When Advertising Is Obscene

Calvin Klein Inc., no stranger to the racy or randy, has shocked America over the past decade with its persistent testing of our moral consciousness. But this time the company's advertising has gone far beyond what many in the public deem acceptable.

It's easy to picture the ad's setting: purple shag carpeting, a wood-paneled rec room à la the 1970s, one stepladder and several seemingly vulnerable young models being questioned by an older man behind the camera. The interviewer says such things as: "That's a nice body....Do you work out?" "Why don't you open that vest up?" "You think you could rip that shirt off of ya?" "Go ahead, show me what you can do." The models squirm and oblige.

The print ads are stills of the models, both male and female, positioned to expose their crotches and, of course, Calvin Klein underwear. While the ads themselves use extremely jarring images, their presence in YM
magazine and on MTV-both targeting audiences as young as 12-make them doubly disturbing.

A preliminary FBI investigation to determine if the campaign is "kiddie-porn" led Klein to pull the ads and issue an official "apology." Skeptics wonder, though, if Klein's glib apology and public retreat were simply another tactic to raise the fashion designer's popularity with young people, the final installments in the company's campaign to position Klein as "grunge, antidesign, white-trash-chic," in the words of Adweek
's Barbara Lippert. According to sales figures, it's worked, and Klein jeans are "flying out of the stores."

SO NOW THAT the Klein ads are no longer in the public view, is all well in America? Not quite. Rampant commercialism is seeping into every crevice of American culture. Today, nearly anything, from sex to the pope, can be twisted and manipulated into a sellable product. Advertisers-shamelessly willing to exploit even child pornography-peddle potentially deadly products including alcohol and tobacco to children and teen-agers. The minor restrictions that exist have done little to prevent the virtual "no holds barred" policy that advertisers typically follow. Not only that, but advertising is a fully tax-deductible business expense.

In 1994, advertisers spent $150 billion to entice Americans to buy their products, and found no social problem too tragic, no religion too sacred, no war too horrific, no stereotype too unfounded, no lifestyle too unattainable, and few taboos too repugnant to exploit.

Last year, the tobacco industry alone spent $4.6 billion in advertising-and that's without costly broadcast advertising-while in 1993 alcohol beverage companies spent $987 million peddling booze (Klein's campaign cost "only" $6 million). These are industries whose products result in the deaths of more than 500,000 Americans each year. And yet we still allow ads that encourage teens to believe that it's cool to drink and even younger children to know and love the image of Joe Camel (who in a recent survey was found to be as identifiable as Mickey Mouse).

As advertising persists in targeting the few remaining untouched markets and unexploited issues, America may be growing weary. The storm of opposition to the Calvin Klein campaign came from both the Left and Right, signaling one departure from the past: America as a nation is realizing the need to protect its children from commercial vultures like Klein. But are we ready to take the next step? Are we ready to get beyond the empty political discourse and attacks on select culprits to fight a real force in our culture-advertising itself?

Within the past month, the Clinton administration has called for stringent restrictions on tobacco marketing that reaches children and teen-agers. In Congress, U.S. Rep. Paul McHale (D-Pa.) said he would move to eliminate the tobacco ad deduction.

In response to Bob Dole's attack last spring on the entertainment industry, Hillary Rodham Clinton said, "It is such hypocrisy for some people in this town to yell about our movies when we use sex to sell everything in America. If adults would just kind of cool it themselves and not use sex in an exploitative way to sell products,...I think we could begin to expect our children to calm down a little bit."

Indeed, advertising messages have an enormous impact on our culture, the values we deem important, and the ideas our children form about the world in which they live. The paradox is this: While Americans so quickly cringe from any thought of allowing government to dictate our values, we idly stand by allowing advertisers with messages at least as menacing as Calvin Klein's to do it instead.

SUSAN MONACO is research director for the Center for the Study of Commercialism in Washington, D.C.