Bethany Khalil's Culture Jam

The Original Advertisement

Queen Bee Salon & Spa created by Hanlon, United States (2014)

The chosen advertisement comes from Queen Bee Salon & Spa, an American beauty services company. While it can be argued the entire beauty industry itself is prone to preying on (and creating) insecurities in women, the advertisements especially tend to capture female consumers using a proclaimed importance of physical desirability for women to feel good and deserve love.

This advertisement is from a Valentine’s Day campaign, showing an animated female’s smooth and bare pubic area. On her mons pubis, “NOTHING SAYS I LOVE YOU LIKE NOTHING” captivates attention and implies the targeted demographics are sexually active women in relationships seeking to make their partner happy on Valentine’s Day. By doing this, they hypersexualize a woman’s value in a relationship to the exposure and state of her body parts.

They marginalize women who maintain pubic hair, whether that is for health, personal, and/or financial reasons. This could be women with natural tendencies for more hair, like those from certain ethnicities or health-related situations (e.g. PCOS), and women with religious restrictions on hair removal (e.g. Sikh women). By equating hairlessness to showing love, those with hair are shamed for not proving their devotion. This guilts women for natural pubic hair, despite not considering male pubic hair as a necessity for love or the diversity in the female body.

It implies that on top of the pain and health risks of waxing, a woman must also contribute at least 75$ USD (their website) to display affection. Consequently, it must be targeting a middle-class female demographic, but it still harms other women now convinced they must save up a full shift of minimum wage work for a wax. The destructive messaging also ignores the diversity in colour and reaction to Brazilian waxes, selling instead an unattainable smoothness in tone. It glosses over the risks of a wax to dehumanize and shame their own consumers for a profit.

While there are more “crucial” feminist issues to tackle in the world, the normalization of removing a woman’s power over her own sexuality to sell a service gives insight into the current neoliberal, patriarchal structure that is forcefully ingrained within our society itself.

The Jammed Subversion

The “jammed” version of the above, original advertisement

The jamming of this advertisement is meant to showcase all of the aforementioned issues. I made these changes to emphasize the ridiculousness of the original message and touch on the neglected truths.

“Nothing says I love you like nothing” was subverted to highlight how absurd the claim that love is portrayed through a wax is. I used “literally just stripping hair off the most sensitive part of your body” to emphasize this skewed depiction of showing love. This accentuates the shame and guilt that the advertisement is trying to instill within female viewers for neglecting their partner by keeping pubic hair. The word “just” aims to tease out the subliminal messaging that the value of love from a woman’s partner can only and exclusively come from the state of the woman’s pubic area – not her actions, thoughts, words, or treatment of her partner.

I have added “75$ to infantilize your womanhood” to the original tagline of “A happy Valentine’s Day starts at Queen Bee” to stress the bizarre view that happiness between couples can only be established with the expensive, oft-unnecessary treatment of removing such a natural, protective part of the adult body. By adding in the unreasonable price, viewers are more immediately exposed to the irrationality of the messaging.

The addition of irritation in the bikini area also show the more realistic reaction for most women to hair removal, which includes ingrown hairs and variation in tone. This imagery shows the pain and effect a woman’s body parts may go through when striving for this unattainable standard of hairlessness the company is promoting.

The goal of the subversions is to educate the viewers on the detriment of the beauty industry’s advertising on women’s own sexual empowerment and increasing their internalized shame. The natural female body is consistently scrutinized, and these subversions hopefully highlight these harms directly. Despite the notorious amounts of damaging media, this small reckoning in the grand scheme of feminism alludes to how deep and prevalent patriarchal mindsets are involved with the neoliberal aim of successfully selling products and services.

Bibliography:

Queen Bee Salon & Spa. (n.d.). Women’s Services. Retrieved June 3, 2020, from https://www.queenbeesalonspa.com/seattle/

Queen Bee Salon & Spa and Hanlon. (2014, February 2). Nothing [Advertisement]. Ads of the World, Media(Health).