All-consuming ads

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.