The Object of Man's Passion

http://loveyourbody.nowfoundation.org/offensiveads.html

Ok, so its pretty much established that this ad is not necessary selling any products that are shown. This is not the typical man or woman modeling clothes or sunglasses. The ad is promoting a type of lifestyle/attitude apparently manifested in the consumption of Dolce and Gabbana products. The value in this ad is more one of shock value and the message is actually pretty ambiguous. On the one hand, you could say its an image of a woman who is just about to be gang raped. She is beautifully helpless and at the mercy of the five cut-up men surrounding her. But then again, the tone that the audience picks up on is not one of male passion for women. And its not clear if its of male passion for men. It's of passion in general.

The man standing up without a shirt on is looking at the man who is on the ground. Its not clear who the men in the background are looking at, but they really don't seem like they're waiting their turn to be with the woman. The men are dressed in a trim, metro style. they look like they take very good care of themselves. It seems as though they have worked very hard to chisel their bodies to near perfection. And it seems as though they haven't done any of this for a woman. They could have done it out of a passion for themselves.

Is this art? It's advertising. What are they selling? A new image.

In an article written by John Beynon, he speaks about "imaged masculinity" in the yuppie and gay cultures. "In this 'heterotopic world' young men engaged in what Mort (1996) terms as 'experiments in masculinity': 'For the most part these were organized along an axis separating heterosexual from homosexual behaviors. However, at moments more hybrid forms of identity were generated, as ways of being and acting mutated from one group to another' (Mort 1996: 182)."

This is an age of the new man--the one who lives to please himself. His pleasure could be in a woman, it could be in a man, it could be simply in himself and whatever he wanted in the moment. This new man sells. Because nobody wants to be put in a box; everybody wants to just be them. The funny thing is, thats exactly what Dolce & Gabbana are doing--putting the new man in a box and presenting him to the world. And they're buying it.