The Crimson And its Advertisers

EXPLOITATION of different people for different reasons occurs in every corner of society. Sometimes it is naked and does not pretend to excuse itself, as in the codified economic slavery of apartheid; sometimes it takes a less overt form, as in the maltreatment of minority groups in both the United States and the Soviet Union. But all its forms share a degradation of the human spirit that springs from treating individuals as means to economic ends.

American society has devoted special energy to perfecting what can be a creatively insidious form of exploitation--advertising. In its worst forms, the advertisement seeks to induce a Pavlovian response of slobbering acquisitiveness through irrelevant, and often exploitative associations: the blonde languishing on the hood of a Lincoln-Continental, or the leather-skinned cowboy touting the manly virtues of Marlboro Country. Yet these tactics are by no means confined to the world of Madison Avenue: they are used to sell daily newspapers and cheap novels, pornographic magazines and T.V. shows. The values of the advertising world steadily creep through the media it supports.

Advertising exploits many groups, but generations of male control of the media and the businesses that support it have made the exploitation of women perhaps the most widespread and most ineradicable example. And a whole industry of pornographers takes the principle of tantalizing advertising to its logical conclusion: where an ad will use the bodies of women as bait to sell an unrelated product, a porn magazine trades directly in the female form itself. Once that form becomes an object to merchandise, it follows naturally that the promoters will seek ever more extreme ways to present the object: from titillation to abuse, from abuse to rape.

Like most American publications. The Crimson depends for a large part of our revenue on paid advertising. Some of our staff might find fault with many of the ads we regularly run--the buxom Nordic woman peddling her favorite beer, or the "Voulez-vouz Pernod with me?" ad. But we run these ads, with the recognition, however unhappy, that without them we might not be able to continue publishing.

Over the years, however, the Crimson has rejected a very small number of advertisements--cases of exploitation so egregious that we decided neither to accept the advertiser's money nor to give him space. Among these ads was an order-blank for the South African government's Krugerrand gold coins, a solicitation for Radcliffe women to pose nude for Playboy magazine, and a subscription blank for Bang magazine, another porno publication. This month the Crimson voted to reject a subscription ad from Screw magazine, which its representative described to us as "only a little more hard-core than Hustler."

We did not base our decision on the ad's content: based on the ads for the movie Raging Bull, it displayed a bloodied man's face with the caption, "Raging Bullshit," and offered subscriptions to the magazine along with a brief description of what readers could expect. But this accompanying copy was negotiable, Screw's representative told us, as long as we would run their ad.

We rejected the ad with the strong conviction that there is a concrete link between the content of publications like Screw and the economic and physical exploitation of women in America. Right on the reverse side of the subscription ad Screw sent us on a page ripped out from a recent issue, we read a graphic and brutal description of a rape, presented in what were meant to be erotic terms.

The decision to reject the Screw ad, like similar decisions in the past, was reached at a staff meeting where all staff members--news, editorial, photo and business--could participate. The Crimson has no set, rigid, policy for deciding which ads should be rejected--it has made all such decisions ad hoc at these meetings. They have served over the years to clarify just why the Crimson occasionally refuses to print an ad and to test the decisions against several objections. The objections have fallen into a few categories, which include:

By refusing to print an advertiser's ad, The Crimson is restricting his freedom of speech. "Freedom of speech" as a legal principle enshrined in the First Amendment exists to protect the statements of individuals from government prosecution. As a moral principle, it exists to insure that every viewpoint has its chance for public airing. Screw's right to publish is not endangered by The Crimson's refusal to print its subscription ad. Many of us, in fact, might argue just as forcefully in the magazine's defense if any arm of the government moved to shut it down because of its contents. And Screw's right to express its political views remains unhindered by the Crimson decision: if its publisher comes to us next week with a political ad that responds to this editorial, we would surely print it.

At root, the right to speech does not translate into the right to advertise, because of the warping intermediary of money. When an advertiser comes to the door of a newspaper, he comes money in hand; with no money, he gets no space. If there were a true "right to advertise," then every newspaper in the country would daily infringe upon the rights of those with too little money to purchase an ad. Advertising is business, not speech, and in business, unlike in speech, absolute freedom is not an absolute virtue.

By refusing an ad, The Crimson is restricting the freedom of choice of its readers. This argument ludicrously--and condescendingly--assumes that the readers of a newspaper receive all their information from it and are helpless without its guidance. Any reader of The Crimson with a desire to subscribe to Screw can do so simply by looking up the magazine's address or phone number and sending it a check. The "freedom of choice" truly endangered in this controversy is that of the thousands of women raped every year, in a society where magazines like Screw have portrayed rape as an enjoyable act.

By refusing ads for porno magazines, The Crimson is setting itself up as a prudish censor. Screw offends not for its depiction of sexually explicit subjects--which have, on occasion, appeared in The Crimson and do not in themselves offend us--but for its promotion of sexual exploitation. There is a critical and easily discernible distinction between the two; and until society and its institutions, like The Crimson, learn to draw it better, both equality between the sexes and a healthy attitude towards sexuality will remain unattainable.