The Commercial Coding of LesBiGays: Sexuality and Commerce
Sexuality is commerce, commerce is sexuality.81 They are linked in the modern American mindset, as a bevy of popular and legal metaphors reveal. In matters of romance, singles are "in the market." A newlywed couple enters into a "marriage contract." And, as young parents, they "produce offspring." In matters of business, we engage in "commercial intercourse." Usurping shareholders can "sterilize" a corporate board. Those same shareholders might be liable if a court "pierces the corporate veil." And the reasonable person knows that, whether playing in the realms of sex or of commerce, "prophylactic measures" are de rigueur.
The ineluctable link between sexuality and commerce is far more than metaphorical, however. In our advanced capitalistic culture, the regimes of profit rely upon the regimes of sexualized pleasure, and vice-versa. Commodities sell sexuality, and sexuality sells commodities. Day after day, America's captains of commerce tender ever more daring depictions of erotic life to hawk their wares.82 Images of women and men that capture their bodies, their sexual mystique, and their sexualized encounters are commercially exploited to sell everything from cars to cologne. In a real sense, commerce pimps its products.
The modern mass advertising process models perfectly the symbiosis between sexuality and commerce. Advertising seizes upon sexuality and imagistically associates it with products and services. By this process, a subtle but significant metamorphosis occurs. The symbols, meanings, and values of sexuality are infused into products and services, just as the symbols, meanings, and values of products and services are simultaneously infused into sexuality. After reworking the cultural meanings of both sexuality and commodities, advertising transmits those meanings back into America's marketplace of items and ideas. Thus, commercial advertising not only reflects images of sexualized commodities and commodified sexualities, but it also constitutes them.83
