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Popular Culture Review
something that does not shape the values of the Las Vegas citizenry, that they do
not see a need to educate our daughters, and our sons, concerning the false
image of female/male relationships that bombards our senses daily as we drive
to work or to the supermarket. Moreover, complacency and acquiescence look
like approval.
The difficulty with contemporary publicity is its subtlety. It is easy for
the consumer to be lulled into complicity with the oppressor. Although raw and
destructive images still appear on CD covers of music for the younger
generation, a more dangerous form of advertising exists that is not so easy to
recognize because it hides behind the veneer of “art.” Art, as John Berger points
out, is connected to learned assumptions about beauty, truth, and taste (11). Tom
Bruny, the director of marketing for the Luxor Hotel and Casino, parallels the
images that appear in the Las Vegas RA ads to the style of ads in fashion
magazines like Vogue, as Megan Capehart observes (3). If the ad attempts to be
artistic in some form, the ad must be innocuous. However, the decapitation
advertisement is one type of artistically contrived publicity, with underlying
meaning that is not apparent to the general public. Marketing that uses the
commodification of women continues to propagate the belief that women have
no status, that they are objects to be used and tossed aside. Because ads like
these are banal and commonplace in U.S. culture, viewers do not react to them.
UNLV sociology professor Kate Hausbeck notes that the advertising market has
been so glutted with sexual images for the past 30 years that “commercial
‘sexiness’ isn’t shocking, provocative, or original” (2). Public apathy explains in
part why sexually provocative advertising, despite its detractors, consumes
consumers.
For example, my classmates (New Wave or “postmodernist” generation
feminists) in a recent gender seminar I attended at UNLV met my concerned
assertions that contemporary objectification of women has just taken a different,
more insidious form with exclamations that I was overreacting, that no one
really took advertising seriously, that the “older generation” had lost its sense of
humor and needed to “get hip” to the “brave new world” of women who do not
have issues with corporate America or with patriarchal oppression and
objectification, because media attempts to control women are innocuous.
Not everyone in Las Vegas, however, is as complacent about
suggestive press. There are Nevada Concerned Citizens; Carole Gates of
American Mothers Inc.; Shari Peterson at [email protected]; and
Mae Clark, the coordinator with “Pom Only In Zone” who protests against
sexually suggestive and subliminal messages on Las Vegas billboards. Over 200
protestors, including Peterson, swamped the March 2004 meeting of the fivemember panel of the disciplining board for the Nevada Gaming Commission
concerning the Hard Rock’s marketing strategies. Clark’s group has been
lobbying against obscene handbills and signage situated in places where anyone
can see them for a number of years. In addition, Michael Wixom and the Main
Street Billboard Committee had meetings in May 2004 with the radio station