Zapping Zappos

Ryan Holiday, director of online marketing at American Apparel is suggesting that brands consider their motives for using nudity and sexuality in ads.

"Are they doing it because they want to get attention from blogs and Web sites . . . or are they doing it because it's the ad campaign that speaks most truly to who they are and what they want to sell?"

He’s talking about the new Zappos advertising campaign. Models will henceforth be modeling au natural. They will be featured walking, cycling, living life wearing nothing at all. We, the consumers, are supposed to dress them, imagine them with clothes on.  Quite a switch, isn't it?

Zappos is hoping buyers will also read the text below the visuals. The text will tell them what's for sale.  Photos of nude models are not  (please say there will be no actual photos).  Website photos are free (you're on your honor) on the Internet.

Are they doing it because they want to get attention from blogs?   If so, hopefully the feedback will influence Zappo's ad campaign. Selling sex is nothing new.  In therapy we call this: objectification and sexploitation.  In this case it is objectification and sexploitation in advertizing.

We could say that posing seductively, even nude, for a camera is voluntary.  No one should criticize the right to that.  And traditionally, attractive young people with skills or not, with college degrees or not, seek jobs in the glamor industries.  Careers like acting and modeling are attractive, especially when your best features are your looks.  Beauty sells.  No coercion is necessary, nobody is twisting anyone’s arm to strike a sexual pose, to wear scanty clothes, or to model nude. The money is incentive, sometimes under the guise of art. 

The money is why so many people raise their hand for the job.

But everything on the Web is permanent and replicable.  That's why there's risk to this business.  It is mostly about risk to the next generation.  Ten years from now, as parents of elementary school children, models who pose au natural, with no clothes, for whatever reason, may have children who care.  And these children may be more vulnerable, even, to emotional abuse and blackmail, than their parents, by virtue of their age. 

You can picture it, other children taunting them with digital files, hard copies. In color.  Those very same advertisements.

Something for show and tell.

What could be worth that price?  The Zappo ad campaign is negligent, irresponsible corporate thinking.  Dangerous stuff.

Exposure like this, public embarrassment, drives psychological pain and suffering. The shame begs therapy, and shame, some of us think, drives the mental health industry.  The economy of psychological health tilts on the heels of this kind of corporate decision making. 

New social work and psychology grads won't have to worry about a therapist glut. There will never be too many of them.  Not the way things seem to be going.

Linda Freedman, PhD, LCSW, LMFT