I don't like Nicki Minaj, but I will recognize when she says something awesome:

“When I started making those weird voices, a lot of people told me how whack it was,” she says, “‘What the fuck are you doing?’ they’d say. ‘Why do you sound like that? That doesn’t sound sexy to me.’ And then I started saying, Oh, that’s not sexy to you? Good. I’m going to do it more. Maybe I don’t want to be sexy for you today.”
- Nicki Minaj (BlackBook Magazine)

I-can't-believe-someone-thought-this-was-okay advertising strikes again! (NSFW)

Why yes, in case you were confused, this is a White woman lying on a bed of naked, contorted Black men, in an advertisement for luxurious handmade bedding. 

"Merge into the colours of the south. Feel the beating heart of the city of light at night. Breathe the scent of the forest. Feel the briny of the breakers on your skin." Funny, I don't associate any of those things with the naked, contorted bodies of Black men. Do you?

My first question is whether these men are intended to be interpreted as being alive or dead. I'm not sure which is more problematic: If they're alive, every single stereotype about the hypersexualized savage Black man out to rape and ravage the pure White woman comes into play here. I realize this is 2011 where interracial relationships are no longer condemned and denigrated to the degree they once were, and could perhaps be less of a big deal in France than they are here (this is a French ad), but...anyone who knows anything about the history of race relations should recognize this damaging trope and not try to replicate/propagate it. Or if I'm supposed to view this from the liberated empowered woman standpoint, are they her playthings? I can't get behind that either. If they're alive, are they/their work supposed to represent the labor that went into creating this luxurious bedding? Dozens of Black men working to make something for one White woman...do I have to say the s-word? (Their contortion does make me think of the arrangement of certain ships...) At the very least this smacks of all sorts of oppression.

If they're corpses, which I hadn't considered until someone pointed it out in the comments on the Sociological Images post that alerted me to this ad, then we're dealing with the Black-body-as-disposable notion that society has never really seemed to shake. They almost look as if they were tossed into some kind of mass grave. Were they worked to death to create the luxury this White woman desires so? Were they sexed to death in some crazy orgy that created the "heavenly" aura the woman finds herself in?

I suppose the best possible way to interpret this is that Black men's bodies are supposed to be a luxury, which is at the very least a kind of rare positive association. But even that has objectification written all over it. PEOPLE cannot be luxuries. THINGS are luxuries. Black man = person. Sheets = thing. Let's not equate the two, okay?