Birth: censored

I found this ad for a Sony Handycam in the Herald Sun Sunday magazine and I've been meaning to analyse it here because of the way it blatantly sanitises birth, presenting an experience of birth that is so stereotypical and traditional, it hurts my eyes to look at it.

I apologise if the image is difficult to see but in sum, Sony's selling point for this new video camera is that 'it captures everything'. At the bottom of the ad, it says:

'...you'll never miss any of life's precious moments'

and of course birth is supposed to be one of those moments. Anyway, this is what bothers me about this ad. The birthing woman is obviously Anglo and blonde, a stock-standard image of a 'normal' middle-class woman who is giving birth in a hospital. Her ostensibly male partner is filming the birth with his trusty Sony handycam. She is on her back in a hospital bed which is so far removed from a typical contemporary birthing experience. I don't know what you think, but most women I know and that I have interviewed definitely did not give birth lying on their back in a hospital gown covered with a sheet to hide her body.

Straight away, the ad conveys a message that birth is something that should be hidden and women's reproductive bodies are chaotic and in need of medical management. You might think I'm being pedantic but what really annoys me is the middle frame which says 'CENSORED": the frame which is supposed to show the birth of this women's child. The frame before the black one shows her 'pushing' and the one after is a blood-free perfect baby. Yet, the moment the baby emerges from her body is CENSORED because birth is clearly too offensive for the innocent eyes of the consumer. The baby is perfectly clean, there is no umbilical cord and no placenta. Everything particularly 'grotesque' about birth is sanitised for popular visual consumption.

This ad reminds me of those ridiculous tampon and pad advertisements which demonstrate the absorbency of a particular product with some bizarre blue liquid. GOD FORBID advertisers use a red liquid because menstrual blood is..well..red. I find it really offensive that women's reproductive bodies are used in both of these cases to sell products but made 'clean' by advertising in order to be sellable. Women's bodies are commodified for the gain of a huge corporation.