The .xxx domain is nothing more than an efficient means for domain registrars to extort money from businesses and organizations afraid that their names will be bought and used by porn sites, and from adult site operators who must purchase their .coms in .xxx format, lest someone else do so and hijack traffic. They basically said as much themselves with the “Can You Afford Not To?” video ad campaign. You have to give them credit: When they finally approved the .xxx domain, ICANN created worth out of thin air by allowing domain registrars to run what is essentially a protection scam: “That’s a nice brand you have there. It’d be a real shame if it redirected to a porn site.”
The new print ads depict female porn performers as furniture carried in ha-ha-ha compromising positions by movers. They are so creepy in their frozen RealDoll-esque poses. They’re probably supposed to be funny, but it feels like you’re looking at taxidermied women. And, (this is a “the food was horrible! and such small portions!” complaint) as someone commented on Copyranter, at least one should have featured a male performer, gay or straight. I admit, as strikingly strange as they are, if these ads featured nothing but men, I’d find them wonderfully effective.
What’s most puzzling, though, is exactly what they are supposed to be selling, and to whom. Why does ICM need to advertise .xxx at this point? Who are these ads aiming to reach? Not domain buyers; they did that with their earlier campaign. That leaves secondary consumers, the people who are the customers of their customers. Perhaps they’re trying to propagate the idea that porn will be leaving .com behind and that you’d better get used to typing in .xxx. Maybe the traffic to .xxx domains is not that great, and they’re trying to save face by bringing another wave of publicity to the whole “we made an Internet just for porn!” debacle.
One last point: the agency in charge of this campaign is London-based M&C Saatchi, which is one good reason why (along with being, uh, ads for porn) they don’t look U.S.-print-media friendly. Perhaps they will run in the U.K. or Europe. If you’re there, and these actually show up somewhere, please forward them to the Tits and Sass office ASAP.
via Copyranter; ads shot by Coy! Communications
Good call on mentioning these most likely aren’t for the U.S. market.They seem too racy. It is odd, though, how they are presented. If they are meant as good news for anti-porn internet users, the visual “humor” would be lost on someone not familiar with porn and would most likely offend them/be considered pornographic itself. The whole thing does just look like a diabolical money making scheme. I don’t understand how this is going to work, though, other than double-charging. I mean, is there going to be enforcement at some point? What about blogs like Kitty Stryker’s Purrversatility which I adore!) that do have porn but are about so much else besides?
See… this, in my mind, is objectification of women. Stripping them away to be nothing but actual objects.
The overuse of the term to mean any time a guy lusts for a woman’s body has completely stripped away meaning from that word for me.
[…] I want to talk about the sex industry as a whole and the polarization between different types of feminists when it comes to this industry. Please note that any time I use the word ‘objectify’, I use it as it’s commonly used throughout some feminist media – particularly sex negative media – to describe when a man lusts for a woman based on physicality alone. I will also note that I do not agree with this usage of the term as it lessens its impact when used to describe true objectification. […]