Oh well.
Before you read this true yet soul-wrenching story, look over your shoulder - is the head of your advertising department there? Because this person, already tortured by the crisis, will rip the magazine out of your hands and then will be getting you pointing his finger at the page:
'Oh well! I told you so! I told you a hundred times! This isn't our format! THEY will not understand us!'
We're talking, if you haven't understood already, about the rules in dealing with the subject of sex in the glossies - and the story of how a few years ago I was hired by a then fairly popular men's magazine, I'll call it ABC, which was licensed to nearly 40 countries, - and I have to mention that I was hired as editor in chief. The conditions were simple; do whatever you want, just no anal sex, God forbid! By the way, the girls from the pink-boxed ads on the introductions website Mamba.ru usually have the same conditions and ask for about 5000 rubles per two hours of their girly labor.
I have to mention that I was paid less than those girls, at least per hour. But I was promised there would be no idle time.
ABC had a story as depressing as the Russian landscape in November.
My predecessor was the famous glossy-maker F.B. who now heads a wildly popular magazine, we shall call it Sir. The ill-wishers say that it has the highest CPP (cost per page, the price for production of a single page) and the well-wishers say nothing, they're just thrilled with delight.
Oh well. My predecessor was promoting ABC in a pretty rough kind of way (even Parfyonov started to mention it on Namedni before Parfyonov himself was rather roughly shut down). One of those rough measures was the aforementioned backside sort of sex. The issue had interviews with girls who experienced it firsthand, there were uncensored diaries of gays (one of which, written by DJ A.M., was, in my view, decent literature - even though the lust was not even light blue, it was deep purple, which might be a turn-on for some) and there were heaps of pics which were very impressive as regards the degree of obscenity. The issue was being made despite the cries of the sales department which bawled that only over their dead bodies... But if such a god of glossiness doesn't even care about CCP, what does he care about some dead bodies?
The results were stunning. The magazine sold like hot cakes. It was read by everyone who could and who couldn't.
Among those who couldn't was the head of the Moscow office of a foreign carmaker who spoke not a word of Russian but signed a huge advertising contract with the magazine. This virtuous man looked at the pictures and ordered that the contract be cancelled and the name of the magazine never mentioned.
That is to say the advertising department and the publisher have lost multi-figure profit thanks to a special type of penetration. And when I was being hired, they told me all about it. They were very nearly kneeling and praying for two things.
That the magazine would be as sexual as possible.
That there would be no sex in it in any way, shape or form.
Woe be unto you if you'd seen any contradiction in these demands. You won't work in the glossy industry and you won’t be the true servant of glamour.
Early 21st century sexuality doesn't even have a hint of sex. Perhaps it did in its maidenly days, in the early 1980s when it was still referred to as sex appeal and when pornography was produced by the muddy photocopying method and any blot could be exciting. But since then sexuality has been cut down, combed, dressed, the smells, groans, moans and hairy pubes and armpits removed. (Yeah, yeah, the thick magazine publishing manual said that the cover girls should have no pubic hairs.) Anyway, sexuality was then separated from sex and turned into a marketing instrument for anything at all - yoghurts or cars.
"If you drink Melactil, I'm staying," - that's all it takes now to bring a partner home, seduce with the stuff that accompanies Melactil, shower and bed. It only takes perfect (airbrushed in Photoshop) hair, skin, figure, and a purchase of this something that stabilizes the healthy flora of the bowel (thank God for it being flora not fauna). You add some Melactil in your diet and you're going to be like this.
Photoshop has generally made a revolution in the brain that's more important than the sexual revolution. With its appearance the magazines started to swell up with perfect bodies that the readers will never, under no circumstances have, and this discrepancy gave birth to the main demand of sexuality.
The demand is as follows: absolutely, without any visually identified sexual desire to be thrilled by 90-60-90 proportioned chicks, or, if so inclined, by boys in unbuttoned shirts with cute photoshopped mugs (I guess they will be interchangeable fairly soon).
Oh well. Perhaps the producers of men's magazines like to think that their audience is "blokes who buy it to masturbate at the photos of chicks," - in reality I don't think my readers were masturbating to ABC preferring chats, porn sites and other icq instead. In my mag they'd be looking at photoshopped girls just to be thrilled. Perhaps they had a complex, similar to the Freudian castration complex: ah, this photoshopped chick doesn't turn me on at all?! Maybe I'm lacking something as a reader (i.e. man)?!
It was hammered into their heads ever since they were small, much like the idea of Dolce & Gabbana (Diesel, Calvin Klein) being unbelievably cool, and he who doesn't agree with that is either a loser or an old fart. Even if you spend an hour in a fitting room to be absolutely certain that the low-hip jeans don't go well with your short legs – who cares? You'll be thrilled all the same despite yourself. And you'll be buying. I bought a pair actually, despite being twice the age in which the decent writers were being killed on a duel in the olden days - and despite the fact that the pockets are now somewhere near my knees when I walk.
Oh well. Unlike my predecessor I haven't tried to turn this wheel back. Quite the opposite, I was even spinning it faster for the sake of commercial interests. (Have I been tortured by conscience? Not then, but now partly yes, otherwise I wouldn't be telling you all of this.) And if the non-traditional sex issue had an approprtiate smell for the advertisers - I have to confess that the issues I edited smelled only of deodorants (obviously by the popular brands that advertised with us.) I removed the section with vintage erotic photos from the first third of the magazine - which is where all the advertisers want to see their ads - and put it in the last third which is unpopular with the advertisers. And most importantly, everything that had something to do with real sex I left only as words in the texts because I knew full well that the advertiser (and reader in most cases) doesn't read magazines, he just flips through them. The pictures themselves didn't have even a hint of sex. Roughly photoshopped Masha Malinovskaya, Pamela Anderson, Angelina Jolie and Ksyusha Sobchak didn't look any more debauched than the head of United Russia party. Yeah, yeah, they didn't at all, even though Ksyusha's photo session featured her in fine lacy underwear chained to prison bars with handcuffs and surrounded by two gorilla-sized guards.
I have learnt the glossy lesson well. Sex is not sexuality, sexuality is not sex. Sexuality helps sales, sex gets in the way. As a result, the sales of ABC (I'm not talking about copies, I'm talking about advertising space) grew so much that even the chaste carmaker forgave us and the publisher sold our profitable magazine with a sizable gain and paid me a nice bonus.
Which was just what I needed to say "Thank you everyone!" and leave the sea of glamour for the safety haven of luxury magazines. I think you understand that I met there, instead of the division between sexuality and sex, exactly the same division between quality and the quality myth.
So I can tell you a thing or two about the $200,000 to $1,000,000 cars' system faults or behavior on the road - but that is a whole different story.
Perhaps it would be more thrilling for some people though.
By D. G.
"It's me who decides today what you will want tomorrow." Frederick Begbeder's words from "99 Francs" could be painted on red calico and raised over the millions-strong procession of advertising industry workers. Put it on a sign, in a booklet, prospect, internal instruction - on any printed, video and audio stuff fit for pulp on which are wasted millions of cubic meters of forest, thousands of hours of TV and radio transmissions and incalculable nerves, health and free time. Of both the authors and the consumers of adverisements.
The Worldwide Masochist
Warned means armed - that's not about us. We were warned about the bane of consumerism and life on credit in Vercore and Coronel's "Quota, or the advocates of abundance" and Elsa Triole's "Roses on credit" with their "Things" - all of which were translated back at the time of the Soviet deficit. But we want to have our own, domestic woes that the foreigners haven't yet run into. And the advertising industry, in all of its obscene variety, started to pull on us the tricks that were long since tried on the experienced Westerners. They used the most sacrosanct things - family, children, love of pets. And simply love and sex.
Mr. Rico's Family
We've been living long and cosily in one big family where the paterfamilias who brings a cup of fragrant coffee (by tibo, messcafe or some other trademark - enter the right one here) to his daughter's door is met by the daughter's groggy boyfriend while the mummy is purring from behind the daddy's shoulder: "Honey, you've always been dreaming of a son." Where the famous actors screw up their eyes from the smell of coffee (TM) very nearly on our very own couch. And the couch or the bed itself would sometimes show up in the ads for "sleep professionals."
Pale-faced, male dandruff tries to push us off that very couch or to destroy a romantic date, a pig from the armpit grunts at the people who enter the same lift. And so before meeting our beloved ones or friends we look at the black jacket with a magnifying glass or smell the freshly washed dress.
If we see a girl wearing white trousers on the dancefloor we think about those critical days.
If we're choosing mayonaisse for our salad we remember the mysterious Mr. Rico with whom somebody's wife is doing "literally everything" in the kitchen.
Our children dress themselves as fruits and veggies and diligently chatter about the magic garden that advertises some juice. Fruits and veggies are falling down from every direction like an avalanche. With any luck they're falling into some soup - though most likely they'd just block the entrance to your house and spoil the view from the window.
You start to feel like a vegeatable who wouldn't be helped in regaining the humanity and intellectual activity even by brain-stimulating nuts – but how can you count on that if even the squirrels die from a mere look at them?!
The Advertising Answer
And that's not everything. There are no vacations in the school of life, as ol' Amado said in an epigraph for the "Shepherds of the Night." You have problems in your personal life? Just visit a nearby bank - you'll meet the girl of your dreams there, and she will be ready to do anything for you to open an account. She's also going to help you with a loan for a wedding ceremony.
You're not attractive enough? It's because you're wearing the wrong brand of tights and your clothes are all washed-out. The situation could be improved by the right washing powder, the right underwear and the same perfume that the beautifully undressed Sharleze Teron uses.
To succeed (in love and in life) you'll need to grow younger by using a certain cream - you'll just have to decide how many of your wrinkles you want removed - 16 per cent or 17 1/2. You can even live with a bald patch - I mean, you can't, because at each corner there's a hair-growth lotion or a hair transplant institute lying in wait. I don't need to explain what you need hair for. To be sexually attractive. Though if you like being bald just watch an ad for some film starring Gosha Kutsenko or Fyodor Bondarchuk - they don't care about being bald-headed.
Addiction to advertising has to be added to the list of illicit drugs. I know people who set up satellite TV to watch movies peacefully. Some of them have started to complain that there's no pause to get a glass of diet cola from the kitchen. Their concerns, however, have been addressed - even the satellite channels - for now only between programs - started to transmit more and more ads.
Nature Gives Its Own
It wouldn't be fair to just blame all of this on the advertisers and promoters. After all, in real art - from painting to cinema – the promotion of certain canons of beauty bordering on the explicitly commercial use of naked bodies and attributes of sexuality is a fairly common occurence. And the breaking of certain types of taboos started with works of art. Which in their turn imitated nature.
Take a walk through the seafood market somewhere in Phuket. Among the hundreds of shells on display your attention will certainly be attracted by the ones that remind of very earthy pleasures.
Salvador Dali, well-known as a shameless fellow, exploited the female flesh any way he could - from a couch shaped like lips to the hypersexy female figure on top of "Rainy Cadillac" - didn't that inspire the countless makers of the car ads who use sexual innuendo in their works?
It's not just "some," there are many people who "like it hot" - otherwise where would the breast-shaped ashtrays, mouth-shaped urinals and other vulgarities be coming from?
Sometimes we are led up the garden path - e.g. after the words "it's so small but I like small ones" it turns out that the talk is about mobile internet. Although this radio advert is actually amusing.
Still you have to agree that a touch of delicate sexuality which was put against the neutral background in a stroke of genius is sometimes appropriate. Beautiful underwear that is placed in a picturesque sort of way around the exhibition can add a taste to the interior design itself. And taste is a long way from vulgarity. Like the seriously cool ads (remember Bekmambetov's work for Imperial Bank) are a long way from the horror in which pearls are few and far between.
Though if the ads didn't exist at all, how would we have found out that the size of TV screens is measured in inches? Sometimes size does matter...
Tamara Ivanova-Isayeva