Graphic sex and sexgraphics

Step Inside Design, Jan/Feb 2003 by Dougher, Sarah

THE AUTHOR OF XXX: THE POWER OF SEX IN GRAPHIC DESIGN EXPLORES THE USE OF SEXUALLY-CHARGED IMAGES IN THE MEDIA, THE POWER THESE IMAGES YIELD, AND WHY GRAPHIC DESIGNERS SHOULD PAY ATTENTION.

In May 2002, I sat down with my colleague at Plazm Media (Portland, Ore.), Creative Director Joshua Berger, and Kristin Ellison, an editor at Rockport Publishers, Inc., to discuss a new project: a book about sex in graphic design. Ellison and the editors at Rockport reasoned that since sex was so commonplace, designers should have a guide to successfully represent and interpret it in their work. Ellison notes, "Sex and sexuality are splashed across every media form from cinema to television to the web and throughout advertising. I think it's important for us all to remember why and how we're incorporating it, and consider what the effects on the audience may or may not be."

As we culled through the images we received (enough for at least two books on the subject), we started to see that representations of sex nearly always contain representations of power dynamics. Sometimes this made us laugh, sometimes it made us mad and frustrated: How could sexism still be so pervasive in visual culture? And how could we talk about it without alienating people?

This book was a great opportunity for us to explore the inbetween place where art, commerce, and politics meet. Some of the materials are challenging, and some of the images, particularly anything showing penetration, didn't make it past the Rockport editors. But most of what we wanted to include, we did.

"This is by no means a body of politically correct work. XXX contains a wide selection of strong work from around the globe that uses sex in effective and purposeful ways. It has made me take a closer look at the messages and images that fill our airwaves," Ellison reasons. Berger has his own cultural observations when it comes to the images we see day in and day out. "On one hand, you have this morality play where people are preaching abstinence and marriage, and that everything will be better if we follow these ideas," he explains. "But at the same time you have a culture bombarded with sexual explicitness in advertising campaigns, where sex is equated with products and services that are desirable."

He also likes the social implications such a book will bring to the forefront. "It's a place where we can collect and curate this content and make some kind of commentary. For example, in our society it's OK to watch a violent movie with people killing each other, or for someone to talk about their broken arm and the consequences behind it, but not the great orgasm they had last night," he explains.

"We wanted to explore this dichotomy. This book needed to be a deeper social commentary. We couldn't just put a bunch of pictures in it and not have any context," Berger relates.

It is a disconcerting fact that as a graphic designer you can be progressive, and still have to cave to perceived notions about sex and sexuality to make designs comprehensible to mainstream audiences. We were interested in figuring out how and why designers do this: Is it the client? Is it the audience? We also wanted to show how designers disrupt culturally pervasive messaging about sex and sexuality to create innovative work. We're convinced that good design changes culture, it doesn't just reflect it. Berger and I wanted to make a book that showed both the dynamic and the staid visions of sex and sexuality in contemporary graphic design. More than that, we wanted to make a book that shows how to use sex in graphic design to make positive changes in culture.

WHAT WE LEARNED

This project excited me. I came to Plazm after enduring a weird string of jobs following the procurement of my comparative literature doctorate, including (but not limited to) rock journalist, touring rock musician, organizer of a feminist art festival, landscaper, and house painter. The Plazm environment allows me to bring up issues related to my feminist politics in a serious and sincere way I had left academia partially because I was sick of the overwhelming sexism pervading that culture. Having studied the classics, I was in the midst of some of the most conservative scholarship in the humanities, where I was often disregarded as a feminist. The sexism of the graphic design industry is different, in part, because engagement with commercial culture naturally means engaging with the pervading attitudes about gender. The sex book (as we referred to it) could take on a broader meaning. To write a critical book about sex and its influences in graphic design sounded like nirvana compared to writing copy for marketing materials.

The major challenges in creating the book came from the large amount of work that actually goes into gathering art from our diverse list of sources. Our first step in the process of writing was going through magazines in our front foyer and simply looking for any tidbits of sexiness that we could potentially include. We also would think of new things everyday and track them down. It was important for us to both approach these images with a theoretical framework and outline for the book, but also allow the material to show us appropriate categories for each subject. This was a process that worked fairly well for us, particularly because we had the help of our research assistant, Lucia Harold, and a few tireless interns whose take on sex was as different from mine as mine was from Berger's.