Choc-chicks: is the new 'post- political correctness' advertising biting off more than it can chew?

Tantalising. Exciting. Scrumptious. Seductive. Are we talking food or sex here? I can't be sure, as the two posters before me--advertisements for Peters' 'Heaven' ice-creams--are a cogent promotion of both.

The problem with these two promotional posters, which were positioned outside corner shops this past summer, emanates from a depiction in each of a woman posing seductively inside an ice-cream. Each poster is headed with the slogan "I'm in Heaven', which acts as both a claim by the woman depicted mid as a promise to the potential consumer, who is urged by this double-dose of appetite arousal to indulge in both the woman and the ice-cream. A more detailed analysis of the text of the posters, both of which have been designed to have a strongly preferred reading, confirms the evoking of dual appetites.

One poster features a tanned honey-blonde, posing luxuriantly as though in a bath--in fact a paddlepop-type Heaven ice-cream which conveniently has a similar shape. Ensconced in the milk chocolate version of the ice-cream, she is the subject of the gaze of someone who hopes she'll step from the bath at any moment, revealing much more than her slim and sexy legs, silky arms, smooth neck and shining hair.

In the other poster a brunette lies within, and contrasts with, a white chocolate Heaven ice-cream with choc-chips, as though stomach-down on a bed. Legs raised and entwined provocatively, and with chin propped beguilingly on delicately posed hands, she meets the gaze with an implicit invitation to join her. There is no doubt that, apart from their ice-cream covering, the women are naked, and each gives the impression that there is more to occur--an invitation (or perhaps a dare) to either act on fantasies or indulge a little longer. The women are there for the taking if/when the ice-cream melts or is consumed from around them.

This is a pretty grand claim for an ice-cream: that the pleasure it holds is equivalent and similar to 'taking' one of these beautiful women, but what sort of claim does it make of women? The posters, like so many advertisements and cultural objects before them, send a message that women are there for the gratification of others. They are primarily there to be appealing, attractive, sweet and ultimately consumable.

Heaven ice-creams are not the first to make a blatant connection between commodities and sex. In the explosion of consumer goods and advertising that followed World War II and the installation of a television into almost every home in industrialised countries, women were crudely seen--both on television and in print--scantily clad atop a car or more fully dressed and sensually fondling kitchen appliances. Through carefully constructed body language, these models spoke to men of how cars or other commodities could be a quick route to sex and spoke to women of what sort of women they should be, which invariably had an emphasis on grooming and an aesthetic in line with prevailing views that submissiveness was an essential characteristic of femininity.

More recently, though, and despite the clawing back of some blatant excesses in the exploitation of women in advertising, a freeing-up of suggestions of sex and an even greater emphasis on images has contributed to a heightened demeaning of women, at some levels at least. This includes the widespread portrayal of women and sex in circumstances which objectify and trivialise women. Connotations may have become more sophisticated, but they are nonetheless blatant. The use of women to sell products is therefore not only unabated but arguably more explicit in terms of sexual overtones. Fitting within this pattern, the advertisements for Heaven ice-creams are among numerous other cultural examples which suggest that women are like confectionery.

One other advertisement in particular springs to mind as having a great deal in common with the Heaven advertisements. The advertisement I am reminded of is one for the chocolate bar Cadbury's Lite, which appeared in Cosmopolitan in 1993. While such placement in a women's magazine suggests that it was not targetted primarily at men, even the most superficial glance confirms that the advertisement was directed at women in the spirit of showing them how they should be when looked at by men--or even when being assessed and compared by other women with respect to how they should appear to men. The message of the advertisement is that a woman can eat chocolate and still be beautiful. Indeed, if the model is seen as a representation of someone who eats Cadbury's Lite (claimed to have 25 per cent fewer calories) there is a hint that eating this particular chocolate bar is actually a route to elegance and beauty. It plays on women's dilemmas about the appeal of food and, on the other hand, the inherent danger that it will jeopardise their own attractiveness. Ironically, these dilemmas have been buttressed by advertisements such as the Cadbury's example, which simultaneously make the chocolate so accessible and so appealing but which have as their centerpiece a tall, thin, beautiful woman who serves as the yardstick for attractiveness. The beauty represented seems at once so available (via the chocolate product) and yet so elusive, having been pursued for so long. The positioning of the beautiful woman in such a way that she appears as a metamorphosis of a chocolate bar declares that at last both the chocolate and the accomplishment of beauty are within one's grasp.

The metamorphosis operates thus. On the top left-hand page of the double-page advertisement is a picture of a Cadbury Lite chocolate bar headed 'The Light Alternative'. The top right-hand corner of the chocolate bar has been ripped open to reveal a square of chocolate with Cadbury written on it, highlighted by silver foil between the wrapping and the exposed chocolate. The picture of the chocolate bar and the heading take up roughly the top-third of the left page, Directly below is a sleek line of purple with blue stripes, identical to the wrapping on the chocolate above. Towards the middle of the double-spread, the sleek line swings up to form the hips of a reclining woman lying on her side with one gloved hand resting on her hip, fingers splayed as though she may have been stroking her figure narcissistically. The angle of the band from its wrist is sharp and links the woman's form to the chocolate bar with its square corners. The glove is made of the same fabric as her long and elegant evening gown and both are of the same colours and pattern as the chocolate bar, further emphasising a sameness between the two forms.

The bodice of the dress is a shiny silver material, similar to the foil of the chocolate. It has a large ruffle directly above the bust, as do the tops of the full-length gloves. The bodice ruffle swings down between the woman's breasts, drawing attention to them and seeming to suggest that the dress could be easily peeled down in much the same manner as the foil and outside wrapping of the chocolate bar. At the top-right corner of this skin-tight evening dress, gloves and ruffles, protrudes the head and shoulders of the woman, placed identically to the chocolate emerging from the corner of the wrapped chocolate bar. The woman has a slightly bowed head, a glamorously made-up face and long wavy hair falling across her shoulder on the far right. She is looking directly and provocatively at the camera, red lips slightly apart and with a facial expression of expectation and knowing. She knows her body is beautiful, she knows she is being looked at and envied or desired and she is inviting a response. She simultaneously imitates a chocolate bar and demonstrates the perfect and sexually attractive body that the chocolate bar promises. Moreover, she can be read as appearing from a cocoon which at one time encased the chocolate.

While the print running directly below her legs says 'New Cadbury Lite offers you a delicious alternative', it is not only talking about chocolate. It is offering the sort of body that men desire, thereby filling two different desires at once: a gastronomic desire and the desire to be desired.

Most disturbing about this genre of advertisements is the suggestion that women and sweets are interchangeable, that socially they feature at the same level of importance. They are a distraction and a delight, an appeaser of appetites and a recluse from the world's drudgery. All the women in the three advertisements mentioned are in prone positions, presumably waiting to be consumed either by sexual penetration or by the eyes. Their role is purely as object for the distraction or satisfaction of others.

The themes are certainly adult and yet more innocent versions of the same food-woman link are to be found in a genre of toys which have persisted for more than thirty years. The most successful of these toys was the doll Strawberry Shortcake, which emerged early in the 1980s, around the same time that television deregulation in the US was spawning an increasingly character-driven type of toy, many of which had their own television program so that they could be more effectively marketed to children. Strawberry Shortcake wore strawberry-patterned clothes, smelt of strawberries, embraced a frivolously fruit-focused femininity and, in accordance with her views of what 'nice girls' do, baked for her friends, If she represented cocooning as part of a backlash against feminism, then it was a sweet and fruity cocoon from which the fragrances of home-cooking emanated.

Other dolls more than matched her food-focused obsession, though not quite her marketing success. One interesting example was Cupcakes, launched by toy company Tonka in the early 1990s, around the same time as the advertisement for Cadbury's Lite. The toys of this series transformed between dolls and replicas of cupcakes and desserts. Some of them transformed between vanity sets and finically presented banana splits, suggesting that women should pay equal attention to the presentation of their faces and their food. The ease with which Cupcakes blended food and femininity was similar to the already mentioned advertisements where the boundaries between food fantasies and sex fantasies are fluid to a point beyond discernibility. Moreover, the boundaries between the images found in the girls' dolls and the images at the core of the sexual depiction of ice creams and chocolates are themselves difficult to discern. Each is on a continuum which marries food and women as the rightful object of others' appetites but simply packages that presumption slightly differently for children and adults.

Returning to Heaven ice-creams, I have to admit that the graphics are clever, as advertisements often are. There is a sense of both the real and the surreal. One wonders, for instance, if these are miniature women who are able to fit within the ice-creams or are these giant ice-creams to which the women have submitted. In any case, both women depicted are at the mercy of the ice-creams, or perhaps more precisely at the mercy of the appetites they arouse. Each advertisement is an almost pornographic parody of itself. The women are clearly enjoying being contained within the ice-cream. The title of each is, after all, "I'm in Heaven,' and the construction of the advertisement shrieks that the epitome of a woman's bliss is to be attractive, seductive and as delicious as an ice-cream.

After all these years of struggling for feminist ideals, we are presented with Peters" notion of the ultimate sublimity for women, not subversion but submersion--within a giant ice-cream.

Wendy Varney is a Fellow in the Science, Technology and Society Program at the University of Wollongong.