From the comment boards at Styledash:

"For what it's worth, I don't believe the breast and crotch shots with the perfume bottle were ever print ads. I think they only appeared on Tom Ford's website, which had an "explicit content" warning before entering..."

Hence the lack of outcry by the IAI over the other images.

Furthermore, Italians generally consider it rude to bite a finger (or thumb) at someone in public.

It's not surprising that there would be cultural peculiarities regarding the boundary between "offensive" and "not offensive".

As I understand it, the "a-ok" gesture of making a circle with the thumb and index finger and pointing the other three fingers upward is, in Arab countries, the equivalent of flipping someone the bird.

If she bites a finger in her sleep, imagine what damage she could do to a penis! Insinuating that a woman might harm a man with her teeth is "beyond bad taste". Fellatio sounds Italiano, no?

I don't know about Italy, but I know the 1st crotch shot has been in print in the US because I've got a copy that my students brought to me.

I've seen all these ads (save for the last and first one) in print in various magazines in the US. I've seen the second ad in Vogue, Harpers, and Cosmo.

I guess I will de-lurk here for a moment. I am a reader from Austria, and I think there is definitely a possibility that these ads never circulated in Italy.

Of course, I cannot say for sure as I do not follow the Italian media, but I am often quite shocked when I am confronted with American ads via the internet. We definitely do have our own sexist ads around here, that's for sure, but still with a very different angle on things.

Considering that much tamer ads were widely discussed in the local media, I think that the ads posted here would have been a complete shock.

As another example, beer ads on TV around here very rarely focus on partying, sex, or club/youth culture. Rather, they are mostly set during the day, and are about relaxing, comfort, enjoying close company with friends, and going back to the old, simpler days. Most of the participants are men, with usually only one or two token females.

I think that international differences in ads are really an interesting phenomenon. For example, here in Austria, German TV is available and has quite a marketshare. I have always been struck by the differences in ads concerning household cleaning products. In both countries, of course, it is the women doing the household work. But in Germany, the ads are overflowing with references to invisible, deadly bacteria that contaminate your surroundings even if they look clean. Naturally, they can only be defeated by using the newest products to sterilize your surroundings. In Austria, there is nothing of this. Rather, the focus to me seems to be on "you have to do the job anyway because men are too retarded to do it, so at least do it quickly" (I think you already had an example of this marketing strategy sometime).

OK, now that I have completely derailed the comments here, I promise to be more disciplined in the future. Maybe I can even find some interesting things to suggest for further posts on your excellent blog.

That's interesting. The finger and teeth is now associated with penis biting - in my mind anyway, presumably I'm not the only one.

BTW you should do a series on ads implying that women enjoy male genital mutilation - there have been a few.