Great post, nattles_thing. I am also a very sex positive feminist. My belief is that absolutely every human being in existence has the right to express their sexuality as long as they don't do it in a way that demeans or belittles others. I have no problems with porn, either. The only problem is that some members of our society seem to be under the expression that only men have sex drives, and chose to use highly sexist slurs and other forms of social terrorism to put down women who assert their sexual independence. I feel that men and women should have equal rights to express their sexuality, so porn that is more enjoyable for men than for women is ok. The thing that bothers me is that there is so little porn out there that portrays men in ways pleasing to women, and far more ads use attractive women than attractive men. However, I'm not sure any individual ad can be blamed for that, just the advertising industry as a whole.

I would say that an ad is sexist if it does something that would indicate some superiority of one gender, for example, tv ads that show women glued to a phone waiting for their boyfriend to call, indicating that there is something wrong with her calling him. A worse set of sexist ads are those that show a girls' father disrupting her relationships or intimidating her boynattles_thingfriend, and making that look ok, as if he had some right to interfere, or she has some need of protection.

No level of sexuality, no matter how far it goes, is inherently sexist. Sex requires equal participation, and hopefully brings about equal pleasure, for both people, and making something that is ideally egalitarian a taboo, I would say, is anti-feminist.

This quote from the above article pretty much captures my sentiment.

"The vote by Parliament reflects a growing queasiness in Europe about how advertisers and big business promote their products."

Welcome to the corporatization of sexuality. One evil being replaced by another.

Just like I am not going to sit back an let old religions dictate my sexuality, I will not sit here are pretend that D&G ads represent my sexuality.

Companies like D&G are simply capitalizing off natural sexual curiosity and a lot of repressed feelings about sex to market and sell their shit. This is about as far from true sexuality as believing that angels will come down and impregnate me.

For.example. These types of ads consistently use the same "sexay" body types and people with features that are overwhelmingly Eurocentric. Either they do this because they want to sell stuff to Europeans and they think that Europeans won't buy their product if they don't see people who look like them hawking them; or these companies simply think that shiny, skinny, white folks are the universal ideal.

And that's why I refuse to give corporations credit for anything other than selling their product. They have a right to market their product in a way that sells the best. But they do not speak to my sexual fantasies. They rarely portray women that look like me, or couples that look like me and my husband. You can call their ad sexy for you (general "you"), but I'm not going to pretend it's inclusive or egalitarian.

Lastly, individual countries, as mentioned, often having been removing ads from public spaces long before this new EU proposal.

The new proposal is aiming to take a different approach, by engaging the industry.

If you actually look at the wording of the press release released by the EU it talks mainly about doing research and education and working with the industry, awarding prizes, etc.

Yeah, I don't think the EU decision can be called censorship. But they do have a good point. It's so fucking irritating that when my daughters watch TV they see one ad after another in which women are happily following their messy offspring around the house cleaning up after them, while the ads with men in them almost never show them cleaning a house or caring for kids. In this way, the world that's presented in advertising on family programming is indistinguishable from the world of the 50s.

As for advertising that's like the D&G stuff, I think if you're going to be portraying some sex fantasy, you should try to make it clear somehow that this is what you're doing. It's also striking to me that the kinds of scenarios involving violence and sex that are thought to be perfectly appropriate by most people when they portray women as the victim/object are horrifying if you replace the woman or girl with a boy or, say, a puppy. If you tried to sell a product by showing a dead puppy face down in the mud you would have a lynch mob at your door. But people don't even blink when it's a woman. Similarly, if you replaced the women in many ads with men, people would find it offensive or at least disconcerting. So I guess that's my test: is it reciprocal? If it would be inappropriate (or criminal) to treat the other gender or another group in this same way then it's pretty obviously sexist. Why is that so hard to grasp?

"The only problem is that some members of our society seem to be under the expression that only men have sex drives"

In a nutshell, that's my problem also. It isn't just sexualization, but sexualization with male entitlement. It's obnoxious.

I've come to believe that the myth of constantly-sexually-available women is part of the opiate of manhood, in a post-industrial capitalist society, just like selling romance to women in rom-coms and bridal mags is the opiate of womanhood. Based on stereotypes, to boot. "Sex sells" and is used to distract people from thinking about true liberation: from the corporate machine.