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(Continued from last week)
As I argued in last week’s column, the first
problem with sexual images in billboards is that they are
essentially not informative and, worse, psychologically
manipulative. Thus, they fail to meet the requirements of legitimate
advertising and mass media.
Plato has been quoted as saying that “the body
intrudes … into our investigations, interrupting, disturbing,
distracting, and preventing us from getting a glimpse of the
truth.” More recently, psychologists have been analyzing the
impact of psychological manipulation in sexual advertising or what
they neutrally term as “sex appeals.” They have found that while
sex appeals improved the viewers’ positive thoughts about and
recall of the advertising message, this came at a price to the
viewer. Sex appeals tend to interfere with thoughts about the
product and the message as well as inhibit counter-arguments in the
mind of the viewer. In short, sex appeals short-circuit the
mind’s natural rationality and replace this with positive feelings
associated with sexual imagery.
A second issue that has been raised against
sexual images in advertising, and which applies more strongly to
billboards, is that they send essentially unnatural and, as a
result, demeaning messages. Business ethicist John Cohan argues that
such ads “redefine attractiveness from something natural to an
unattainable ideal.” The utter artificial flawlessness of
human bodies in 50-foot billboards implies an essentially demeaning
and manipulative message. Jacobson and Mazur argue that “by
inviting women to compare their unimproved reality with [such] …
perfection, advertising erodes self-esteem, then offers to sell it
back—for a price.”
Thus, this style of advertising dissuades
against the cultivation of inner beauty. Not surprisingly, such ads
have cultivated the desire of women to aspire for mythical standards
of beauty, which are often only possible through costly, and
sometimes dangerous, surgical intervention. The reported cases
of disfigurement, injuries and death related to cosmetic surgery
operations in the country is an inevitable result of this obsession
with an unattainable physical beauty propagated in part by sexual
advertising.
A third ethical objection against
sex-oriented billboards is that they erode traditional
conventions of virtue and modesty among women and, therefore, slowly undermine
the country’s social fabric. Women, because of their tender
qualities and crucial nurturing roles in the family and in the
community, have always been afforded a high level of respect in
Philippine society. Although we have come a long way from the Maria
Clara ideal, Filipina women are still raised in the exercise of
virtues such as modesty and prudence. These are not trivial
considerations for a society, which values the family and the
raising of upright children. By extolling immodesty in the
highways of the land, these billboards are conditioning the young
generation to forget traditional community values.
A final and practical problem is that these
billboards pose a safety threat to the motoring public. Billboards,
of course, rely on their ability to attract attention and,
therefore, send a message. But sexual images attract attention
much longer than necessary for the message to be sent. The
driver who understandably lingers too long to take in the alluring
images may find himself in a collision before he knows it. These
billboards are found in highways, after all, where high speeds are
to be expected. Shouldn’t considerations of public safety override
the commercial interests of companies?
Companies should take care not to let their
pursuit of profit override their basic sense of decency and concern
for the community. Perhaps, in specific contexts and for exclusively
mature audiences, nudity has a place in advertising. But it
doesn’t belong in billboards.
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Dr. Ben Teehankee is an associate professor
at th e Ramon V. del Rosario Sr. Graduate School of Business,
College of Business and Economics at De La Salle University-Manila.
His e-mail address is teehankeeb@dlsu.edu.ph.
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