Florence Gildea exposes this sad and dehumanising aspect of Western society
With the average person seeing 3,500 marketing messages per day, advertising fills the air we breathe.
Public space has been colonised with adverts covering station platforms, toilet doors, bus tickets, carrier bags, roundabouts, and sports pitches. Products are strategically placed in films and TV shows, and whole channels like QVC are essentially 24-hour long adverts.
Buying in
Most of us assume that these messages only have an effect on us if we succumb and buy the product in question. But the influence of marketing is far more insidious. We can buy into its philosophy without spending a penny. We can buy into how adverts conceptualise success, worth, love, sexuality, community and normalcy at cost to our spiritual lives, if not our bank accounts. With so much control over public and digital space, consumer capitalism’s grasp over the hearts and minds of the masses is unparalleled by any other religion or ideology. A generation railing against the absolutist claims of organised religion unthinkingly accepts the psychological warfare of advertising.
In a world wooed by advertising, coveting and idolatry are no longer sins: they are signs of healthy ambition. Adverts want us to compare ourselves with their models and to find ourselves wanting – in both senses of the word. Hence they breed constant dissatisfaction. Humans may have always ranked themselves against the Joneses. But if the Joneses once lived next door, nowadays we hanker after celebrities and supermodels.
The product makes the difference
Living in a supposed meritocracy means that we think nothing structural bars our entry to a paparazzi-stalked life. And adverts go one better: the only difference between us and the social elite is a product. Advertising takes our non-material desires for acceptance, love, friendship, and feelings of achievement, and directs them towards material products. These, rather than God, are presented as the source of hope and fulfilment.
Sceptics who balk at the ‘leap of faith’ of the religious suspend reason to bank on a material solution to their sense of imperfection and inadequacy. Ladies and gentlemen, behold the modern golden calf.
Danger signals
The Bible is clear that nothing created can fulfil the role of the Creator. And true enough, Oliver James’s research across 14 countries shows that those people who strongly value money, possessions, physical and social appearances and fame are at greater risk of emotional distress. The relentless demands of the idol of materialism guarantees this psychological result.
In order to sell us solutions, adverts inform us of problems we never knew existed – from Listerine’s invention of the term halitosis to cracked heels and blackheads – natural phenomena are moralised: this one good, everything else bad. Then, for each ‘problem solved’, we either keep having to buy that product or, in a matter of moments, another problem will be highlighted for us. We forget all previous broken promises and, blaming ourselves for the failure, we buy again. This endless cycle of false and confect-ed wants blinds its captives from recognising their fundamental needs for relationship with each other and with God.
Physical appearance
The most legalistic and demoralising of cycles revolves around physical appearance. Our value, we are told – especially that of women – is proportionate to the extent we conform to standards of ‘beauty’ or ‘sex appeal’. For love, there must be sex, the myth continues, and sex is dependent upon sexiness. But this salvation (for being wanted is proof of having value) through sex appeal is costly: it requires cosmetic surgery, dieting, masses of grooming products and lingerie, and suppressing one’s emotional and moral instincts.
A new liturgical year is defined by ‘fasts’ after Christmas and before summer to atone for capitulating to cravings (that other adverts inspired in the first place). Our sins – physical flaws – are obvious to any onlooker: we live out our confessions. Redemption, however, never comes: the anti-aging and diet industry’s profits depend on their products’ failure. The evil of bodily imperfections always wins.
This obsession with the body does not, paradoxically, mean it’s held in high regard. Adverts which depict just part of a woman’s body, have her body as a canvas for a logo or product, or imagine a woman as one of a series from which the male buyer can choose, are the logical, if abhorrent, outworking of this philosophy. The effect on viewers is worse than mere offence: both men and women increasingly view the female body as an object.
For girls, this means seeing one’s own body as a project, in need of improvement and maintenance in order to receive male affirmation – the only way to validate her existence. Articles in women’s magazines regularly describe how high heels, red lipstick and lacy lingerie make women ‘feel sexy’. Unknowingly, these women have internalised the world of advertisements, where women’s real power – monopolised by the aesthetic elite – is to sexually arouse men. Images which show women at their most confident when they are undressed suggest to viewers that their truest, most empowered self comes when they play the role of sex object.
Adverts laud and normalise promiscuity and sexual freedom. Yet, despite co-opting the language of empowerment, advertising’s influence is oppressive and dehumanising. One study showed that 57% of women would rather be hit by a lorry than be overweight; another that 80% of ten-year-old girls have been on a diet. To make women’s ambitions so narcissistic is to vastly limit their God-given potential. And it puts tension at the heart of every relationship. Because a woman is conditioned to expect disapproval for her natural state, she can never let up the rigmarole of dieting, make-up and hair maintenance – she can be without clothes with a man but not without that mask. If ‘exposed’, she will be left alone and valueless.
The intimacy, trust and authenticity that God designed to be at the heart of sex within marriage is replaced by yet another stage on which to perform and pretend. Adverts also encourage men to increasingly expect and demand this performance as, in adverts, women are the status symbol par excellence to prove one’s masculinity.
For love, there must be respect. And for respect, there must be self-discipline. Advertising fuels thoughtless, self-centred consumption and thereby, if unchallenged, it makes love impossible.
It makes no sense
If worldviews are meant to help us make sense of life, consumerism fails hopelessly. It has no answer to suffering or mortality, no way of discerning right from wrong, no reason to transcend narcissism, no virtues to develop, and no way of building lasting relationships.
It is for Christians to model a more life-giving, life-affirming, compassionate way. To a world burned out by chasing fulfilment through consumption, our resistance to envy and idolatry is imperative to defeat the lie that ‘it is in shopping centres that we live and breathe and have our being’.
Living simply and abounding instead in acts of love and charity can defeat the myth that love is only for those with sex appeal. Our sexual ethic may be castigated as prudish, but in fact it is because we value sex more highly than the world of advertising that we protect it within marriage.
At the same time, Christians can resist idolising sexual desire, and define and show love more broadly than just eros. We must act with compassion to those who do not fit marketing’s narrow mould – the disabled, the mentally ill, the elderly, and the multitudes without a Barbie-like physique. In loving with breadth, steadfastness and authenticity, we can remind those duped by consumerism of their truest relational needs, and point them towards the one who can fulfil them. In these ways we can point to the love of God, which is never shallow, never failing, and always undeserved.
