Safer Sex In Spain: Differing Opinions

Alex in Spain sent us some links to this safer sex ad campaign. I think the image below is particularly interesting. In the U.S. anyway, we rarely see safer sex principles being applied to oral sex. Also, I much prefer the musical instrument metaphor to the gun metaphor.


Thanks Alex!

More safer sex campaigns: Milwaukee, New York, the United Kingdom, and France and Germany.

GWEN ADDS: I want to point out Oxydo is a sunglasses company. I think these images are advertisements for their sunglasses, not a safe-sex campaign. Here are two more posters:

Notice that in all of these, the woman is a faceless body to have sex with, whereas the guy is presumably supposed to be cool because he's wearing sunglasses. I'm not sure it's an AIDS awareness campaign at all--I think it's actually an ad campaign for Oxydo, and "protected" sex means wearing their sunglasses. They add the AIDS ribbon at the bottom to make a connection to anti-AIDS campaigns. See Copyranter's discussion here. Did anyone else notice the musical score in the first image is for "The Magic Flute"?

So there you go, folks--polysemy in action. People read images differently, and not always as the creator intended. This might be a unique AIDS-awareness campaign, or it might just be an ad that makes a superficial nod to AIDS awareness.

An Alternative Image Of Love

Miguel in Barcelona sent us this government-sponsored poster aimed at promoting egalitarian relationships. He translates the text as:

The love has to be free
Free of machismo
Free of fights
Free of jealousy

This image, as a representation of idealized egalitarian love, is a nice contrast to the representations of love common in the U.S. (and in Spain?) that make power asymmetry sexy, desirable, and constituitive of love. Consider the love affair between this apple and pear and these two images (which look more like the fruit than Miguel's image above):

Thanks to Miguel for sending us our first image from Spain!

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