1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amn0Zst4LXA Overweight woman breaking photocopier
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjdeN6sdFOo&feature=related: Sexy woman on photocopier
My last post on Jessica Simpson’s questionably abject sexuality has been further aggravated by the recent discovery on YouTube of two very divergent ads concerning the photocopying of women’s genitalia. Sounds purvey? That’s because it is. Beyond the office gimmicks and Christmas party antics of wayward secretaries, (see Bill Murray’s “Scrooged”) the narrative of women teasingly producing papered copies of their privates has become a popular culture cliché reproduced in numerous movies and TV shows to illustrate the illustrious sexual antics of water cooler-bound office environments. The first commercial for a repair service, displays (what polite commentary would term) a ‘curvaceous’ woman, mounting the trusty office copier for some playful libidinous revelry, yet, the copier smites her, declaring “select larger paper tray” at which point she unleashes a fury of technological/psychological angst; kicking, hitting and demolishing the disobliging machine. This ad is contrasted by the second clip for “Double A quality paper,” during which a “sexy” woman mistakenly pushes the copy button whilst climbing on top of a photocopy machine to reach an upper office-room shelf. As this copier frantically spits out numerous copies at a rate rivaling the rapidity of an Olympic sprinter, one must compare the differences both explicit and implicit. The first woman attempts to solidify and produce a copy of her sexuality whilst is refused, the second inadvertently is violated and mass-produced regardless of her own will; the first is humiliated due to a refusal to acknowledge her sexuality, the second by the refusal to stop acknowledging and producing a spectacle of hers; the sexuality (or lack their of) of the first woman ultimately ends up wreaking destruction and damage whilst that of the second produces a state of erotically induced bemusement for a naive office boy who finds himself privy to the perpetual duplication of this woman’s genitalia. And thus is spelled a duality of erotica; abject versus object filtered through the medium of un-cooperative office equipment. This commercialized visual dialectic of culturally worthy, versus unworthy female sexuality makes me question which position it is actually better to occupy. Would I rather be the woman rejected, abjected and forced into a frantic state of violent rebellion? Or perhaps the hapless victim and objectified fetish; placed upon the pedestal of the phallocentric gaze whereby my sexual identity is distributed en mass through “grade A quality” pop culture replication. Providing an Eden for esoteric French theorizing, one could ponder for millennia over the simulacra implications of producing multiple copies of female Va’ Jay Jay’s. Are we diluting the realness of our own sexual identities and anatomies in an “uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference (Baudrillard, 6)?” If so, what does the refusal of the first copy machine speak to? Perhaps there are abject-defined limits to simulacric replication as mediated by the mechanistic agents of simulation distribution—the trusty old office copy machine (technological surrogate and allegorical instrument of hegemonic supply and demand). If plasticity is in fact our “modern paradigm (Bordo, 245),” perhaps the copy machine is merely providing a gentle nudge encouraging said plump female to realize her determinist, postmodern, potential and actualize the fantasy of limitless bodily determination (Bordo, 245). Maybe then (once repaired) the machinery of pop culture sexual censorship would be willing to mass-produce her femininity as well. Lamentable, Lamentable.
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjdeN6sdFOo&feature=related: Sexy woman on photocopier
My last post on Jessica Simpson’s questionably abject sexuality has been further aggravated by the recent discovery on YouTube of two very divergent ads concerning the photocopying of women’s genitalia. Sounds purvey? That’s because it is. Beyond the office gimmicks and Christmas party antics of wayward secretaries, (see Bill Murray’s “Scrooged”) the narrative of women teasingly producing papered copies of their privates has become a popular culture cliché reproduced in numerous movies and TV shows to illustrate the illustrious sexual antics of water cooler-bound office environments. The first commercial for a repair service, displays (what polite commentary would term) a ‘curvaceous’ woman, mounting the trusty office copier for some playful libidinous revelry, yet, the copier smites her, declaring “select larger paper tray” at which point she unleashes a fury of technological/psychological angst; kicking, hitting and demolishing the disobliging machine. This ad is contrasted by the second clip for “Double A quality paper,” during which a “sexy” woman mistakenly pushes the copy button whilst climbing on top of a photocopy machine to reach an upper office-room shelf. As this copier frantically spits out numerous copies at a rate rivaling the rapidity of an Olympic sprinter, one must compare the differences both explicit and implicit. The first woman attempts to solidify and produce a copy of her sexuality whilst is refused, the second inadvertently is violated and mass-produced regardless of her own will; the first is humiliated due to a refusal to acknowledge her sexuality, the second by the refusal to stop acknowledging and producing a spectacle of hers; the sexuality (or lack their of) of the first woman ultimately ends up wreaking destruction and damage whilst that of the second produces a state of erotically induced bemusement for a naive office boy who finds himself privy to the perpetual duplication of this woman’s genitalia. And thus is spelled a duality of erotica; abject versus object filtered through the medium of un-cooperative office equipment. This commercialized visual dialectic of culturally worthy, versus unworthy female sexuality makes me question which position it is actually better to occupy. Would I rather be the woman rejected, abjected and forced into a frantic state of violent rebellion? Or perhaps the hapless victim and objectified fetish; placed upon the pedestal of the phallocentric gaze whereby my sexual identity is distributed en mass through “grade A quality” pop culture replication. Providing an Eden for esoteric French theorizing, one could ponder for millennia over the simulacra implications of producing multiple copies of female Va’ Jay Jay’s. Are we diluting the realness of our own sexual identities and anatomies in an “uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference (Baudrillard, 6)?” If so, what does the refusal of the first copy machine speak to? Perhaps there are abject-defined limits to simulacric replication as mediated by the mechanistic agents of simulation distribution—the trusty old office copy machine (technological surrogate and allegorical instrument of hegemonic supply and demand). If plasticity is in fact our “modern paradigm (Bordo, 245),” perhaps the copy machine is merely providing a gentle nudge encouraging said plump female to realize her determinist, postmodern, potential and actualize the fantasy of limitless bodily determination (Bordo, 245). Maybe then (once repaired) the machinery of pop culture sexual censorship would be willing to mass-produce her femininity as well. Lamentable, Lamentable.
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