'Sexploitation' north and south

Catholic New Times, Jan 30, 2005 by Joelle Morgan

Tope other day, my sister and I were driving p Avenue Road in Toronto, and as we assed a bus, I noticed the advertisement n its side.

It was an image of four men facing the camera wearing nothing but their low-riding jeans. They were surrounding a woman (also wearing nothing but jeans) with her back to the camera. The woman was covering her breasts with her hair and arms.

It was an ad for jeans.

Before Christmas, I was cycling along Bloor Street downtown, and there was a large transport truck parked in my lane (not an unusual occurrence, actually). As I came around the truck, I was astonished to see it filled with sand, fake palm trees, and four people lounging on the "beach" inside the truck. Each one was scantily clad in a bikini or "Speedo." None of them looked particularly happy. As I passed I could see one of the women saying that she really needed water. The big sign overhead read: "Only in Mexico!"

Sexploitation Only in Mexico? This "live ad" is sign enough that there is sexual exploitation here in Canada too. Sex and sexuality are used constantly to sell products, from cars to clothes to perfume. But this use of live models in a truck in the middle of the street, where people can gawk at them, seems to kick the level of sexploitation up a notch.. They looked like caged animals in a zoo. They were there to encourage the passer-by to dream of the possibility of what one would be able to do if one traveled south: lounge in your leopard print bikini at a resort and enjoy the heat.

Whenever I tell people that I am travelling to Mexico, this is the "paradise" that they envision. The irony of this live tableau is that it is part of a tourism campaign to encourage people from the North to go to the South during the cold winter months and spend time at a resort. The ad itself does violence to the models by turning them into a freak show. What happens to their humanity?

It is advertising for an industry--tourism--that is itself exploitative; of people, the land, and natural resources like water. Most resorts use enormous amounts of water for the many showers a day needed by the guests, so that there is little left over for local consumption. This is not something visitors at resorts want to think about--they want to imagine that they are vacationing in a perfect paradise. They have the power to buy a holiday from the difficulties of daily living.

This struck me again as I was listening to the CBC coverage of the tsunami recovery in Thailand. This is a country that has developed an impressive tourist industry. Sadly, this seemed to be the focus of the initial recovery work: rescue the visitors and normalize the resorts as quickly as possible.

Even the Prime Minister of Thailand was out on the beaches greeting tourists who were back out on the beach just a week after the disaster. It was an image that was frankly repugnant to me, as it lacked any sense of the horror being experienced by thousands in the region. Other tourists were speaking about how wonderful the Thai people had been to them--I too experienced them as a gracious people last summer--ensuring their well-being. But it seems that the Westerners were not seeing the dynamic of exploitation at work.

The common experience of our humanity is what seems to be lost in these relations of power imbalance. Whether it is the abuse of bodies for the advertising industry or the economic dynamics between the North and the global South, we seem to forget that we are all made in God's image.

Many have said that the world has been changed by this natural disaster in Asia, I can only hope that we will open our eyes and our hearts and be truly awakened and transformed.