Incest, beauty standards, and manipulating public opinion

Jiang Wenli’s “incestuous” ad for the Maxam line of skin-care products has had the Chinese media buzzing for the last week (see notes on ESWN and China Daily, or the ad itself on YouTube).

Opinion pieces in newspapers across the country have asked important questions like “Has it crossed the line of acceptable social standards?” and have given valuable suggestions like “What can be said at home might not be appropriate to say on TV.”

Commentators have remarked that Jiang shoots too many commercials as it is, that she’s a bad mother for not correcting her son when he talked about marrying her, and that she really has no business shilling for a cosmetics company after winning over fans with her makeupless performance in A Chinese-Style Divorce.

Other reactions have been more understanding, although not quite the sort of defense that Jiang may have wanted. In today’s Wenzhou Daily, a commentary titled “Don’t think that you don’t have an Oedipus complex” casts the ad as a reflection of normal, Freudian psychological development:

So we can say that an Oedipus complex is nothing shameful. On the contrary, love for one’s mother plays an extremely active role in an individual’s healthy psychological development. If a boy does not love his mother, in the future he will not know what kind of spouse to find, and in serious cases this may even lead to homosexuality. If a boy does not want to “kill his father,” he won’t seek to take over his father’s position or continue the family business, and he won’t learn from or imitate his father. In the future he quite probably will not be very masculine, and in serious cases he may undergo a sex-change operation.

Or perhaps it’s all just a storm in a teapot. Lu Pin, a frequent commentator in China Women’s News, says that incest isn’t the real issue here; it’s just being exploited as a tool to win influence, while the false promises of the ad – “Maxam cosmetics will keep your mother young forever” – are being overlooked. Here’s Lu’s piece in last week’s Southern Metropolis Weekly (which identifies her only as “feminist”):

The cosmetics ad starring Jiang Wenli that has a son wanting to marry his mother has been a public target the past few days, and the media has recently reported that the ad has been pulled from CCTV-6 because of unhealthy content. The storm surrounding this Jiang Wenli ad is essentially much ado about nothing; it arose out of a post on some forum where the majority of the responding comments took issue with the the original claim, and many commentators and experts also provided explanations for Jiang Wenli. But after the news was broadcast to a wider audience, it immediately stirred up a tide of debate.

In this flap over the so-called “incestuous” advertisement, Jiang Wenli has been treated unfairly; if it hadn’t been so close to Golden Week, a slow time for news, when reporters had discovered that “explosive” posting, this storm may not have arisen at all. A famous star plus “incest” – what sensational subject matter – only required a few netizens to exaggerated into a group of netizens to make this a top-grade salacious news item. Such an action at the very least is manufacturing garbage; considered in a larger context, it is counterfeiting public sentiment and holding public opinion hostage. But those involved had no choice but to respond as if it were genuine, while those who had sparked the affair stood innocently on the sidelines. Commentators have already begun using this to criticize online public opinion for its ethical proclivities, but compared to the media, which worked both ends of the affair, the Internet may just be a scapegoat.

Another interesting character is CCTV. That institution once again showed off its cluelessness: never having cared a whit for public opinion in the past, this time, to ensure that it is completely blameless during ethical investigations and self-inspections, it threw away advertising revenue from a commercial and disregarded the fair protection of those involved. Its actions are in no way responsible; they are simply utilitarian, a rush to make sure that its own house is clean. Only by waving the cudgel of ethics throughout the entire “incest” flap and increasing its own power could CCTV thoroughly weaken Jiang Wenli and the cosmetics company; regardless of public opinion, if it was involved with a stronger party, then right and wrong wouldn’t enter into the picture.

So we get a glimpse of the characteristics of power in China: on the one hand, economic power is growing rapidly, but on the other, economic power is still subject to strict limitations by other powers that have no rules, including an undisciplined media that fanned the flames during this episode and fell far short of fair, honest investigation and opportunities for understanding. And the power of the people, situated on the lowest rung, is always at risk of being manipulated or stirred up; one wonders whether it hasn’t already been turned into something else.

Returning to that advertisement: the problem with it is not “incest”, of course, but rather that the myth of skin care products keeping women young forever has once again broadcast misleading ideas about women’s worth; what comes out of the young boy’s mouth is actually the logic of the adult world: men will only want you if you are young and beautiful. Transforming a relationship between a man and a woman to one between a mother and son, packaging beauty standards in warm affections – the novelty of the advertisement makes it an even cleverer trap. However, this kind of criticism of gender roles in society probably won’t find an audience since our social ethics to a large degree still lack sensitivity toward gender equality.

(When this article was submitted, news reports said that this commercial was not pulled and was still showing on TV, though some sociologists were still pushing for it to be banned. Whatever the fate of this ad, we can see from the debate it raised that the cudgel of ethics often falls on the wrong target; the trap in this commercial does not lie in its promotion of “incest,” but rather that it suggests a value system of “gender inequality.”)