Sex for Voting?

In honor of election day tomorrow, I thought I'd open up a little friendly debate on when it's appropriate to incorporate women's sexuality into advertising campaigns. The above poster, made and distributed by a group of women in Brooklyn, is a takeoff on a 1968 anti-war poster that read "Girls say yes to boys who say no."

Now, there's a variety of opinions floating around the online feminist community about this poster. According to the feminist magazine Bust, the poster proves that "politics can still be fun." But several Salon writers criticize the ad for its "boring, overdone sexual politics and its hipster aesthetics," with one going so far as to claim that it makes her "want to put a fist through the wall." And taking something of a middle ground, feminist blog Jezebel weighs in on the poster as "a little self-consciously cutesy, certainly derivative and ironically playing into outdated sexual mores, but ultimately harmless."

Most importantly, my roommate Danielle pointed out that the only place she'd even seen this poster was on feminist blogs, so why the hell did anyone even care?

Frankly, I'm more inclined to fall on the anti-poster side here, but not necessarily because I'm intensely offended at the poster's invocation of women's sexuality. The use of sexuality in advertisements is nothing new, and it seems clear to me that this poster is not intended to be taken literally in any way. With its retro black and white design, and the fact that it was created by a group of obviously historically aware women, I find it incredibly implausible that anyone involved with its making really intended to convey the message that all women would have sex with any man who voted for Obama. Especially since the text at the bottom of the poster reads, "Sarah Palin is not a woman's choice," it seems difficult to argue that the purpose here is to speak to men who want to get laid. And honestly, I don't think contemporary men are so dumb that that's the message they're going to get out of this. Instead, the poster seems intended humorously and aimed at a female audience.

On the other hand, the nostalgic nod to the New Left that lies at the core of this poster kind of irritates me. Considering how sexist the progressive movements of the 1960s were--need I evoke the famous quote that "the position of women in SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] is prone"?--I am fairly certain that the original poster was not intended in a tongue-in-cheek manner, nor was it directed at women. I'm consistently frusterated by the way that many contemporary youth progressive movements (particularly on college campuses) evoke the 1960s as some sort of perfect, idealized moment of activism. In saying, "Girls say yes to boys who say no," anti-Vietnam war activists intended to establish sex with liberal girls as some sort of prize for good protest behavior. So my question when I look at this Obama poster becomes: why even go there?