn up to that?’ I thought, of a party organized on Marlborough Road, a street with a high student population. I stayed in. Throughout the day friends popped back to the house for something, merry with sun and Pimm’s, telling me the party was really good and not even about William and Kate, really, just a good excuse to get drunk. But that night, as I watched YouTube footage of a mass, pissed rendition of ‘God Save The Queen’ in a street packed to capacity with students, I unexpectedly found myself in a minority within my own generation.

Part of what defines that minority is opposition to the hereditary principle. But, more than that, we are defined by sheer incomprehension as to what is being celebrated with the cucumber sandwiches and plastic Union Jack hats. During royal events a different Britain is celebrated from the one in which we actually live. This weekend, I’ll glimpse it again from my window.