red tide

I used to like ads, especially TV ads. I thought there was an artistry to caricature: a visual semiotics testing how much can be thrown out while retaining signification. And, while political cartoons essentialized a politician's features, TV ads caricatured everyday expressions: particularly, looks of discomfort, exasperation, and embarrassment. Over time, these caricatures became a cultural anthropology, tracking trends in expressions and body language.
But, sometime in the past two years, I've stopped liking ads. I feel like one of their characters when I'm watching them: my eyebrows rise with surprise, then plummet with annoyance, and I mouth to anyone nearby, what the hell? The ads are like the ridiculous and offensive characters they contain. But I'm not sure if I've changed, or the ads have. And so, I keep meaning to start a regular column here (Ad-Verse), in which I try to summarize the most offensive trends in ad campaigns. (My last attempt at Ad-Verse was in March.)

Today's trend comes courtesy of Andrea, who has "been badly wanting to develop a lecture series on tampon ad campaigns."

The fact is that they're getting more and more horrific, and I have to attribute this "aesthetic of fear" to intense competition between the feminine hygene companies… When I was going through puberty, tampon companies were still playing nice. Ad rhetoric was all about comfort and ease, assuring young teens that tampons were a cinch to get the hang of and that we wouldn't even be able to feel them in our bodies. But then, sometime around the millenium (perhaps this has some cryptic bearing), I began to notice that the tampon companies were leaving behind the idea of the tampon itself as being a benign, helpful product, and were embracing a more all-encompassing projection of the fear that should be involved while having one's period. Now, instead of comfort being the focus, it was the horror of being in a state of menstration and the way that tampons, including packaging and design, could help to hide this horror from those around us… So anyway, I've long been wanting to do this series examining just what is going on in tampon ads, exactly, and what better ad to kick it off than the one that actually made my jaw drop earlier this month, the ad that is so clearly fucked up that I don't really even have to take the time to go into heavy analysis today (which is good, because I'm tired)?

Here's the ad, from the May issue of Seventeen:

Posted by nchicha at April 22, 2004 02:26 AM