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A problem that is related to the mainstreaming of pornography in mass culture involves the ways the genders are being portrayed. A large part of what is real pornography – especially as far as hardcore porn is concerned – makes use of gender stereotypes that gradually seep into mass culture when mass culture refers to pornographic elements. This is especially true for advertising media, but it is also true for more general fashion reports in magazines, as well as Danish youth magazines that target both genders. Here pornographic signs are connected to scenarios that are quite gender stereotypical. To underscore the distinction it can be stated that the role pattern in mainstream hardcore pornography is the classic one: The women are on display, attracting men by acting sensually, with the implication that they will thereafter serve them sexually. The men are teased and finally accept to be caught. Of course this presentation of gender is not applicable to all pornography, but the point is, that this is increasing when commercial illustrations and fashion features copy pornography.

This especially gives one reason to wonder if one studies the sales promotion industry. The industry is generally known for being ‘streetwise’, exploiting social trends and adopting cultural changes as soon as they appear. The changing relations between genders is no exception. Through the last five decades the advertising media have functioned as a seismograph for the fluctuations of gender relations. Any expansion of the gender role repertoires or shifting of power is registered and implemented quicker than lightening – out of bitter necessity. If the merchandise is to sell, its advertisements must convince consumers to identify with the product. In commercial illustrations from the 1950s women were therefore in charge of the hygienic standards of the home, and the family members’ interaction with soap and water. Products for cleaning were marketed by house wives who with a raised forefinger reminded the child, the husband or other women of the importance of being hygienic. In those days, a considerable part of Denmark’s female population were not yet part of the labour force but took care of the home, and thus such images were accepted as portrayals of ‘real’ femininity. The commercial illustrations were quick to transmit that the private sphere was a female domain – a place where men (breadwinners) did not belong during office hours.

In the 1960s and 1970s, however, the women swarmed to the labour market. For many of these women this resulted in double workload; when they were not at work, the laundry and house cleaning were waiting for them at home. The commercials were influenced by this change, and the dyspeptic remedy ‘Samarin’ not only reflected the new female role, but also promised women that the powder could remove the bubbling symptoms of double-work stress from their stomach.

Despite the fact that women had entered the labour market, it was still their responsibility that the house was tidy – both in reality, and in the commercial illustrations as well. However, when men at all were represented in the commercial illustrations at the time, it was exclusively in work related settings. But even this was changing over the years, not only in a social perspective, but also in the advertising media’s reflection of the social transitions.

Looking back, the 1990s were the decade where the advertising industry really dissolved the traditional meaning of gender – completely in accordance with the social reality, and also in accordance with the post-modern ideas about the cultural construction of gender and its possible changeability. The women took their place in the public sphere, conquered the car and broke down the doors to the male lodges. Their definitive departure from home and entry into the top career positions were reflected in the commercials for hair shampoo, where women with long, thick hair, perfect make-up and a self confident manner chaired the board meeting.

Interestingly, the men went in the opposite direction. They turned up at home, started to do the laundry and took days off for child care. And Marc O’Polo illustrated both these social trends by pointing out that it was a matter of course that the father was home with the children when the mother was at work, because: “The male swan will watch over the offspring while his mate searches for food”. Through the 1990s fatherhood and caring fathers became the objects of considerable social awareness, and in the advertising industry there was a general eagerness to picture the father while he was carrying, hugging and caressing his children, and by so participating responsibly in his offspring’s activities.

However, this was not the only change in mass culture’s illustrations of the turnabout in men’s lives. After years of insisting that the prototype of a real male was connected with ‘offices’and ‘leading positions’, Hugo Boss brought a corrective to their former commercials by presenting the choreographer Kevan Allen while ‘dancing for a living’. So no longer was dance as a man’s profession considered ‘sissy stuff’. Homophobia was also challenged in other ways in the 1990s. Men gradually came to be staged as sex objects. Calvin Klein’s commercials for ‘Obsession’, Eau de Toilette for men, kick-started the trend in the late 1980s, but it spread rapidly to the marketing of other products. Now not only the female body, but the male body as well was capable of promoting products that had no relation to body care, for example feather beds, jeans and cameras. For the first time in the history of mass culture, the traditional gender roles were in transition; men were not only sexually objects to the female gaze, but also to their own. The mass cultural representations of men as sexualised and as sex objects made it possible for men to look at pictures of naked men without fear of being suspected for being homosexuals. Nikon gives an impressive illustration of this phenomenon in their commercial “Expose yourself and your camera”, where the male body is introduced for the masculine consumer’s eye: “Stuart McIntyre uses a Nikon F3 to photograph Søren Sundby with a Nikon Nuvis 125”. In the picture Søren Sundby is immortalised in the middle of a jump. Stark naked he is hanging in the air while noticing that he is being observed by another man.

It can be argued that to sexualise the male body and turn it into a sex object is exactly as problematic as it is with the female body. And it is of course relevant to be critical of the tendency to market products by relating them to sexuality. But if we have to live with the sexualisation of the public sphere and the ‘porno-chic’ trend – and things do point in that direction – then making the male body a sex object is a democratization of the public eye because it challenges the accepted notion that by definition it is only the female body that can become a sex object.

In this perspective it is quite unfortunate that the phenomenon of sexualising the male body proved to be short-lived. Not that it has vanished. But sexualising the female body is still the overall dominating feature in mass culture. This condition was recently underscored by the hysteria it created when Yves Saint Laurent launched the new fragrance for men, ‘M7’, in 2002. The advertisement for the new fragrance showed a frontal picture of a naked man with his penis exposed. Most fashion magazines, including the semi-erotic magazines GQ and Out, which also are occupied with design, fashion and art, found this to be so groundbreaking and offensive that they refused to publish this advertisement, unless the picture was cropped so that only the model’s torso was visible. In spite of 30 years of sexual liberation, it is still provocative to expose a naked person in a full frontal picture unless the person is a female model. In mass culture’s sexualisation of gender and body the exposure of the penis remains one of the most tenacious taboos.