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.