Sunday, April 28, 2013

Tom Ford Porn: What does it mean?



While looking for a suitable image to open the lexicon entry on hedonism, I happened upon all sorts of pretty unbelievable things. Did you know, for example, that there are vacation clubs called "Hedonism" and "Hedonism II", where people go to have sex with strangers? Well, it was news to me. 

I also discovered a series of advertisements for Tom Ford Perfumes which I had never seen before. I had seen the Neroli Portofino shot with a naked man and woman pouring, I presume, water on each other from large Neroli Portofino bottles. It must be water, else they would not be laughing, and might even have to undertake a detox program after the photo session, given how strong that fragrance is. The volume which they were splashing around so blissfully in the ad spot could easily have cleared the building. 

I posted the Neroli Portofino ad before in connection with another topic, but here it is again:





Pretty racy, I thought, when I first encountered the image, especially given that the woman is fairly clearly staring at her partner's private parts. Another ad for the same perfume ratchets the excitement up from ogling to direct contact, as though the naked couple were together in bed in the midst of (gasp!) fornication:




A third image for the same perfume features frontal nudity:





To my surprise, however, the Neroli Portofino ad campaign does not hold a candle to some of the others which popped up using Google image search, including this one:





Not sure exactly what this is supposed to mean. Can anyone help me out here? Paper strips used for testing perfumes have been nestled in the woman's behind while Tom Ford, a confirmed homosexual, poses as a creative director assessing the perfumes. The message is quite unclear.

What about this one:





Here we have a more standard advertising technique. The suggestion appears to be that if one wears Tom Ford Cologne, then one will gain access to the treasures hiding behind the bottle in the ad. A version of "panty dropper" logic, it seems. Here a variation on the same theme adds the extra allure of well-oiled skin:




With all of this naked flesh, and the heavy-handed, even panting, juxtaposition of sexual images to bottles, Tom Ford perfume ads start to look verily pornographic!




I use the word pornography with some trepidation, as my own knowledge of the porn world is nearly exhausted by the contents of the film Boogie Nights, which I found utterly fascinating, in part no doubt because it revealed to me a subculture of human society about which I was up until then entirely ignorant.

It's not that I have any principled moral objection to pornography, per se. If it leads men to mistreat women, then I think that is a bad thing, but whether it does or does not is an empirical matter. My real objection to pornography is simpler and less contingent than that. What little I've seen of this genre of self-expression (for lack of a better term) has just struck me as boring or distasteful or stupidand usually all three. 






Pornography seems to be about separating body parts from souls, and in that sense it does not connect with my own experience in any way whatsoever. I've never had a relationship with anyone which was about isolated body parts. Really. As unbelievable as that may sound, it's true. Perhaps that is because for me, people are a package deal: body and soul. Aristotle opined that human beings were "rational animals" or "embodied souls," and I could not agree more.

Pornography is about severing the soul from the body, and dividing even the body up into appendages to be used as sources of pleasure. Say what you will, but isolated body parts are just not very interesting to me. I am merely reporting on a matter of taste here, not taking to task anyone who happens to like porn.

I also dislike boxing. It's true that one of my classmates in high school was rendered an imbecile by sparring without head gear during a practice session, but I disliked the sport even before that happened. I actually cringe during boxing scenes in movies. Raging Bull is the Scorsese film which I've watched the fewest number of times, and I still have not gotten around to the Hilary Swank boxing movie (Million Dollar Baby). Perhaps there is a connection between my aversion to boxing and my dislike of porn? Do I suffer perhaps from anemia?

Probably what I dislike the most about the small amount of pornography I've seenand I confess to never having made it through an entire "work", if that term even appliesis that the acting itself was so egregious that I could not even bring myself to watch the thing. To be honest, I found what I've seen excruciatingly embarrassing for the actors. How could they degrade themselves so horriblynot by having sex on film but by pretending to be actors when they were nothing of the sort! Know thyself. 

Which reminds me: while searching for Tom Ford Pornwhich returns thousands upon thousands of imagessome pornographic shots of Scarlett Johansson popped up as well. I was needless to say taken aback, as she is a real actress, is she not? Coincidentally, Bryan Ross at From Pyrgos opened a recent feature with a photo of and several comments about Scarlett, one of which being that she is the world's least talented actress. I almost left a comment, because I can think of about a hundred worse actresses than her. I am not saying that she's great, but far from the worst. For the record, I disliked Lost in Translation, which I found to be distastefully xenophobic. Japanophobic, to be more precise, and I'll never understand the praise which it garnered (I presume from monolingual anglophone Americans).

Now I am really curious: did Scar Jo (which I learned from Bryan's post is her nickname) do porn before breaking into Hollywood? Or were the porn shots I found photoshopped? Either way, it got me thinking about how easy it would be to fabricate false images of famous people juxtaposed with any- and everything, as in the images of Scarlett with plenty of other people's, let us say, "ample" body parts. Yet another reason to use avatars while roaming about the world wide web...

Add to my avoidance of bad films more generally the fact that I have no interest in watching other people have sexor any other animals for that matterand pornography just ends up being a no-go for me. It's not interesting, and I find it aesthetically repugnant and intellectually insulting. Why would I watch it? I refuse to watch bad movies, and the porn which I've been exposed to involved insipid plots and pathetically bad acting. Those are my queue to leave the theater. I never watch regular movies which are that bad, so why would I watch a porn movie which is even worse, given that I've no desire to watch animals copulatewhether dogs, horses, rabbits, or people?

I know that lots of people enjoy or even love porn, and Tom Ford appears to be one of them. In an interview for Harper's Bazaar in 2011, he indicated that he watches heterosexual porn "all the time". He went even so far as to say that his top bookmarked sites are porn sites:

"I watch straight porn all the time. If I go on my computer, there's a button that can connect me to all the sites I look at most often, and they're all porn—and 1stdibs.com. Porn and antiques!"

Tom is not alone. Cyberporn addiction appears to be quite the internet age phenomenon, impossible in centuries past, but made possible today by the ease with which images can be transmitted from one place to another and accessed with an innocentor not-so-innocentclick of the mouse.


Cyberporn addiction must be real because sometimes when I am in the computer laboratory at the library, I see men in rows ahead of me watching porn, which seems pretty incredibleat a library?but there they are! They tend to be older men, and my guess is that they watch porn at the library so that their wife will not discover their naughty cookies on a shared computer. I gather that they find it less embarrassing for the people in the rows behind them at the library to know that they watch porn than that their family find out. 

When I've seen what I presume to be "porn addicts" watching women masturbating and the like, I wonder again what the appeal of these images is supposed to be. I guess that I don't understand, but I also don't want to, to be perfectly frank. My reason for posting these Tom Ford Porn advertisements is not so that we can all enjoy the images. Nor am I hoping to draw porn traffic to the salon de parfum, which is not even monetized. No, I have ulterior, philosophical motives.




What do the Tom Ford Porn ads really reveal?

On their face, the Tom Ford Porn perfume advertisements suggest that Tom Ford advocates hedonism. Would that be descriptive or normative hedonism? the savvy salon de parfum subscriber is now wondering. In the Harper's Bazaar interview, the provocateur gestured toward descriptive hedonism about himself. But he is a role model of "coolness" the world over, so saying such things could also be advocating that people emulate him and start bookmarking porn sites, too. "If it's good enough for Tom Ford, then it's good enough for me!" we can imagine some of his many adulators explaining to their employer when asked about the suspicious cookies on shared corporate computers.

One interesting facet of philosophical hedonism is that it does not distinguish pleasure by species. Any sentient creature is capable of pleasure and vulnerable to pain. In an ethical framework such as utilitarianism, if utility is defined as net pleasure, then all sentient creatures should be taken into account in the final equation. That means that cats, dogs, cows, horses, pigs and, yes, rabbits, should be considered in deciding how to act.

Why is this relevant to Tom Ford Porn? you may not without reason be wondering. And the answer is because it just so happens that the house of Tom Ford is on the PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) list of companies which test their products on animals. This is not a result of the fact that Tom Ford is one of the Estée Lauder group companies. Aveda is too, yet they bear the benevolent "Beauty without Bunnies" badge.

If Tom Ford is a philosophical hedonist who advocates maximizing the pleasure of the greatest number, then he owes us an explanation of why his company is injecting chemicals into animals and causing them to suffer so that other animals can spray on the products and hopefully snag some of the hot coochie which his ads promise awaits the wearer of Tom Ford Cologne.

Perhaps I am giving Tom Ford too much credit here. Perhaps he is not a philosophical hedonist at all. Perhaps he is just a money-grubbing guy out to make big bucks. His ads then reveal not what he himself thinks but what heor his marketing teamthinks that his potential customers think. He obviously does not use soft porn images for no reason. He thinks that sex sells perfume. One surmises that his marketing data bears this out, which is why he has put out so many such ads. He probably knows that not everyone will be seduced by his not-so-subliminal suggestions, but the ads are undoubtedly carefully placed in magazines whose readers generally share Tom Ford's fondness of pornography.

I have never seen any of the above advertisements in any of the magazines familiar to me. So the Tom Ford company has done a good job of placing the ads where they will be seen by people who are likely to view them favorably. Those of us who are not titillated by the juxtaposition of naked bodies and perfume bottles are probably better off not seeing the adsor any ads whatsoever. 

I own two bottles of Tom Ford perfume: Black Orchid and Black Orchid Voile de Fleur, but they were purchased not because of but in ignorance of the advertising strategies of the house of Tom Ford. The exclusive private collection is this house's effort to appeal to the sophisticated niche consumer and seems to be yet another savvy business tack. 

What Tom Ford Porn reveals is not what Tom Ford thinks, but that his company's marketing data suggest that a fair number of perfume users are hedonists of the sort who use perfume functionally, to achieve other forms of pleasure, above all, sex.


17 comments:

  1. sherapop, I have not seen these particular ads where I live. I am guessing they are placed in Europe or South America, where displaying the body as such is more acceptable.

    I think Tom Ford is trying to be a bit cheeky in his ads a la Marc Jacobs but a bit more adult. I'm not really putting much thought into looking at these ads though--not the first time I've seen this kind of thing as they are fairly common in fashion magazines.

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    1. Dear Chloe,

      Welcome to the salon de parfum, and thank you for your comment!

      I agree with you that there is an attempt to be "cheeky" or provocative in these images. They do not strike me as particularly interesting or original, since similar images are rife in the world of porn, which we know from Tom Ford's interview he spends a lot of time viewing. The "original" idea here is to transfer porn themes to mainstream advertising.

      You are right that the juxtaposition of bodies and bottles is ubiquitous in perfume advertising. Perhaps that's why in order to get a reaction, Tom Ford decided to dispense with all attempt at subtlety.

      In a comment on this post in a Facebook group, one person characterized Tom Ford as a "genius".
      I respectfully demur. There are no new ideas here at all...

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    2. I agree, not a new idea at all. :(

      (P.S. I'm Hayven; I lurk here from time to time ;) )

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  2. For that matter, we could pick on Abercrombie & Fitch which uses nearly naked (or at least very suggestive) advertising of scenatily clad models that look to have barely emerged from pubescence...and in some cases (including more than a few parodies) the subtle suggestion of homosexuality.

    I think we're giving Ford too much credit for creativity. Perfume marketing has leveraged sexuality for at least as long as I can recall. I've seen the cleavage and 'vajayjay' shots for Tom Ford for Men a number of times, and it's definitely more inspired by Hustler than Playboy in taste (I found it tacky and I'm certainly not a prude). Somewhere there is also a picture of some male shower-room horseplay with rear nudity (like we haven't seen men's butts in your average R-Rated movie). I cannot recall if it was used as a marketing image or just one that was published, but let's assume for a moment it was and we're sitting in a focus group: What subliminal marketing message would it send?

    "I see you there with a woody. You know you want me. (wink)"
    "Don't drop the soap, big boy. (wink)"
    "You're a 'man's man'. This is your scent."

    I'm certainly not homophobic in the least, but I'd be the guy in the focus group giving a thumbs-down to the beefcake ad. I agree with Chloe in that Ford is being much like my response -- cheeky -- and pushing the boundaries to see where the envelope breaks.

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    1. Good morning, Andrew, and thank you so much for these colorful reflections! ;-)

      I agree with you that Tom Ford does not deserve much credit for creativity here. The images are standard soft porn, and only a bit more racy than the average mainstream ad. I'm glad that you brought up the term 'prude', because someone over at Parfumo.de remarked on this post that it struck him as "prude".

      I don't know. To me this boils down to a matter of taste. Saying that I dislike porn is not saying that I dislike sex, is it? You mention the distinction between Playboy and Hustler. There's also Penthouse, is there not? And then there's a whole universe of erotic literature and art.

      Provocative or Vulgar?

      That is the question, it seems to me, and the answer can only turn on one's own sensibilities and taste. The purpose of my post was not to oppose pornography but to inquire as to what precisely Tom Ford was doing.

      My conclusion: he's not a philosophical hedonist but a savvy businessman, no more and no less. He uses a variety of techniques to sell his products, and above all cultivate an image of himself as a provocateur. It obviously works, given the gushing I've seen....

      His judicious placement of the above sorts of ads in some places but not others has paid off because some people love him for his provocation and others for his perfumes. His "private collection" targets niche snobs, and the above sorts of ads target the "panty dropper" shoppers.

      As far as the products he peddles are concerned, I prefer to judge them on their own merits. Some of them I like, others I do not.

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    2. My views on Private Blend tend to be contrarian and I often find myself disagreeing with most on the scents I prefer (Tobacco Vanille is the perfume equivalent of artificial baking vanilla), but I already know I'm in the minority of those who feel this is a great "pipe tobacco scent".

      Yes, Penthouse is somewhere in the middle of the two extremes mentioned, but I felt the starker comparison was perhaps more apropos for those who might have that point of reference. Or simply look up the difference in personality and reputation between Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt if you care to leave the issue on the news-stand.

      I'll introduce the notion of "opportunistic huckstering". Ford may not be inventing the concept, but he's milking the idea as far as it will take him. Besides, we've ridden into an age where everything becomes a train-wreck, a matter of prurient interest. We live in a world of "reality TV", a medium that is almost completely staged to produce a dramatic outcome; the "50 Shades" series is now considered NY Times best-seller "literature"; we provoke in mediums like Facebook and Twitter to goad people into "Liking" or "Retweeting". What's provocative? What's vulgar? We redefine that daily and the definition of vulgar has made each preceding incidence tame by comparison.

      Ford, in a sense, is an opportunist huckster and using whatever means he can to draw attention to his product, and judging by the fact that he's gotten us discussing it, I'd say he was successful. In another sense, there are more than enough opportunists in the world who will huckster to make their point -- promotion, sale, what have you.

      Last I checked, Neroli Portofino was a Private Blend scent. So the two models doing the nasty in that picture appear to be marketing to the niche snobs. (I have my doubts on whether the guy was that interested in the woman, though).

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    3. All good points, Andrew: thank you!

      Yes, here we are discussing Tom Ford Perfumes! Another node on the www dedicated to him! Reminds me of your assessment at The Scentrist of the Brad Pitt Chanel no 5 campaign. All attention is good when it comes to marketable goods...

      You are right that Neroli Portofino is one of the private collection perfumes, though it is also being advertised as a "panty dropper" of sorts. So the categories are not mutually exclusive!!! ;-)

      Provocation or vulgarity? So true that the standards are constantly shifting. I agree with you, too, that reality t.v. has lowered the bar. There is a greater and greater tendency toward sensationalism and exhibitionism in the twenty-first century. In fact, I gather that lots of people are now uploading home video porn of themselves. Needless to say, I won't be joining them. ;-)

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  3. I got to like Tom Ford's perfumes before I saw any of those (awful in my opinion) ads so I keep using his perfumes (and like them) despite them. Luckily, here in the US there are almost no places where you can see those ads (if not to look for them intentionally on the Internet - but then, if to look, there are worse things to be found).

    Out of all the pictures you posted I dislike the one with Tom Ford himself the most: a homosexual man using a woman's butt as a blotter holder? It's like objectifying women squared.

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    1. Hello, Undina, and thank you for these comments.

      Yes, there's a good reason why those ads were judiciously placed so that you and I did not see them before our opinions of the quality of Tom Ford perfumes were made.

      I wonder whether people are more lenient toward Ford because he is gay. In the image which you most dislike, we know that he has no prurient interest in the woman, but the ad certainly does depict her as an object serving no better purpose than to hold the paper strips while he, the man, does the important work of assessing the quality of the perfumes.

      I recently watched the new James Bond film, Skyfall 007, and was a bit taken aback to find that even in the twenty-first century, the unambiguous message of the film is that women are incompetent and unsuited to any role but secretary or bed partner. In one of the images above, the naked woman is ironing clothes for the man, again so that he can presumably go do the important things for which women are ill-suited.

      It would be one thing if women had not been excluded from every space but the bedroom and the kitchen (and the church) for millennia. But they were, and that's what makes such "lighthearted" depictions offensive.

      My point in the above post was not specifically to criticize pornography, and I do think that it reduces both men and women to body parts, but in images such as the above, the reigning power structure is clearly displayed. Sexism lives on.

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    2. I see no problem whatsoever with criticizing pornography ;)

      I do realize that the topic of your post was much more complex than that. It's just a nature of this type of virtual communication: when you publish a lengthy post many readers pick up on the part, topic or even an off-topic that they want to comment on - oftentimes not the most essential to the discussion. It doesn't mean they (I) didn't read or understand the rest of what you wanted to say - but just that some part got the most friction.

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    3. My ambivalence about pornography--and unwillingness to denounce it tout court--stems from my commitment to freedom of speech. Clearly there is a point beyond which porn becomes unacceptable: snuff films, anyone? Child pornography? These seem obviously abhorrent.

      It's a huge debate, of course, because when soft porn becomes "boring", then people want to up the ante, push the limits, etc. (precisely as Tom Ford has done with his advertising...). That's when we start moving into morally murky territory. Yet another slippery slope...

      I had no doubt that you understood the point of my post, Undina! After all, you are the Queen of Entertaining Statistics! ;-)

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  4. Perhaps in the land of super hype and over-the-top ads, the pornographer is king? LOL.

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    1. Hello, bigsly!

      Yes, I was wondering myself how much further this could be pushed. I think that we've reached the limit--so Ford is the winner, I suppose. ;-)

      Now it's time for something new. A truly original idea rather than simple-minded pilfering from a well-established genre. Hello? Marketers? Are you listening?

      I'll give the initial Chanel no 5 Brad Pitt campaign some credit for trying. Unfortunately, they ended up wheeling in the beautiful woman in the slinky black dress, so then it was just more of the same all over again...

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  5. The photo of the test strips in the woman's behind brought to mind a quote from Jacques Guerlain I read in Burr's The Emperor of Scent:

    "The smell of clean anus turns out to be extremely helpful in perfume. In trace amounts it deepens and enriches floral scents, fleshes out green scents. Jacques Guerlain - this is a man who was creating perfumes as recently as the 1950's - famously said that all his perfumes contained, somewhere inside them, the smell of the underside of his mistress. He was referring to all three holes..."

    Perhaps this photo was a nod to Jacques Guerlain;s quote? Maybe not, Ford is smelling the wrong end of the strip. Probably just for shock like the other photos, which do about zilch to make me want to buy or try the scent.

    Not to open a can of worms, but have you seen "Inside Deep Throat"? Not a porn, it's a documentary of the making of the film, and porn and society during that time period.

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    1. Good morning, Natasha, and thank you for your comment!

      That's a very interesting possible connection which you've brought to our attention. I also like your analysis: Ford is sniffing the wrong end of the strip, so we can safely conclude that he is not really doing anything more than porn-esque provocation. Which is not really very exciting or creative, given that he himself admits to watching porn "all the time"...

      I have not seen "Inside Deep Throat", but it sounds as though I should perhaps. I certainly enjoyed and appreciated "Boogie Nights"--what a thought-provoking film that was! Thanks for the recommendation, I'll put it in my queue.

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  6. Tom Ford must be rather desperate. I have noticed the deep green bottle of Neroli-Portofino before ... but my mental connection was the fragrant coast of Italy. That would have been enough to make me want to sniff the bottle in a department store. I like and respect your reference to the animals who are subjected to testing so that people could smell good ... all in all those graphic ads misfire, actually they are not even necessary. Marketing thinks they are. Marketing has bad taste.
    Ursula / Pipette

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    1. Hello, Ursula, and thank you for your comment!

      The case of Neroli Portofino is an interesting one. As Andrew Buck pointed out in a comment above, both advertising techniques are being used simultaneously: targeting of niche enthusiasts and panty dropper shoppers!

      I agree with you that the sleek niche advertisements are enough to spark interest among some of us... I myself did not end up liking the perfume very much--it seems like an über-potent version of 4711 to me. The quality is probably a bit better, but to the average person it will be mistaken for 4711, so my thinking is that it would be better to invest one's niche bucks in a more distinctive composition.

      I must admit that I was lured into testing the perfume by the seductive niche aura through which the private collection has been promoted. I did not see the ads of the naked couple before testing the perfume. Would they have dissuaded me? Probably not, but they would not, in and of themselves, have motivated me to seek out the perfume for testing.

      Is Tom Ford "desperate"? Well, I imagine that the ad campaigns are grounded in and emerge directly from a lot of marketing analysis. The data must indicate that such ads are effective, else he would not use such images!

      As far as our furry friends are concerned: I think that most people don't really care. They figure that the "lower" animals are objects to be used to serve human purposes. What I wanted to point out above is only that Tom Ford's use of pornography does not appear to be philosophically motivated. It's just a business tack.

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