All-consuming ads

You’re stuck in traffic behind a bus and there's no way to ignore it.

Three chicks dressed only in their knickers look winningly at you. Yes, it's an ad for Hot Tips, Hot Lips or Hot Hips. Whatever. I've seen this one so often I feel I know the girls, especially the slightly bow-legged one.

Visual pollution or just the way of the world? Is there any point in getting het-up and what would you get het-up about? This particular ad is for women's knickers, so I suppose it's only fair that we have three girls with knickers on. So, they have nothing else on but any more clothing would take attention away from the bottom line.

For a small project I'm doing I've been immersed in ads. As Emma Tom wrote in a column in The Australian recently, most are moronic, some are funny and increasingly the joke in ads seems to fall on the man.

One that is particularly tragicomic is for some company called Repco. Wifey struts around the living room in her new sexy knickers and bra and all hubby can say is, "Have you seen what they've got at Repco, honey?"

Wow, power generators and carseats.

You can't really use the line that it's sexist. It's more husbandist or a sad commentary on married couples.

Sure, some ads are still in-your-face tits and ass. But even in the egregious Cougar ads, where the bloke orders a bourbon and Coke with a slice of lemon just so he and his mates can get a flash of the barmaid's cleavage as she bends down, it's the men who come off looking dumb. Or just very ordinary. All the blokes in the Cougar ads are as down-market as, well, cheap bourbon and Coke. It's a pretty devastating representation of your average bloke.

If we can no longer scream sexism at advertisers - especially when that's the desired response calculated into the advertising campaign - what's left to say?

That's the question I face teaching my large undergraduate course on media and gender. A lot of students come expecting the "that's sexist" type of critique. They're quickly disappointed. It's no longer as easy as that. It never was. Apart from some vulgar versions of Marxist feminism, ways of thinking about visual representations have always been complex.

An oldie but a goodie is John Berger's Ways of Seeing. Published in the early 1970s it co-incided with a BBC program in which the upper-class and nattily dressed Berger lisped his way through the history of Western art. Berger, who is now a renowned novelist, certainly knew his stuff and for the time delivered it in an accessible manner. I still show his video and while the students titter at his accent and retro shirt, they get his point: from at least the 14th century women have been painted in ways that portray a "to-be-looked-at-ness". It's what he calls presence and, as he points out, their modest gazes were directed at the assumed male spectator-owner. Juxtaposed with masterpieces, the ads he shows replicate the same structure of looking.

Berger's argument rests on debates at the time within film theory. The psychoanalytic moment was much less amenable to public understanding. Laura Mulvey's article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema set the stakes high. Pleasure in looking, or what Freud called scopophilia, had to be destroyed. This is where my students go, "Huh?" Why would you want to do away with the pleasure of cinema or television?

We can skip all the Freud and Lacan-speak and I'll spare you the difference between the phallus and the penis. Suffice to say, for Mulvey and others at the time, woman in visual representation was but a blank screen upon which male fantasies could be projected. A quote from the great director of westerns, Budd Boetticher, sums it all up: "What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act in the way he does. In herself, the woman has not the slightest importance."

It's convincing when applied to some representations, especially westerns in the '50s where the action was all between men. But images are a lot more knowing now. With references to different film genres, and laced with self-consciousness or irony, it's hard to say who's zooming whom in contemporary advertising.

For every ad where women are ogled, someone will inevitably pipe up, "What about the Diet Coke ad?" That's the one where the office girls perve on the perfect pecs of an innocent window cleaner.

Goose for the gander, tit for tat - is that all we can come up with after decades of theories about ad images? Maybe we should ditch the obsession with who's looking and who is objectified. In The Consumerist Manifesto, a terrific book analysing the ad culture of Britain in the '80s, Martin Davidson rides roughshod over the obvious critiques of advertising. Davidson worked in the advertising business before he moved into producing documentaries. He's pretty funny about what he calls "the great brow-beaters, lecturers pouring polysyllabic scorn on the louche opiate" that is advertising. He's not keen on "the pseudo-ecumenical piety of Coca-Cola" either.

Davidson's point is that we live in a world where commerce has penetrated every corner of culture, where culture, art and politics is consumption. It's not a new point - his book was published in 1992. But it's how he frames it that's important: "The spirit of consumerism is too powerful and too pervasive now to be vulnerable to a critique that isn't equal to it." Which means we have to get over critiques that are either idealist or vulgarly oppositional.

What this adds up to is that we have to develop and continually practise an ethics of living with consumerism and its handmaiden, advertising.

Easier said than done but as inevitable as ads on buses.