Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a Gay Toilets In Advertising
Tom Coates’ recent post on the current Muller ad. campaign, in which, to quote Tom, ‘mincing gay men flounce around the place looking at straight men’s cocks’ reminded me of the odd standard in advertising that consistently anthropomorphises toilets as camp gay men.
You might not have noticed, but there are currently two separate campaigns airing for products that stop your loo smelling of poo featuring camp speaking toilets. (I can’t for the life of me remember the brands in question - they’re bad adverts in every sense.)
In both, women are shamed by their talking toilets into taking more care over the odors eminating from the bowl, lest their houseguests think ill of them. In one ad., the loo is voiced by Julian Clary (or an impersonator) in the other, it’s a generic Kenneth Williams-esque voice that chides the housewife.
The reason for this queering of the toilet bowl is simple: you can’t have a woman sitting on the face of a humanoid toilet that is explicitly hetero - the wonks scripting the ad. are in weird enough territory as it is without introducing a cunnilingual subtext to the relationship between the Everywoman heroine and her newly clean and sweet-smelling shitter.
In his complaint about the Muller campaign, Tom chooses to miss out a layer of the Muller spot, one shared by the adverts featuring our poofy toilet friends - the gay Air Steward (what a lazy, lazy stereotype) who looks at a man’s willy to make people buy yoghurt (do they really want to associate yoghurt with cocks?) doesn’t do so with a lascivious glance, nor does he make an aggressive pass. Instead, it’s a purse-lipped end-of-the-peir mug to camera. So, instead of have the protagonist fuck his girlfriend in some yoghurty way, we are shown her getting distracted by a delicious tub of Muller Light, while her boyfriend is forced by circumstances beyond his control to have a non-sexual encounter with a gay man.
WTF?
On the one hand, this could all be seen as an extension of media representation of gay men as inherently asexual, non-threatening figures of fun - just as damaging a stereotype as the one Tom identifies when he says:
When I was growing up gay I was under the misapprehension that gay people were dirty and sickening and pathetic because of adverts like this.
But I think it’s more complicated than that. In all these adverts, sex is being used to sell products - whether it’s the winking harpies (Harpics?!) who trade double-entendres with their living toilets, or the woman who prefers a tub of live culture to the attentions of her man - but the implication of shagging is diffused through a neutered-but-sexual homosexual. That’s at least as dangerous a message (or chunk of social control, if you’re feeling paranoid) as the, erm, straight portrayal of gay men as threatening pervs - these adverts say, effectively, that gay men are naughtily suggestive of sexual activity, but also that they themselves are barred from that activity.
It’s a bit like dressing your Barbie doll up like a slut, only to point out to everyone that she has no cunt.
There’s a point buried up there somewhere, I think (in this post, I mean, not your Barbie doll). It’s probably that until the television advertising industry starts presenting gay men (and lesbians, who are similarly much-used in their most unthreatening, lipsticky form) in the way that, say, advertising has, on the whole, learned to present mixed race couples, or ethnic minorities in general, without making it an issue, letters of complaint like Tom’s are much needed.
Posted by ida slapter at 12pm on 13.07.04
Er, isn’t that exactly what I say in the post (except I didn’t bother with 5)?
Posted by Jack at 1pm on 13.07.04
Simply pointing out that it is a matter of brute capitalist expediency, rather than Something More Sinister. Everything is presented in ‘its most unthreatening, lipsticky form’ in advertising. Obviously. It’s not an arena that’s intended to challenge, or fairly represent, is it?? It only absorbs social changes in order to cover more potential cash-scraping bases - not because it GIVES A SHIT. Any representation of minorities in advertising is therefore going to be either offensively caricaturish (hilarious shrieking queers/glowering hip hop thugs/saintly disabled people) or offensively bland (lipsick lezzers/smiling mixed race couples/pleasantly dotty old folks). It works in broad strokes.
The Muller advert doesn’t especially bother me; it’s just a bawdy sitcom scenario that happens to involve a predatory gay man. I think it’s counterproductive to get too paranoid about that kind of thing. Gay men also tend to make a lot of jokes about predatory gay men, no? It’s like having gay characters in soaps - they might be slenderly and shallowly characterised and subject to horrific stereotyping, but at least they’re there, in the mainstream consciousness. Gradually, it evens out - anything threatening has to get awkwardly mocked or misrepresented for a while before it gets properly accepted. When you see, say, an Indian lady in a sari in a Boots advert, or a person in a wheelchair presenting kids’ TV, you know it’s totally contrived tokenism - but wouldn’t you rather they were on TV in any capacity than NOT AT ALL? Consider Nadia - isn’t it finally a positive thing that British people are responding to a transsexual as a real feeling human, even though she’s getting disgracefully lampooned and misunderstood?
Posted by ida slapter at 9am on 20.07.04
Hmmn. I dunno - I’m not sure it’s an entirely good thing to have groups ‘in the mainstream consciousness’ in such a way as to reinforce the views of those groups already extant in the mainstream consciousness. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s a bad thing. The Muller ad, for example, would’ve worked just as well with a straight woman (or better yet, a hen night party) checking out the bloke’s willy; by having a mincing poof doing the willy-checking, you get a joke at the expense of the mincing poof as well as at the expense of the hapless boyfriend.
And this has nothing in common with tokenism, which obviously always presents it’s token minority representative in a positive light. Your token presenter in a chair is socially useful - if a wheelchair-using little kid sees someone with a chair in a fairly glamorous, high-profile job, that can only help them to deal with the difficulties being in a chair presents, and give them someone to point to when faced with the ‘Does he take sugar?’ assumptions that their physical disability renders them incapable in areas where it makes no difference. A gay little kid seeing the Muller ad, as Tom said, is unlikely to take anything positive from that representation, it just reinforces the sort of shit the gay kid is getting in the playground every breaktime. Even offensively bland is good, really - those smiling mixed race couples, by dint of their smiling ‘normality,’ probably shift a few preconceptions, and even if it’s thanks to a combination of political correctness and simple greed (black people have money too!) the result is good.
anything threatening has to get awkwardly mocked or misrepresented for a while before it gets properly accepted
Well, yeah, but you can still hope that we might be able to skip this stage when it comes to sexuality, having gone through it over decades with representation of women and ethnic minorities in the media (not, obviously, that those groups are properly represented yet.) Also, it seems that good representation of minorities defined by sexuality doesn’t stick - it’s been a decade or more since the first (laughably chaste) gay kiss on Eastenders (between a non-mincing, non-evil gay couple), but the furore surrounding a recent gay storyline in Corrie recently matched the tabloid opprobrium of ten years ago.
And Nadia is an interesting one: she’s not being perceived as a woman in the press, or even on Channel 4’s Big Brother programmes, but if you look at the onscreen SMS messages from kids on the live coverage, she’s massively liked because she’s good fun, full stop - you see comments like ‘You go girl!’ not ‘You go suspiciously-jawed transexual who I will mock to mask my fear of the other!’ Doubt that means the kids of today are incredibly broad-minded, but her fanbase must contain folk who previously would’ve run a mile on meeting a transexual, or beaten her up, and who are now going to treat transgender folk with a wee bit more respect, despite the media take on her. (Compare this to the neutered screecher Brian who won a couple of years ago by reinforcing the idea of gay men as deeply trivial ‘entertainers’ who, most importantly, don’t have torrid bumsex. Which gave him the perfect in to presenting kids TV, which is a whole other media peculiarity.)
Posted by Jack at 11am on 20.07.04
I can’t believe I am pointing this out, but the mincing queer Muller ad was a follow-up to a previous ad in which the young man tried to wheech the young lady into a plane toilet for some hetero action and accidentally wheeched the gay plane steward instead. Because she was busy, like, orgasming over a fucking yoghurt.
I don’t know if that makes it any better, but it does mean there’s a context, rather than him just being a Passing Gay.
I’m more worried about women being told that low-fat diet foods are a thrillingly naughty indulgence far preferable to sex, myself.
I am, incidentally, shortly to take up a position as the Chair In Muller Rice Advert Studies at the University of East Chiswick.
Posted by ida slapter at 3pm on 20.07.04
You, madam, are a freak. Though you do have a point about the (very common, very bizarre) trend in advertising to present Product X as better than sex. It’s always products that bear some vague resemblance to a gentleman’s viscous essence, too. (See the Philidelphia adds featuring pervy angelic chicks - solidspunkguzzletastic.)
Posted by Jack at 2am on 22.07.04
Why not have the toilet speak with “the voice of God”? Well maybe not THAT God down at the C of E … but how about the Oracle of Delphi? It just seems so obviously correct!
Would the voice of a bidet sound different from that of a toilet bowl? French, perhaps?
As for gay air stewards, I’m yet to meet one … and I do travel … despite Tracey Ullman’s “Trevor” and “Will” on Mile High.
I think maybe I saw a gay counter-person once in a TCBY. Ah! Now it starts to make sense!
You think Alexander the Great had a lisp? Not if he was bloody Irish!
Posted by Rossbot 2000 at 4pm on 22.02.08
diet foods that are nutritious would be the best for our bodies, most diet foods are not very nutritious ::,
Posted by Floating Shelves at 9pm on 12.12.10