by Owen | Filed Under Random Musings
Some people have asked about the story I alluded to behind the creation the “Buy Me” photos, so I’ve decided to address that here rather than individually, so those who may be interested need not ferret out the answer from scattered comments. Fair warning: it is not at all salacious and probably nowhere near as interesting as you may hope. It is even, I may say, rather pedantic. But I have pronounced pedantic tendencies — it is, for better and/or worse, how I think — so at the risk of drizzling gray tedium over much more pleasing suppositions, I will here relate exactly why I decided to create these images.
These photos were something of a departure for me, as I don’t normally venture into fetish photography outside of a commercial context. But last week, a woman I work with told me about an ad she had seen that brought home to me some characteristics of our society and moved me to create these images.
In brief, our society exhibits 1) a fascination, bordering on an obsession, with the New, the Outré, the Shocking and/or Transgressive; and 2) a preoccupation, sometimes almost neurotic, with sexual and erotic concepts coupled with a prudish aversion to those concepts’ frank expression. This condition, which I might call puritanical hedonism, causes considerable conflict. This conflict occurs not just between sectors of society but within individuals, where it all too often manifests itself in some very ill-considered (not to say amazingly dumb) ideas.
Nowhere is this more evident (at least in my view) than in advertising. The ad referred to, which was intended to sell shoes, I believe, involved a woman and a malamute: the woman had her foot up on a piece of furniture, displaying the product; her skirt hiked up to the hip to bare her raised, flexed and bent leg; and the malamute licking her exposed calf while the woman threw her head back in what we can only hope was a pose of faux ecstasy.
Now what immediately leapt to mind — and I know I am not alone in this — is that someone had concluded it was a good idea to promote bestiality to sell shoes. And not only that, but that someone was paid to come up with this idea and someone’s corporate management decided to approve and execute it and someone else’s corporate management to ultimately publish it. So this was not some one-off nutty idea by a foot fetishist with an unfortunate thing for dogs and women; it was a corporately approved and vetted concept considered not just appropriate for national circulation, but beneficial for the client and as reflecting well on the agency that created it.
How exactly could this happen?
Imagining myself (however speciously) in the position of the person assigned to come up with this ad, I see myself receiving a memo saying something like (in what I conceive to be the argot of the day): “Gotta sell some shoes. Kewl shoes! Gotta be edgy, hawt, Rad. Gimme ideas!”
Now, it being me, I would ponder a bit and suggest something like this: “OK, 2 women. Woman 1 has her foot up on a table, displaying the shoe. Woman 2 is kneeling on the table licking Woman 1’s foot. Woman 2 is nude except for shoes, but posed so nothing really shows.”
To me, such a concept is sexy, thought-provoking, memorable, and kind of sweet. It has some edge and I think it would satisfy the “hawt” requirement. But I can equally imagine the response: “2 girls? Naked? Like naked naked? Foot licking? Like Naked Lesbian foot worship? No waay!”
Me: “So what do you wanna do?” (Showing my flexibility.)
Them: “Gotta talk upstairs.”
Eventually corporate response: “No nudity. NO lesbians. We’ll get a dog. The dog will lick her leg. Her Leg — not her foot. NO foot stuff.”
Me: “The dog can’t wear shoes. You’ll only get one pair of shoes in the shot.”
Them: “N/p. we’ll work it.”
And so… bestiality. Yeah, that’s waay better than two normal every-day loving women sweetly engaging a bit of foot worship. Society is not ready for that. But bestiality? No problem. Green Lite. Go.
Me: “2-word 7-letter resignation note.”
Admittedly, I am making this rather ungenerous exchange up out of whole cloth, but the fact remains that the ad in question was produced and did run, where I am quite sure that should I propose the photos I created for the self-same purpose, they would be rejected out of hand on the grounds of being to overtly sexual. Thus does puritanical hedonism result in rejecting perfectly usual, laudable, and not uncommon expressions of human desire in favor the truly perverse and disturbing; thus producing a wildly distorted vision of the Erotic, or, as in this case, a remarkably meretricious bit of advertising.
Or I could be wrong. If I have somehow created the next great shoe ad, you will read it here first.
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