“BATH TISSUE IS LIKE MARRIAGE”
The Corruption of Relationships
“BATH TISSUE IS LIKE MARRIAGE,” SAYS AN AD FOR CHARMIN FEATURING A smiling old couple in their kitchen. When I read this to my happily married friend Bettie on the phone, she was mystified. “But I thought what one wants most in bath tissue is to be able to flush it away,” she said. From my more disillusioned point of view, I thought it might mean that you have to deal with a lot of shit. But the ad tells us: “The longer it lasts, the better it is.” Although at first glance, this might seem to be a nice statement about long marriages, the comparison is ludicrous, trivializing, and ultimately odious.
The problem with advertising isn’t that it creates artificial longings and needs, but that it exploits our very real and human desires. In some ways, advertisers know us better than we know ourselves, and they use this knowledge to take advantage of us. Above all, advertising promotes a corrupt and bankrupt concept of relationship. Most of us yearn for intimate and committed relationships that will last. We are not stupid: We know that buying a certain brand of toilet tissue, or anything else for that matter, won’t bring us one inch closer to that goal. But we are surrounded by advertising that yokes our needs with products and promises us that things will deliver what in fact they never can. In the world of advertising, lovers are things and things are lovers. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, not to be affected by this.
We are surrounded by hundreds, thousands, of messages every day that link our deepest emotions to products, that objectify people and trivialize our most heartfelt moments and relationships. Every emotion is used to sell us something. Our wish to protect our children is leveraged to make us buy an expensive car. A long marriage simply provides the occasion for a diamond necklace. A painful reunion between a father and his estranged daughter is drawn out and dramatized to sell us a phone system. Everything in the world—nature, animals, people—is just so much stuff to be consumed or to be used to sell us something.
Even when advertisers tell us that something is priceless, they manage to put a price on it. In 1998 MasterCard had a campaign with the tagline, “There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else there is MasterCard.” One commercial shows a father and son at a baseball game. It places a dollar value on lots of things related to the game—tickets, snacks, an autographed baseball—but rates “real conversation with an 11-year-old” as priceless. Other commercials in the campaign also link intangible emotions with activities that cost money. The ostensible message of the commercial is that you can’t put a price on what is most valuable in life . . . but the underlying message is that sure you can. You can not only put a price on it, you can put it on a credit card.
It may be that there is no other way to depict relationships when the ultimate goal is to sell products. But this apparently bottomless consumerism not only depletes the world’s resources, it also depletes our inner resources. It leads inevitably to narcissism and solipsism. It becomes difficult even to imagine a way of relating—to ourselves, our children, our partners, our environment—that isn’t objectifying and exploitive.
Children, especially babies, are sometimes used for shock value, to grab attention, as in the ads headlined “A child is the ultimate pet” and “A kiss is not just a kiss.” The child is nothing but a fashion accessory in these ads, in one attached to a jeweled collar and leash, in the other fastened to the woman’s breast like a brooch. Perhaps we should be grateful that real children are pictured—“It’s a girl!” says an ad featuring a watch substituting for the fetus in an ultrasound of the womb. I guess life begins at consumption. When we really look at these ads, we see that they are shocking, outrageous. We would be horrified by images like these of our own children. But until we force ourselves to pay attention, these ads are just part of the mostly unconscious blur of images that surrounds us every day. No big deal.
Some ads hark back to the days when children were supposed to be “seen but not heard.” “Quiet kids. How’s that for a product benefit?” says an ad for a sport utility vehicle that comes with a TV/video cassette player. A commercial for a minivan features an entire family cruising along, each one but the driver wearing individual headsets and watching a movie on the overhead video screen. And a candy bar ad asks, “Kids talking too much? Give ’em a Chewy Grand Slam . . . Really, really chewy.” Do we need this kind of message in a culture in which people say they spend about forty minutes each week in meaningful conversation with their children?
Sometimes children are portrayed as getting in the way of our pleasure. “We can get rid of the pain in your neck but not the cause of it,” declares an ad for physical therapy featuring a woman dragging a little boy out of a park. Although the copy assures us, “Of course, you’d never want to get rid of the little guy,” the initial impression is of shocking hostility. Of course, the creators of this ad use shock to get our attention; they intend no larger consequence. But an image of potential child abuse, in a culture in which millions of children are abused and neglected, is used to attract our attention and perhaps to make us laugh.
More often, sentimental images of children are used to evoke deep feelings of love and protectiveness, which are then connected to the product. “Can a shoe hug you like a tiny hand?” asks an ad featuring a woman cradling a child in her arms. The answer, of course, is no—but that’s not what the ad implies. Whatever emotional response we might have to the image is immediately transferred to the product. We might well feel betrayed by this, but it happens so often every day that it is more likely we don’t even notice (or think we don’t).
Many ads that seem to be about the relationship between a parent and a child turn out to be glorifying the relationship between the parent and a product. “What makes this room so cozy?” asks an ad featuring a woman and a little girl. The little girl is behind the woman, touching her hair, but the woman is on the telephone, seemingly absorbed in her conversation, not looking at the child. Nonetheless, the room is cozy . . . because of the air freshener. “There are some things you wouldn’t trade for the world,” says an ad featuring a beautiful woman wearing a fur coat and holding a child rather stiffly on her lap. The copy continues, “If you don’t feel that way about your fur, why not trade it for a new one?”
A stunning example of this kind of confusion between products and people occurs in an ad featuring a girl running into the open arms of a woman, presumably her mother. The copy says, “Open your eyes. What’s important is right in front of you.” One hopes, expects, that what is important to this woman is her child. But no, it turns out the ad is referring to her shoes. Again, if we take time to reflect on this, the message is truly awful. The ad explicitly states that the shoes are more important than the child to this woman. But we don’t usually pay conscious attention to ads, so the message slides right by . . . into our unconscious. One ad like this wouldn’t matter at all, but the constant repetition of the belief that products are more important than people has an impact.
Advertisers know that many of us, perhaps most of us, feel guilty about not spending enough time with our children. So they use this guilt to sell us watches, as if somehow telling time is related to having more of it. “Of all the things you give her, time is the most valuable,” says an ad featuring a woman kissing a young girl. This is true, but how does it relate to the watch being advertised? Is this mother going to remember to spend more time with her daughter whenever she checks her watch? How many hours did she have to work to earn the money to buy the watch?
An ad picturing what we assume to be a grandfather reading to his granddaughter says “Life’s precious gifts.” Again, if one were unfamiliar with advertising one might assume that one of life’s precious gifts is this warm relationship. However, the ad is for little crystal knickknacks, which somehow are supposed to be related to this cozy scene. Perhaps the child will be reminded of her closeness with her grandfather when she sees these knickknacks later in life. Or perhaps the items are totems imbued with the emotions in the room. The grandfather dies, the little girl grows up and moves away, but the little knickknacks go on forever. Except, of course, we know this can’t be true. We don’t think about all this when we look at the ad, however. Perhaps we glance at it as we turn the page. The immediate message, unchallenged, is that the warmth between the two people is somehow related to the crystal objects flying around the room (like the floating cherubs in old religious paintings). Just as, in another ad, the camaraderie and friendship among three laughing young women are due to the Coca-Cola they are drinking. If we didn’t see this kind of thing all the time, surely it would strike us as surreal.
Ads have long promised us a better relationship via a product: buy this and you will be loved. But more recently they have gone beyond that proposition to promise us a relationship with the product itself: Buy this and it will love you. The product is not so much the means to an end as the end itself.
Products are not only sold by celebrities; they have become celebrities. Indeed one of the functions of advertising is to make the products familiar to us. We encounter them like old friends in the shopping aisles. Look, there’s Mr. Clean and Budweiser and Crest! We are proud to be associated with them. We are encouraged to identify with Coke rather than Pepsi, with Burger King rather than McDonald’s, as if they were feuding families and we had to take sides. This is especially true for children, for whom personality almost literally becomes the product, whether it’s Tony the Tiger, the Ninja Turtles, or My Little Pony.
Lifestyle, the ultimate self-expression of the 1990s, is available even to those on a budget. People can sleep on sheets with Ralph Lauren’s name on them or decorate their houses with materials blessed by Martha Stewart and sold at Kmart. We can dine on Christian Dior dinnerware, drive a Nautica minivan, lunch at a Giorgio Armani café, and put our children to bed in Guess cribs. Clothing designer Bill Blass put his signature on Lincoln cars, but he drew the line at braces for children’s teeth and coffins.
Associating a product with Ralph or Martha or Calvin gives it magic value for some consumers. We are encouraged not only to constantly buy more but to seek our identity and our fulfillment through what we buy, to express our individuality through our “choices” of products. We’re a “Marlboro man” or a “Maidenform woman.” “Some people are born with charisma. Others just buy it,” says an ad that exploits James Dean to sell towels. Of course, there is no real magic in these products. One does not have a relationship with them or with the people whose names are branded on them, although we might believe that we do.
Many advertisers are using the Internet these days to encourage this sense of a relationship with a product or a brand. Most insidiously, cartoon pitchmen create individual “virtual relationships” with children. According to the Center for Media Education, any marketer who learns a kid’s favorite color or pet or activity can harness sophisticated child psychology and interactive technology to “prey on children’s vulnerabilities” and “manipulate your child in very profound ways.”
As always, Calvin Klein goes further. He set up Internet addresses for the three models depicted in a campaign for his cK one perfume and encouraged consumers to write them for vivid details about their lives. The only catch is, the characters are make-believe, the life stories imaginary. According to Klein, “What you have is a new kind of intimacy that’s really a paradox—people all over the world are more in touch than ever, but they’re doing it one-to-one on e-mail and the Internet. When we take this new campaign to e-mail, it makes it very personal.”
No wonder some people become confused about what’s real and what isn’t in advertising. One researcher, interviewing ninth-grade students in a school with Channel One, found that many of them believed that the people in commercials weren’t paid actors. One girl, speaking about a Pepsi commercial, said, “I know that I’d be terribly disappointed if the kids in that commercial turned out to be paid actors—they’re just real kids off the street, like us.… They just couldn’t be actors, ya know?”
When we’re not involved in pseudo-relationships with the models in ads, we can be falling in love with our hamburgers. “Attention: Big Mac lovers” appears on the television screen in a Burger King commercial, while a singer croons, “Who do you love? Who do you love?” and burgers and fries dance through the air. Then “Ready for a new relationship?” appears on the screen, with a heart surrounding the Burger King logo. Time to break up with McDonald’s and fall in love with Burger King.
Very little in advertising is coincidental. Consider the way a six-pack of soda announces the last date the drink should be consumed. It doesn’t say “drink” or “consume,” but rather invites you to “enjoy,” as in “Enjoy by May 30.” According to Steve Chinn, director of business strategies at Saatchi & Saatchi, “It’s such a simple thing, but it’s a stunning difference. You feel that the people behind the brand care about you. They’re using the same words you’d use for a relationship with someone you like.”
The important thing, of course, is not that the people behind the brand care about us, but that we feel that they do. “Know the heart of the consumer, and you will own the future,” says market researcher John Houlahan. Many chains, from pizza stores to moviehouses, are trying to deal with the troublesome fact that the lowest paid and least trained workers are the ones who interact with the consumers not by paying them more or training them better but by requiring them to repeat certain phrases, such as “Thank you for coming to Loew’s” and “Hi, welcome to McDonald’s!” This facade of friendliness is probably meant to give the illusion that these huge and impersonal chains are as homey as the neighborhood stores they drove out of business.
The research on the significance of relationships to women has not been lost on advertisers. According to market analyst Faith Popcorn, “Marketers will need to create a rich series of connections and bonds” in order to reach women. And market researcher Bernadette Tracy says that women want Websites that build relationships. “On the Internet,” she writes, “if content is king, relationships are the trump card.” Kraft recently announced a plan to target advertising messages so finely that two households watching the same program could see radically divergent Kraft spots. In fact, different television sets within the same household could have different spots—one for Minute Rice in the kitchen and one for Kool-Aid in the family room. “Its a one-to-one communications approach,” said the Kraft executive overseeing the project. “Relationship marketing is what it’s all about.”
As the products (and stores and fast-food restaurants and airlines and phone companies) are portrayed as ever more intensely alive, we are encouraged to feel that we are in relationships with them, to feel passion for our products rather than our partners. “The right dress is like the right guy,” says an ad featuring a couple embracing. “You love it more when you get it home.” A facial care line is advertised as “the most exciting thing to happen to your face since your first kiss.” “Oh my goodness!” proclaims an ad featuring a bottle of Coca-Cola. “You should’ve seen this one . . . tall, dark and cooler than cool. I had to pick it up.” The overt eroticism of this ad is no coincidence, of course. The bottle has even worked up a sweat!
After all, it is easier and considerably safer to love a product than a person. Relationships with human beings are messy, unpredictable, often uncomfortable, sometimes dangerous. “When was the last time you felt this comfortable in a relationship?” asks an ad for sneakers. Our sneakers never have bad moods or ask us to wash the dishes or tell us we’re getting fat. Even more important, products don’t betray or abandon us. “You can love it without getting your heart broken,” proclaims a car ad. One certainly can’t say that about loving a human being. As most of us know, love is risky, love is painful, and love without vulnerability is impossible.
A forlorn young man in a shoe ad says, “I loved Missy from next door. She moved. I loved my French teacher. She got married. I loved Betty on TV who said, ‘Oop boop bee doo.’ She was a cartoon. Well, at least my feet have always known true love.” A similar ad features a closeup of a woman’s foot in a sandal and the copy, “It is said that when the heel of the foot is caressed, it stimulates the heart. Sure beats waiting for love to come along.” Clearly these two soles are meant for each other.
Taken individually, these ads are silly, sometimes funny, certainly nothing to worry about. But cumulatively they create a climate of cynicism and alienation that is poisonous to relationships. Many people end up feeling romantic about material objects yet deeply cynical about other human beings. In a society in which one of two marriages ends in divorce, we are offered constancy through our products. As one ad says, “Some people need only one man. Or one woman. Or one watch.” Okay, so we can’t be monogamous—at least we can be faithful to our watches. Because of the pervasiveness of this kind of advertising message, we learn from childhood that it is far safer to make a commitment to a product than to a person, far easier to be loyal to a brand. Ad after ad portrays our real lives and relationships as dull and ordinary, and commitment to human beings as something to be avoided.
“Who says guys are afraid of commitment? He’s had the same backpack for years,” states an ad that features photographs of a young man with several different women, but always the same backpack. The young women are the accessories, the backpack is the intimate partner. The copy assures the reader that the backpack “comes with a lifetime guarantee not to rip, tear, break, or ask for a ring.” You know, people are so annoying—they want promises, permanence. Such a drag. So much easier to snuggle up with your undemanding backpack.
An ad featuring a couple cuddled up on a sofa says, “Some people just know how to live.” Lest we think this refers to their relationship, the copy tells us, “Life forces you to make far too many commitments. Which is why we offer you the opportunity to live with furniture that doesn’t.” On closer look, the woman does seem a bit anxious and quite desperately focused on the man, whereas he is looking straight at us with great confidence. It is commonplace today to note that many men are phobic about commitment and that women have to be more wily than ever to “snare a man.” This ad illustrates this. The apartment is barely furnished. The paintings are not hung on the walls. The crate substituting for a table is so small that only one cup fits on it. The couple could be moving in or moving out. Or maybe they’re not a couple at all, at least not for long. The appeal of the sofa, according to the ad, is that it comes with washable slipcovers so you “can change the look of your home with every season, or simply because you’re in the mood . . . living this carefree can be very habit-forming.” Carefree is one word to describe the mood of this scene. Uncommitted, insecure, tentative, uprooted are others. It’s one thing to live this way, quite another to love like this.
If a guy does get roped into marriage, he can always drown his sorrows in booze. “Hang on to your spirit,” says an ad for Southern Comfort, which features an anxious groom with a hangman’s rope around his neck. The bride is smiling, completely oblivious to the true feelings of this moron she is so, so lucky to marry. Another ad in this campaign pictures a man accompanying a woman on a shopping expedition. In addition to being laden with packages, he has a ball and chain around his ankle.
Women are told we can adjust to fleeting, impermanent relationships with men by focusing on our lasting relationships with products. “The ski instructor faded away 3 winters ago. At least the sweater didn’t,” says an ad featuring a woman alone on a beach, smiling happily in her sweater.
“Getting engaged means making a huge decision. You live with it for the rest of your life,” says a smiling young woman in an ad for diamonds. She concludes, “So I decided on the solitaire.” A diamond, long considered a girl’s best friend, has now become her lifetime companion. We get this message again and again and again—the ring is more important than the man, the backpack more reliable than the woman. The average wedding in America today costs $17,634. If at least some of this money was spent on premarital counseling, maybe more of these marriages would succeed.
Sometimes advertisers tell us we’ll find true love and commitment with the products. Other times we’ll apparently settle for great sex. For decades products have been advertised as the route to passionate lovemaking. “There are times when making the right shoe decision can keep you up all night,” says an ad featuring a couple embracing on a balcony. Are they going to have terrific sex all night long because of the shoes she’s wearing? Are they going to have sex with the shoes? Where can I get a pair? If those shoes don’t do the trick, one can always try the sandals pictured in another ad with the copy, “The pair you wear to rekindle your marriage . . . will also look stunning at the maternity ward.” “If these can’t put a little romance in your life, maybe you need a dating service,” declares an ad for . . . slipcovers. I can see ads claiming that perfume will lead to passionate sex, maybe even shoes, but slipcovers?
These days, however, we are often offered a sexual relationship with the products themselves. “When you see what you want, it possesses you,” says an ad featuring an extremely “sexy” woman, standing with her legs apart, clutching a small leather purse. The attraction between the woman and the little purse seems to be mutually intense. In a watch ad, we are promised “goose bumps as well as the time.” In a Bernini perfume ad, it looks as if the product is specially designed for the woman “aroused by her own imaginings.” We don’t need people at all, either present or implied.
In a recent television commercial, a man is snoring in bed while the woman beside him tosses and turns and hugs her pillow and a song called “Dreamin” plays in the background. A female voiceover says, “Put some excitement back into your life.” What is the ad for? Marriage counseling? French ticklers? No. It turns out what the woman longs for is new sheets.
In another commercial, a heavy woman dances with a man, while a woman’s voice sings, “I never felt like I fit in ‘til you curved around my curves. My body feels so right when you caress my skin. It’s hard to tell where you end and I begin. I know you’ll never stray. Just keep holding me each day.” My first thought is that it’s nice to see a heavy woman portrayed as attractive in a commercial. Next I wonder what the ad is for—perhaps perfume? Not a diet product, I hope. But it turns out that the woman’s relationship is with her lingerie. It is her bra with the stay-free straps that will hold her and never stray. I suppose we should be grateful that she isn’t dancing with her bra. Maybe she became aroused on a shopping spree at J.C. Penney and will end the evening by having sex not on but with her sheets.
Alas, even relationships with products can sour, at least according to the ad for stereo speakers that asks, “Will you still respect your speakers in the morning?” It certainly looks as if the guy on the bed took the promise of advertising too literally and actually slept with the speaker. No wonder he’s so depressed. The speaker’s probably not in great shape either. The man might have had a better time if he’d taken the risk of relating to a human being.
In the topsy-turvy world of advertising, we are told to expect that our lovers will be distracted by their possessions, that we will end up in competition with products for our partners’ attention—and losing. “I remember when he couldn’t keep his hands off me,” says a frustrated woman wearing sexy lingerie as her lover plays a video game. The copy continues, “He used to play all night with me. Hot action, fantasy games . . . you name it. Now he says his NEO GEO gives him more, plus major league sports, ninja warriors, and flame throwing enemies. Can you do that? he asks. . . . I scream but he doesn’t hear me.”
This woman seems to have the right lingerie. Perhaps she needs to change her hair color. After all, Clairol Ultress offers such shades as “Super Bowl? What Super Bowl? Blonde,” and “Make Him Drop the Remote Control Red.” The truth is many women do feel abandoned by men who compulsively watch sports, play video games, or surf the Internet (or will do almost anything to avoid having to talk). Ads that imply we could make our mates more responsive to us by changing our hair color increase our sense of self-blame and trivialize the agonizing loneliness of the disconnection.
At the same time that relationships are increasingly trivialized in the popular culture, some theorists are discovering that they are even more important in our lives than has been traditionally recognized. Although most of us know, of course, that relationships are central in our lives, it is only recently that psychological theory has truly understood this. Traditional psychoanalytic and developmental theories start with the notion that healthy development is based on a person disconnecting from relationships, beginning with his or her parents (especially, of course, the mother). These theories, based on studies of males but assumed to apply to females as well, focus on a goal of autonomy, separation, and development of the independent individual and emphasize self and work rather than intimacy and love. Of course, this focus seems entirely “natural” in a culture that values rugged individualism and independence above all else.
Jean Baker Miller, author of the classic Toward a New Psychology of Women, and her colleagues at the Stone Center at Wellesley College have done groundbreaking work on the nature and importance of relationships, of connection, especially for women. Their theory, originally called self-in-relation theory, shifts the emphasis from separation to the “relational” self as the basis for growth and development. A fundamental tenet of their work is a recognition that an inner sense of connection to others is a central organizing feature in women’s psychological development. For individuals to develop in a healthy direction, Dr. Miller says, they must engage in relationships that foster growth, empowerment, and empathy. This is important for men too, of course, as well as women. But boys are still rigidly socialized in a way that makes authentic intimacy difficult. This depresses men and sometimes makes them violent, and it also depresses women who are blamed for failing to make successful relationships with these depressed, violent, and inaccessible men.
Sometimes relational theory is dismissed as “difference feminism” by people who mistakenly see it as a claim that women are innately superior to or different from men. In fact, Miller never suggests that women’s relational orientation is innate, nor does she idealize women or relationships. Indeed she recognizes and discusses some of the problems that result from this emphasis on relationships in women’s lives, especially when the relationships are not mutual.
According to Miller, mutuality is the key to healthy connections—both people in a relationship must have an impact and be able to grow. Such growth-fostering connections promote zest and vitality, empowerment to act, greater knowledge of self and others, an increased sense of self-worth, and a desire for more connection. These outcomes are what we all long for and what we need. Sadly, the very nature of our culture makes it extremely difficult for relationships to flourish. And even more sadly, advertising (and a market-driven culture) co-opts the desirable outcomes of real connection. Advertising promises us that products can deliver what, in fact, we can only get through healthy interpersonal relationships:
Zest and vitality. Ads often promise that products will make us feel more alive, will help us to experience life more intensely. Ad after ad links drinking a soda with risky and exciting adventures like sky-diving or tells us that shaving with a certain lotion is “up there with your peak experiences.” In the world of advertising, Zest is literally a soap and “Happy” a perfume (and New Freedom is a maxipad, Wonder a bread, Good Sense a teabag, and Serenity a diaper).
Everywhere we look, we are offered false excitement, pseudo-intensity. Not only does this inevitably disappoint us, it also contributes to the general feeling in the culture that every moment of our lives should be exciting, fun, that sex should always be passionate and intense, education ceaselessly entertaining, that anything less is bo—ring.
Empowerment to act. Ads also promise us that products will give us courage, will empower us to act. “Just do it,” Nike ads tell us, as if putting on high-priced sneakers will help us achieve our goals. “Everybody’s afraid,” another ad tells us. “People in leather just don’t look like they are.” All we need is the right outfit and we can overcome our fears and triumph. Empowerment is almost always defined in advertising as power over other people (such as those people who are too stupid to cover up their fear with a leather jacket) rather than the ability to act for others as well as oneself.
Knowledge and clarity of self and others. Ads constantly tell us that products can help us find our identity, can make us unique, can help us understand ourselves and each other better. An ad for accessories from Emporio Armani says, “The big items say what you do. But the little details say who you are.” “Define yourself,” says an ad for pantyhose, which continues, “If you are what you wear, wear what you are.” And Calvin Klein tells us, “be good. be bad. just be,” as if somehow his perfume had something to do with our core identity, indeed was more important in defining us than our morality.
Just as enlightenment comes without hard work in the world of advertising, perhaps via a cruise, so does self-knowledge. Lexus offers us “personal empowerment without the long boring seminar.” “Fulfilling your dreams is better than having them analyzed,” says a travel ad, while another ad promises an herbal tea that “works approximately six years faster than psychotherapy.”
Ads also promise that products will lead instantly to better communication. “The woman who claims men hide their feelings never gave a man a diamond,” one ad tells us. Is there a woman alive who doesn’t think men hide their feelings? Is it all because we haven’t given them diamonds? Men are socialized to hide their feelings, at enormous cost to themselves as well as to women. This ad trivializes the power of cultural conditioning and places the blame squarely on the shoulders of the woman who just doesn’t get how simple it is to change all this with the right gift. Many women do believe that we could get our men to open up if we could just find the right words, the right combination to the lock—in other words, if we just tried harder and were better women.
At the same time that most of us yearn for better communication and deeper relationships, men are encouraged to be distant (strong and silent) and women are exhorted to be mysterious—surefire ways to make real intimacy impossible. “You’ve known her for years, yet she still remains a mystery,” an ad says. Because the woman in the ad is beautiful, we know this is a compliment. Of course, women are mysterious to men in the same way that Asians are “inscrutable” to Westerners. A group perceived as subordinate has to pay very close attention to the dominant group for its very survival, whereas the opposite isn’t true.
Sense of self-worth. One of the central messages of advertising is that products will enhance our sense of self-worth. “And I’m worth it,” say Cybill Shepherd, Heather Locklear, and others in the endlessly irritating ads for l’Oreal hair products, which tell us we can demonstrate our self-worth by spending a little more on hair coloring. More recently, these ads feature children claiming their worth and therefore their right to expensive hair products. We don’t have to do anything but buy the right products in order to experience this sense of self-worth. “You’re worth it,” says an ad for beer, which continues “(And even if you’re not).”
Advertising interprets self-worth to mean valuing one’s self more than anyone else and being absorbed with oneself to the almost complete exclusion of others. “And so my fellow women ask not what you can do for everyone else’s happiness but what you can do for your own,” says a Reebok ad featuring a group of powerful women on Rollerblades. “We are hedonists and we want what feels good,” says another ad for an overpriced sneaker.
Desire for more connection. And finally, the consumer culture always attempts to instill in us a longing for more of a given product (especially if that product is potentially addictive), more goods and services, more money—rather than a longing for more authentic connection with the people in our lives. An ad featuring a beautiful woman caressing some bracelets says, “Just exactly how much do you want someone to like you?” “In this icy world, gold warms her heart,” says another jewelry ad, this one featuring a couple in a strangely dispassionate embrace. They’re not looking at each other, they don’t look happy, but she is wearing gold jewelry, so all must be well. We know the codes of advertising: When we see an image of a heartfelt connection between people, we understand that it has a commercial purpose.
The desire for more connection is trivialized in a clever commercial that features a woman at a restaurant table talking to someone across from her who is off-camera. “You know,” she says, “we’ve been together awhile and I’ve been thinking . . . I’m missing something from our relationship.” At this point, the camera pulls back and we see that she is talking to a credit card perched on a chair. She continues, “I think it’s best if we make a clean break.” A voiceover says, “Expect more from your credit card,” and goes on to advertise the Discover Platinum card. The woman calls to the waiter, “Check, please,” and then says to the credit card, “Oh, you’ll get this, right?”
This corruption of relationships in advertising is taking place at a time of great trouble for real relationships, as indicated by the increasing rate of divorce, the breakdown of our civic life, the rate of domestic violence, and the neglect and abuse of children. Half of all marriages in America now end in divorce, and demographers forecast that two-thirds of recent first marriages will fail. Although it is only one measure of failure, of course, this rate of divorce is tragic, especially for children. Marriages are falling apart because of individual failures, to be sure, but also because our culture is hostile to marriage, commitment, delayed gratification, and families. Rest easy—I am not blaming advertising for the divorce rate in this country. However, it is part of a cultural climate that discourages successful long-term relationships. Advertising, a key component of our consumerist culture, constantly exhorts us to be in a never-ending state of excitement, never to tolerate boredom or disappointment, to focus on ourselves, never to delay gratification, to believe that passionate sex is more important than anything else in life, and always to trade in old things for new. These messages are a kind of blueprint for how to destroy an intimate relationship.
How are we supposed to understand that all long-term relationships go through periods of anger, boredom, disillusionment, that aridity inevitably replaces ardor from time to time? How many people leave marriages for more passionate pastures, never learning that relationships require work, patience, tolerance, compassion (all the things that are so often ridiculed or trivialized in ads)? In a culture that surrounds us with images of lust and romance and very few models of long-term love, most of us grow up totally unprepared for life after infatuation. Actor Charlie Sheen unfortunately reflected a fairly common attitude when he said about his recent failed marriage, “You buy a car, it breaks down, what are you going to do? Get rid of it.” As the Coke ad says, “The same applies to relationships: if it’s not the real thing, move on, honey.”
A few years ago People magazine carried on its cover the headline “Children of Divorce: Wounded Hearts” and a photograph of a family ripped in two. The inside story claimed that the trauma of divorce for children lasts longer than ever imagined. On the back cover, a Toyota ad featured a shadowy couple embracing beside a car. The headline for the ad was “The best relationships are lasting ones.” It clearly referred to the couple’s relationship with the car, not with each other. Inside the magazine, an ad for Coca-Cola featured an empty glass with a lipstick imprint on it and the caption, “The end of a brief but meaningful relationship.”
In the world of advertising, lovers grow cold, spouses grow old, children grow up and away—but possessions stay with us and never change. Of course, seeking the outcomes of a healthy relationship through products cannot work. For one thing, the possessions can never deliver the promised goods. They can’t make us happy or loved or less alone or safe. If we believe they can, we are doomed to disappointment. It simply is not true, as an ad for Waterford crystal tells us, that “in a room with a thing of beauty, you are never truly alone.” Because products are only things. No matter how much we love them, they will never love us back.
