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Popular Culture Review
a male fantasy image of the woman who is all appetite, never satisfied, willing
(usually pictured on her back), and waiting for more. In this case, the female
model’s face does appear in the ad, but her sexually provocative facial
expression or body pose demeans her individuality and her voice and reduces
her to one of the stereotypes about women, namely the “bad girl.” The furor
within the last few years in Las Vegas about neathage, especially the
controversy over the Palms billboard on 1-15 in April 2004 as reported by Stacy
Willis (1), and about nudity in suggestive ads in Las Vegas, misses the primary
issue—decapitation advertising is the residue of centuries of oppression of
women and this is the issue that ought to be addressed.
I first became aware of decapitation advertising at a conference session
held in Los Angeles and sponsored by Media Watch of California in 1989.
Media Watch in the United States and Canada has been around since 1984, and
in 2005 is still “challenging racism, sexism and violence in the media through
education and action” as their website, www.mediawatch.com, proclaims. They
profess that “corporate-owned media will use any image or story to manipulate
buying power and opinion, regardless of the harm engendered by their images.
We believe people’s safety should come before profit.” I would add that female
subjectivity should come before profit as well. The Media Watch website
contains resource sites, current scheduled lectures in North America, and ways
women can take action. Their “Hall of Shame” advertisement display
graphically reveals the ways in which women are still disenfranchised in
contemporary U.S. print advertising, in song lyrics, and in motion picture lobby
cards. There are current ads represented that display women in supine and
submissive body poses, women who are afraid, entrapped, helpless, frozen,
bound and enslaved, dumbed and dumbed down, dead and drugged. The
subjugation of women is manifested in contemporary U.S. society in insinuating
forms through the media, including not just magazine ads and billboards, but in
movie promos, rap song lyrics, music videos, even in children’s toys.
The activists of Media Watch are not alone in their mission to
challenge denigrating stereotypes, to give voice back to marginalized groups.
There are organizations like About-Face whose project is also to encourage a
healthy skepticism about media representations and to empower young women
to feel confident about their individuality, their abilities, and their bodies. Media
Watch and About-Face try to counteract the four hundred to six hundred body
image advertisements that women view per day (“Body Image” 1) and the
harmful effect this marketing propaganda has on women. Decapitation
advertising is not a new phenomena; it has been used to market diverse products
including alcohol, perfume, automobiles, suntan lotion, and beauty pageants for
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