French feminists fight to ban 'porno-chic' advertisements

The poster shows a naked woman. She dominates streets and Metro stations all over Paris. She is not selling perfume, make-up or even fast cars. If you look closer you see that her picture is composed of the ends of thousands of pieces of spaghetti. This is an advertisement for pasta.

The poster shows a naked woman. She dominates streets and Metro stations all over Paris. She is not selling perfume, make-up or even fast cars. If you look closer you see that her picture is composed of the ends of thousands of pieces of spaghetti. This is an advertisement for pasta.

Advertising in France is decidedly risqué. Whether for traditional luxury items or for less glamorous products such as shoes, mobile phones or pasta, sex sells. Nudity and sexual innuendo are the norm on billboards across the country.

Feminists, who see this sexually implicit advertising as offensive to women, have long been angered by it. Now a manifesto is circulating on the internet campaigning for a boycott of products promoted this way.

Florence Montreynaud, the founder of the Chiennes de Garde ("guard bitches" - a deliberate irony) hopes to raise public awareness and engender more respect. "For 30 years I've tried several means of having advertising practice changed. When I was younger I would paint on the adverts in big red letters, 'Sexists go home!'"

Ms Montreynaud, 52, the author of the encyclopedia The 20th Century of Women, is a respected academic figure in France. She created the Chiennes de Garde in reaction to the sexist insults aimed at prominent women. "'Whore' and 'bitch' would be unthinkable in other societies. In France we tolerated them for too long."

The campaign was a huge success, with 10,000 people from around the world electronically signing up to an internet manifesto. Now Ms Montreynaudhas turned her attention to advertising's "porno-chic". "Four years ago, when I was president of the Association of French Women Journalists, I offered a prize for the least sexist advertisement ... it was like looking for a needle in a haystack."

Among promotions that angered Ms Montreynaud were the Panzani spaghetti advert and a notorious Opium campaign, featuring a picture of the British model Sophie Dahl, shown naked. There was also a JM Weston shoes ad showing a woman wearing a leopard skin top and nothing but a man's phallic foot over her lower half.

"The Opium picture of the nude woman was really terrible," said Ms Montreynaud. "Advertisers feel they have to shock to be memorable, to be effective - a problem that's become worse in the last five years.People are so used to these images they no longer see or react to the sexism. But when such intimate scenes are exhibited in public it threatens everyone, not just women."

The constant reliance on sex in advertising has been viewed by many as a lack of originality. As if to underline the point, this year's winner of the Effie prize, an award for the most effective French advertising strategy, was Eurostar, which used wit rather than sex. Among its winning images was a picture of the Teletubbies with the caption "In London you can dress how you like".

But Jacques Bille, director of the AACC, the French advertising trade organisation, said: "The truth is that French advertisers are about the average, in the world, for using images of women to sell products. Go to Italy, or Brazil, if you want to see the extremes.

"I know that British and American [advertisers] talk of the French nipple syndrome, which means that in French adverts the nipple is just uncovered, whereas in Anglo-Saxon adverts it would be just covered. But worrying about nipples is, to French minds, just Anglo-Saxon prudery."

Ms Montreynaud's manifesto stresses that advertising trivialises scenes of sex and violence, making women "mother or whore", "housewife or sex object", or "child or slut". It calls for an advertisers' code of conduct and a law against sexism. The campaigners themselves are ready to boycott products promoted by sexist means. "By issuing this manifesto we're putting the point that enough is enough," said Ms Montreynaud.