31 January 2010: "Getting ‘hornie’ viewing Am Appy’s latest gimmick searching for the Best Alternative Ass."

This post is about scopophilia. In her seminal essay on the gaze and the cinematic experience, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey writes of the "pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight." Could this perversion still adhere if the "person" is always already constructed entirely of signs, such that the eroto-visual consumption takes place not on the somatic level but at the level of hermaneutic decoding?

Confronted with a American Apparel advertising scheme that invites customers to submit photos of their gluteus muscles, post in the coital position most associated with estrus, Carles asks the obvious question: is there any difference under late capitalism between a sexual experience and a branding experience? "Have u ever pleasured urself while looking at the Am Appy website?" In other words, is branding the self through goods an onanistic pursuit as well as a narcissistic one? Can any form of pleasure in a consumerist society escape the mediation of branding? Or are the calming and validating presence of logos now necessary even to put us in a receptive sexual mood. Hence Carles demonstrates that the estrual pose in the images is deeply ironic, as they serve as testimony of the failure of nature to inspire the impulse to coitus in (post-?) humans of our current era.

When Carles asks, "Do u think this gimmick will help Am Appy’s brand, or will they turn into a ‘hipster porn site’?" clearly he means to suggest that there is already no distinction left to maintain. To promote a brand is to become a hipster porn site; brands are porn for hipsters, in that they stimulate and excite the libido of the hyperidentity conscious citizen of post-postmodernism.