Sitting in the doctor’s office yesterday, caught a Calvin Klein ad in Rolling Stone that sort of set my mind ill at ease:
To each his own, and sex is great and all that, but a young woman with three guys is not what I would call a good model to represent to the public as a normal standard. There are more ads at the Calvin Klein site here.
Where do we draw lines? This ad is in a magazine that is available in a doctor’s office. Is this what we want kids to see? In any fine arts museum there are more explicit scenarios to be sure, so it is difficult to decide what is art and what is ‘normal’ and what is porn, etc. Advertising somehow doesn’t seem like the proper medium to be pushing the envelope however. If the government has decided that tobacco is harmful and so doesn’t allow advertising any more, there must be standards set of some sort as to what might be considered a more private decision as to sexual play.
Other questions are raised; if the above is okay, then why are multiple partner marriages considered bigamy and illegal? I can see that one being challenged immediately after the male/female marriage base has been challenged and changed. And how about age? Why isn’t a girl or boy ready to wed at twelve? And more worms in the can: How can you claim that anorexic models and an impossible sense of beauty standards are damaging to self-esteem and unrealistic, and then allow advertising with a multi-partnered sex arrangement as not having an influence on human expectations of what’s real and okay?
I would agree that the image is beautiful, but is it tasteful? Not as an ad for jeans. Maybe for experimental sex.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology