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. 

Kony 2012: Political Activism for $30

‘Humanity’s greatest desire is to belong and connect.’ These are some of the first words that narrator Jason Russell speaks in Invisible Children’s record-breaking viral video Kony 2012. They are a reference to the capacity of technology and social media to bring us closer together by allowing us to share information. The explicit message of the film is that linking to videos, liking statuses and tweeting hashtags constitute a new form of political activism by spreading awareness of campaigns and uniting people in support.

But, as has been pointed out elsewhere, the immediate reaction to the release of Kony 2012 was not one of connection but of division. The internet was split into two camps: one enthusiastically supportive of Invisible Children’s campaign, and one critical of the calls for US military intervention, the film’s lack of context surrounding the war in Uganda and it’s portrayal of Ugandans as without power or agency.

Put another way, one camp bought (figuratively or literally) what Kony 2012 was selling, and one didn’t. Has the campaign given the former the sense of connection and belonging that Russell claims social media can provide? It’s difficult to see how because what supporters of the campaign share is a basic human reaction of shock and sadness at the footage of Jacob Acaye, a Ugandan boy abducted by Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, talking about his experience – a reaction they share with just about everyone, non-supporters included. So what else defines Kony 2012 supporters as a group? They’ve all watched and shared the video, bought $30 Action Kits or donated to Invisible Children.

Kony 2012 and Invisible Children’s various other products are consumed by a network of isolated individuals who believe they are taking part in a collective act of political protest. And, as well as employing the familiar ‘soothe some guilt, donate money’ approach used by many charities, the movie deliberately exploits this desire to belong to a movement with a common cause. ‘The fight has led me here, to this movie you’re watching, because that promise is not just about Jacob or me, it’s also about you,’ Russell claims about a promise he made to help Acaye. This direct address to the viewer establishes the illusion of a community that we can join, as do the images of thousands of young Americans running around the streets in Kony 2012 t-shirts, putting up campaign posters.

Will Invisible Children’s ‘Cover the Night’ event, planned for 20^th April, actually provide the sense of community sold by the movie by bringing the Kony 2012 campaign into the physical spaces of cities? Russell narrates:

‘This is the day when we will meet at sundown, and blanket every street in every city ‘til the sun comes up. We will be smart and we will be thorough. The rest of the world will go to bed Friday night and wake up to hundreds of thousands of posters demanding justice on every corner.’

This part of the video very carefully constructs a spectacle of activism. As a dubstep track plays in the background, we see young people sprinting through the streets, throwing flyers off buildings, unfurling huge banners and one guy staring at himself moodily in the mirror, pulling a red bandana over a black face-painted nose and mouth. These images draw on a lineage of representations of protest, from photographs of students throwing flyers from the windows of the Sorbonne during the May 1968 protests to more recent news footage of black-bloc anarchists clashing with riot police on anti-cuts marches. In short, ‘Cover the Night’ is advertised as an exciting, collective act of subversive protest.

But in order to take part you need to have bought an Action Kit or donated money to Invisible Children. What looked like collective activism is exposed as coordinated consumption. The people meeting that night to put up the posters they’ve bought may feel a sense of connection, but perhaps only in the way that, say, a Mazda driver might feel towards other attendees at a Mazda convention. Blanketing the streets with branded posters therefore seems less like a political act and more like free advertising for Invisible Children. ‘We are making Kony world news by redefining the propaganda we see all day, every day that dictates who and what we pay attention to,’ Russell says of the campaign. In reality, Kony 2012 posters are not that different to the billboards of Coke, Dior and Mercedes-Benz adverts shown in the video.

That what supporters of Kony 2012 share is that they’ve bought Invisible Children’s products and not much else says something about the larger purpose of the charity and its campaign. Grant Oyston, on his Visible Children blog, criticizes the charity’s finances, arguing that more goes towards ‘awareness programs’ (including film-making) than directly to Uganda. He also claims that a lot of what is sent to Africa is used to fund the Ugandan military, itself accused of similar human rights abuses to the LRA. And it has been pointed out that the problem with using a military assault to arrest a man notorious for abducting children and forcing them to become soldiers is that he is probably guarded by children whose lives may be put at risk.

The minimum of $15 million already raised from selling Action Kits is likely to go on making the next Invisible Children movie and funding an approach that may exacerbate a volatile situation, while failing to address many of the problems facing children in northern Uganda today, such as unemployment, prostitution and AIDS. Meanwhile, young westerners can carry on buying things to feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves.