Finally I can say that I've seen that, done that, bought the T-shirt, at- tempted to wear the bra and viewed the uncut version. The latter is a witty, pornographic booby-fest which moved me first to laughter, then confusion. Pretty Polly is selling its new range of bras as the female's answer to Viagra. The ad shows a succession of beautiful women clothed only in bras and panties saying "oooh" while writhing in ecstasy. While the bras bring the women to the brink of orgasm, the men in their vicinity explode. But all the bra achieved, in my case, was to move me to tears - but that's another story.
RTE and the Advertising Standards Authority spent two weeks deliberating on whether the Pretty Polly ad was suitable for innocent Irish eyes. Who can blame them for taking their time? Breasts - those silly, giggly, floppy appendages - were always more trouble than they're worth. If a woman wants to be taken seriously in her career, she should be flat-chested. If she wants to be noticed in her social life, she should be well-endowed. The ideal solution would be inflatable breasts which can be deflated for the workplace and inflated during leisure time (except when jogging or playing tennis, of course).
But then, some women would spend all their time standing in front of mirrors inflating and deflating because, as everyone knows, breasts only really come in two sizes, too large and too small. Most women have no idea how large or small their breasts really are: 80 per cent wear the wrong size bra, resulting in back pain, ridged shoulders, red scars and a droopy appearance. And the problem is getting worse, because breasts are getting bigger. The average age for developing breasts has fallen to 10 (some children are developing them at the age of eight) and young women's breasts are developing larger, faster. Mothers are urged, with good reason, to take their daughters for specialised bra fittings. But do we want our daughters to see this latest ad, which claims to do no more than advertise a bra that is both sexy and comfortable? This is rather an ambitious claim, since such a thing scarcely exists. Your average underwire bra should carry a health warning. One friend's underwire worked its way lose and appeared beneath her chin during a radio interview (thank goodness it wasn't TV). Another friend was kissing her boyfriend when her underwire broke free and shot up his nose, nearly piercing his brain. And there is the neighbour who pretended she had lost a shoulder pad when the padding from her Wonderbra popped out on the dance floor.
These design flaws probably occur because the people who design bras don't have to wear them. The lingerie business - like obstetrics - is dominated by men. The men at Pretty Polly decided that it would be nice to design a push-up bra that wasn't torture to wear. But why do women need push-up bras in the first place? For men. RTE, advised by the Advertising Standards Association (ASA), decided to cut two scenes from the new ad - yet there are so many images it is hard to see why they chose what they did. In the original cut, a nerdy male scientist in a white coat announces: "All you ever wanted to know about bras but were afraid to ask." To start the experimentation process, a man's hands turn two huge metal knobs shaped like breasts. A young student tears off her shirt in a classroom to reveal her bra. A woman in a white lace bra and pants dances provocatively inside a glass cylinder in a laboratory, asking in a mock-Marilyn Monroe dumb blonde voice: "Is this microfibre?" A bra-clad model who looks disconcertingly like feminist Naomi Wolf (author of The Beauty Myth, who surely wouldn't approve) screams: "I am a sex goddess." Another woman in a glass cylinder says: "There's beginning to be a warm sensation" and later "The whole area is beginning to feel tingly." A woman at a feminist rally attended by women wearing only bras and panties, shouts: "It's not a sexual thing, it's a natural thing."
A woman poses coyly in her bra behind a two-way mirror, watched by peeping men. A woman flirtatiously cups and manipulates her breasts, saying: "Don't squeeze, lift." A woman lies on a psychiatrist's couch slithering seductively in black bra and panties until the psychiatrist spontaneously combusts. The images which RTE decided to have cut were: the scientist's hands on the two metal breast-shaped knobs and the girl writhing in the glass cylinder. The rest of the scenes remain. You could easily ask, why are two metal breast-shaped knobs more provocative than actual, dare I say it, female knobs? Debbie May, product manager with Pretty Polly, says that while the women in the ad appear to be manipulated by the men, the irony is that they are actually in control. The woman on the psychiatrist's couch makes the psychiatrist explode, for example. The irony of that scene is that in real life, the model on the couch was breastfeeding during the making of the ad and insisted that filming stop while she tended to her baby. What a magnificent role model! Why can't we see that on TV? It's weird that we see breasts presented as objects of lust worthy of RTE censorship, while we fail to see them for their true purpose.
On a superficial level, Debbie May's argument, that the ad seems to view women as objects while the women are actually in control, works.
ON a deeper level, however, these images play on an underlying assumption that women are responsible for all male sexual responses and this is both false and dangerous. Also dubious is the image in the ad of women being controlled by male scientists, just as the female viewers of the ad are being manipulated by male media image manufacturers. In the context of an ad, which uses sex to sell bras, the cry "it's not a sexual thing, it's a natural thing", comes across as little more than the male image-makers' lip service to feminism.
In an attempt to reconcile TV advertising with reality, I went to be fitted myself with the bra in question. I was disappointed when the largest PP bra almost fitted, but not quite. When the trained fitter uttered those dreaded words "I'll check the stores," I assumed she was checking their stockroom to see what they had by way of an extra-large Amazon medieval truss.
When you are well endowed, there is rarely anything pretty to wear. Yet 48 per cent of the female population happens to be size 16 and over, which means that they are definitely more than 38E. So if you have big bazooms, forget it. Fashion bras are probably not for you.
What's the point, then, of an ad campaign that claims to celebrate breasts and to be for real women, when it actually isn't? This is important, because the Pretty Polly ad pretends to be a message of empowerment for women, when what it is really doing is asking us to squeeze ourselves into a male fantasy of what a woman's body should be.
Debbie May says the ad is aimed at 20-55 year olds, but I didn't see a single 55-year-old in the ad. PP bras are for skinny women with jolly, pert little breasts, just like a man's wet dream. Which is what the ad is. Maybe RTE shouldn't have agreed to show it at all.
The PP ads will be shown on RTE from next Saturday