Full Comment: Barbara Kay on the Bishop Strachan School's perplexing new ad campaign

Recently I saw two ads for the same private school. One had me drooling and — if I only had one handy — ready to sign up my young daughter. The other had me reeling in disgust, and vowing no putative daughter of mine would ever cross its threshold.

If you go to the Web site of Bishop Strachan School (BSS), one of Toronto’s oldest and most prestigious girls’ private schools, you’ll see a slick introductory montage of smiling girls of various ages, race and cultural provenance, individually and collectively voicing the repeated mantra “I can do anything!” The images and examples flick past: “I can be an artist”; “I can be an astronaut”; “I can be a good friend”; “I can be a leader.” White, black, Asian, all scrubbed and shiny in their middy blouses and tunics, the girls and their message body forth the wholesome message that this school turns out confident young women beautifully equipped for a life of professional and personal achievement.

No question, this Web site is an appealing promotional package guaranteed to seduce modern parents seeking that optimal combination of cutting-edge education, encouragement for free-flowing creativity and social peer diversity for their little girl. Kudos to the marketing company that produced it.

And now we turn to another promotional, um, gambit for BSS, this time on page 37 of the October 15, 2007 issue of Maclean's Magazine. It’s a half-page ad. The message, printed over an image, reads: “Send your daughter to B.S.S. (space, then in red) The world needs her.” In the bottom corner, you see an open spiral notebook, on which the BSS logo is stamped, and beside it the words in formal typed script “With the right education, girls who want to change the world become women who do." Underneath that, in faux handwriting, as though added by one of the students, “Girls can do anything.” 

So in terms of the message, the magazine ad and the Web site reinforce each other — standard branding procedure. But now we come to the actual image of the magazine ad, and…whaaat?! We see a woman’s body from the base of the neck to the waist. It fills the entire frame of the ad. The body is naked, but she is not a model. You see the body and skin texture of a very mature woman: freckled, crepey and slack. The woman’s right hand is cupping a sagging breast. Her left arm hangs at her side. There is no need to cup the left breast because there is no breast there, only a scar. 

This is how a marketing firm (in alliance with the school obviously) thinks you attract girls — or rather their parents — to a school? Through an image of a naked woman with breast cancer? At first I was stymied. What are they saying? Go to BSS, and you’re sure to get breast cancer? Well, obviously not. Ah, then it became clear: Go to BSS and you’ll be the one to cure breast cancer. A roundabout way to send a message, to be sure. And in any case surely a picture of a young woman doctor accepting an award from the Canadian Cancer Society would make the same point in a far more upbeat and straightforward way. 

Perhaps too upbeat for the ideological temper of our times? I must say I have never seen a more surgically seamless fusion of the two pillars of the feminist message in the same graphic: “Women can do anything” but at the same time — and this seems to be the over-riding motivation for the choice of the deformed woman — “women are victims whose needs are not being served, which is why they need more women like the ones BSS turns out.” Of course both messages are fallacious: Women are no better equipped to cure cancer than men, and women’s medical needs are far better funded and far better publicized than, say, prostate cancer is for men.

Setting aside the misleading messages of the ad, though, this in-your-face anonymous deformed body is a disturbing by-product of a current vogue in feminist art for specifically female affliction as ennoblement, a form of “art” in which random misfortune (to a woman) is cast as heroic. We saw the tendency epitomized last year in the eyesore of a gigantic statue of a hideously deformed naked pregnant artist on a plinth in Trafalgar Square.

Foolish trends in art may appeal to the aesthetically avant-garde whose main goal in life is to “épater la bourgeoisie,” but the bourgeoisie itself, those parents seeking a safe psychological environment for their little girls are not likely to take such confusing, guilt-producing and uncomfortable bait.

bkay@videotron.ca