Speaking in Code

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” —that is all / Ye know on Earth, and all Ye need to know. (Keats)

This ad appeared in the alternative weekly in Salt Lake City. It’s a vertical-spine half-sheet newspaper funded by advertising, the kind you’ll see covering the latest anarchist indie dance-pop duo in your city like white on rice. In Salt Lake, the City Weekly occupies an important space: when the wagons circle up, there’s little leftover for the rest of us.

But sadly, that doesn’t mean it pays equal attention to the world outside of Utah and the place in which it sits. It’ll still feature baby-related things in its annual “Best of Utah” issue, still targets a related subset of Utah’s dominant demographic (the “rebellious” kids of homogenous Utah Mormons), and still carries ads that demographic would easily understand and normalize.

The first thing I propose most of us would think upon seeing this ad is, “What the hell is it for?” and maybe immediately afterward, “Sisters? What?” I guess that because that’s what I thought. Especially when you start to read the smaller type, and you read the words “per syringe.” Whoa, this shit is serious, and medically related somehow. But this ad is way too glitzy, polished, and commercial to be solely a medical service, not to mention features two blonde-haired, blue-eyed white women who are clothed and photographed to appear naked. So it can’t really be an ad for a doctor’s office, right?

That’s what we all might think upon first seeing this ad in an alternative weekly paper—the only printed source, I immediately add, for public discussion of any kind of nontraditional, pierced, tattooed, titillating, or thrillingly dangerous subject matter in the great state of Utah. That’s what we might think, and it contains some shock. But that’s nothing compared to shock we’re about to feel, once we a) really start to think about this creepy ad and b) realize how normal it is made to seem.

Take the two women first. Their whiteness and their nude-implying photography. So already, we have to dynamics: the politics of belonging, and sex. Whatever these people are selling, they want you to be turned on by the these seemingly naked women, and they want to deploy classical, unrefined, blunt aesthetics of human beauty. They want to use the power of those aesthetics to solicit your drive to belong: this is the apotheosis of beauty, so don’t you want to look like them?

At this point, the ad is already problematic, even if we’re still confused as to what it’s actually selling. But take a look at the hook text—the marketing engine of the advertisement. “Look More Like Sisters,” the ad offers. It was at this point that I even noticed—by design, no doubt—that the two women were different ages. So, since one is supposed to be the other’s mom, whatever this company is selling is targeted at older women, promising to make them look like their daughters. Weird, on the face of it, at least.

But in Utah, “sister” isn’t what it might be in many other states (solidarity in the black community, a nun, maybe a hippie/Wiccan thing, etc.). It’s what female Mormons call each other.

“So,” I thought as I stared and realized this, “that’s the code.” There’s an extra layer of the Politics of Belonging to this advertisement. With this product, you’ll look more like sisters than mother and daughter, but could you also look more like….a Sister?

Picture this: you’re a 50-something Mormon woman from West Jordan, Utah, whose biggest disappointment is (disgustingly) your own daughter. She now lives 13 miles north in downtown Salt Lake, has 15 tattoos, 6 piercings, and works as a graphic artist (printmaking), and waitresses at a fancy restaurant. She’s a disappointment for all the usual Utah reasons: she’s 35, single, drinks alcohol, actually has casual sex with people, and is very vocal about her desire to never get married and/or make babies. But you’re sad, because you’d like a better relationship with her.

So you start perusing the City Weekly, if only to get an exciting taste of the verboten, if not to find some inspiration as to how you might actually bond with your daughter. And then you see this ad. It’s that exact moment the creative in the ad agency that created this image was hoping for: the woman gets the idea to get a little chemical cosmetic procedure done, to feel and look younger and maybe (the logic is always a little fuzzy when it comes to advertising) try to feel closer to her daughter. As an added bonus, the concept of sisterhood seals the emotional deal, undergirding the entire mental transaction with a sense of belonging, familiarity, and social sanction.

Can advertising define a major part of a place’s culture? Sadly, it can. And when ads that trade in female body insecurity assault the eye in this country, we’re at least able to handle such assaults as being peripheral to our core values about a place. Milwaukeeans don’t see an ad for botox in the Shepherd Express and see some reference to beer, cheese, farming, deer hunting, or the packers in it. It’s just an ad for botox injections. It might be problematic in the Politics of Gender sphere, but it would never try to access cultural key terms. The same is true for the Boston Phoenix (may it rest in peace) or the New York Press, or LA Weekly. But in Utah, such a trashy and halfhearted cosmetic procedure is advertised as an establishment product. It almost makes you think people just can’t resist throwing a coded reference to the wagon circle in there.