Tom's been stirring the controversy pot for years, but his latest ad campaign takes the cake for making some folks just plain indignant, and starting a national conversation about ad bans and censorship. Feminists took one particular image (above) to heart because it alludes to a violent act against women, but I find Ford to be an equal opportunity debaser with this male version:
Um, keep in mind, these are ads for his new sunglasses collection, ahem. But anyhoo, his latest public plea comes in a New York Magazine blurb that claims Tom is irked that no one wants to look at dicks:
"Tom Ford has encountered yet another speed bump in his lifelong quest to make the world okay with male nudity. For the spring/summer issue of Britain’s GQ Style, he wrote an impassioned essay questioning why exposed penises seem to be the last taboo. “As much as I’ve tried, it has been consistently harder to get images of nude men onto magazine pages and billboards than it has nude women,” he wrote. “There’s a double standard at play here: magazines that are happy to fund ads featuring an artfully-lit female nude will balk at an image of her male counterpart.” So imagine Ford’s surprise when he picked up a copy of his essay and the photo spread he’d directed in GQ Style to discover artfully placed blocks of text on every photo. “They censored all the penises!” he told us at the CFDA awards on Monday. “I was really pissed off about that. That wasn’t why I got [involved]. It was supposed to be full-frontal male nudity, which was the way we shot it, and then the magazine censored all that!"--New York Magazine
So Tom is the victim in all this? Huh. But maybe there's something in his assertion that we, as a society, are far more forgiving when it comes to female nudity than to men. Certainly, people are shocked when we see male frontal nudity in films, but boob shots are old hat. Thoughts?
SEE ALSO: "Banned in the USA: Have sexual images in advertising gone too far?" and "Should this Tom Ford ad be banned?"
