Cinemascope

Did you hear? The posters for the “Sex and the City” movie were banned from being hung on Jerusalem billboards. Why? Because Ultra-Orthodox Jews felt the word “Sex” is offensive and objected. That’s what I read in USA Today and in Haaretz, both items based on a press release by the spokesperson for the local distributor. But Haaretz’s English edition has an extra paragraph, where the billboard company has a response for the report. And The Jerusalem Post has a different story altogether.

News agencies around the world quickly picked up on the story, papers and websites ran it a couple of days ago. Naturally, it’s a piquant item, mixing sex and religion and the freedom of… well, advertising.
Let’s make this clear: I’m against censorship and political power plays. If the story were true and Orthodox officials would’ve asked the company to remove the posters because they deem the word “Sex” offensive I would’ve cried foul. But I also know that the status-quo in cities with a large Ultra Orthodox community is that no suggestive pictures of bare women will be posted, but never has anyone objected to a word. And how come “Sex and the City” is banned when “Sex and Lucia” and “sex, Lies and Videotape” had no such troubles in Jerusalem?
So what’s the deal?
This is how I see it: the company that owns the billboards in Jerusalem, Maximedia, got the posters. The CEO for Maximedia, fearing Ultra-Orthodox hoodlums will burn or deface his billboards, made a preemptive decision to ban the posters himself. No one from the Ultra-Orthodox community or even the city officials ever heard anything about it or seen the black-and-pink god-awful-ugly posters (sponsored by Kleenex, no less).

This is the “Sex and the City” poster that was so-called “banned” from Jerusalem billboards

It was a case of self-censoring, made of commercial fear. The CEO then contacted the film’s distributor, suggesting they change the posters to a suggestive “… and the City”, omitting the word “Sex”. The distributor was rightfully outraged, after all this is not a tagline but the movie’s name and brand.

It should be noted that while “Sex and the City” (the TV series) was shown in the States on premium cable network HBO, in Israel it was broadcast on Channel 2, the leading terrestrial channel - profanity and nudity intact - and scored big numbers in the rating. So contrary to the reports, when it comes to sex Israel is more of a promiscuous country than a conservative one.

So when the secular CEO took it upon himself to ban the posters from being hung on his billboards what did the movie distributors do? Business sense would have them going to his competitors: after all as far as I know there is no billboards monopoly in Israel. If advertising in Jerusalem was so - umm… - sacred to them they would’ve found a way to get those posters up, after all no official person in the municipality banned them, just a man who has no official capacity, fearing for his business.
So what did they do instead? Of course: issued a press release, crying that Orthodox Jews are censoring our secular lifestyle. They made an idiotic business decision look like culture war between observing Jews and secular Jews. From a PR point of view this was brilliant. Now buying a ticket to see “Sex and the City” has political implications to it, it’s about standing tall in the face of religious totalitarianism. When in fact it’s just two corporations playing the religion card to enhance profitability.

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Almost apropos: Over at The Hot Blog David Poland is talking about the relations between Print Media and Online Media. While frgdr.com noticed that Maariv - Israel’s second biggest daily - is systematically plagiarizing reports from PerezHilton.com (frgdr.com’s graphic illustrating this is amazing). A month later, in a follow-up post, he can’t seem to convince the reporter or his editors why what he his doing is wrong, both legally and ethically.