Commercials...

I do agree with everyone on hating commertials because they seem to show children all the time. But I've kind of got used to it now, really, if you are going to watch TV you just have to expect a kid to come up, there is nothing really you can do about it, I just try get used to it although more of the time I just look away or pretend I am not interested. I guess the best thing you can do is just accept you are going to most likely see a kid on TV, and when you do, accept that you can not help yourself to be attracted to them.

One thing I will complain about is why do the commertails have to use the cute kids all the time? Would be helpfull if at least some of them where not all that attractive .

anonymous112 wrote:One thing I will complain about is why do the commertails have to use the cute kids all the time? Would be helpfull if at least some of them where not all that attractive .

Yes, but who would buy a brand of baby food the advert for which featured a poorly lit, harelipped freak who looks ike his mother lived off a diet of cigarettes and teratogens during pregnancy?

There's lotsa different reasons to have kids in your ad. You want to sell to families, or to sell directly to kids who will pester their parents to get a product. I imagine there's at least in some cases a sexual aspect that's explicitly acknowledged among those creating the commercial - hey, a market is a market and capital finds its way in regardless of moral considerations. Besides, everyone likes kids, probably even most of the people who say they don't.

I don't think the sexual element is intended. Desirable beauty is a topos of capitalist imagery, just as the proud worker standing erect, spade in hand, on fertile farmland was a topos of Soviet communist imagery. A society's imagery embodies (and, in a kind of feedback loop, also shapes and reinforces) a society's ideals. I use the phrase 'desirable beauty' to leave it open as to whether this is an ideal of beauty one wishes to live up to personally, or an ideal of beauty one wants to be surrounded by to adorn one's life and lend it a sheen of perfection (beautiful partner, beautiful offspring, beautiful friends, beautiful home, etc.), or an ideal of beauty one aspires to as an object of the sexual instinct.

Now, obviously what constitutes beautiful children will be coloured by our adult ideals of beauty, which are steered by sexual desire. I don't think there's any way round this. We are destined to sexualise children by virtue of our conception of what is beautiful and ideal and the ineluctable influence of our sexualities on this conception. I think, then, that the sexualisation is primarily (at the level of intention) a beautification of children, one which is coloured necessarily by the way sexuality influences and shapes our ideal of beauty. Of course, if you are attracted to children, you will pick up on their appeal all the more readily. The fact that this sexualisation is so prevalent perhaps explains why anti-paedophile sentiment in our culture rings with such a hysterical tenor at present. The more we as a society feed ourselves (metaphorically) on a diet of beautiful children and the more widespread this imagery is (in an age of television, Internet and catalogue order firms), the more angst there is about paedophilia, that angst probably being symptomatic of the conflict (individual and collective) situated at the boundaries of morality and sexuality.

GinaSmith wrote:The fact that this sexualisation is so prevalent perhaps explains why anti-paedophile sentiment in our culture rings with such a hysterical tenor at present. The more we as a society feed ourselves (metaphorically) on a diet of beautiful children and the more widespread this imagery is (in an age of television, Internet and catalogue order firms), the more angst there is about paedophilia, that angst probably being symptomatic of the conflict (individual and collective) situated at the boundaries of morality and sexuality.

I enjoyed your post. I think this is very interesting and plausible. I wonder how the conflict can be resolved.