Sex_Sells

Cameron Jones Jones 1 Sex sells within the media. It has been selling since the beginning of advertising, just in different forms. Today’s media is a product of today’s consume and visa versa its a catch 22!! The media uses sex to advertise what it sells, so they use more. It sells. The media imprints visions in the minds of individuals of how they should look, dress, and act. Hugh Heffner, the creator of Playboy, coined the phrase in defense of his at that time controversial magazine, Playboy. Hugh Hefner created an entirely new market category -- something very few entrepreneurs have done. An article I have read said, “Sex is everywhere, we are bombarded with it” (Fazed Style, Culture, & Fashion Magazine [Lifestyle]). Sex is all over the world, it appears in adverts, in dialogue and unavoidably in our everyday lives as humans. “Sex Sells” is not referring to buying and selling sex acts for the most part. It is referring to using a sense of eroticism to sell other products…like Calvin Klein underwear ads or perfume or alcohol. Major designers like Calvin Klein proudly display advertisements presenting men and women in underwear in erotic poses. This outrageous display of sexuality has catapulted these design houses to success. The Calvin Klein Company continued to cause controversy Jones 2 with their racy and scandalous advertisements. Critics went as far as to compare the advertisements with child pornography. However, even the most critical opposition could do little to stop what would become the future for advertising. Calvin Klein’s jeans sales doubled during this period. When I was a kid there were always a sexy blonde enticing people to smoke in cigarette ads on TV. Now there are sexy blonde-haired women selling Skyy Vodka. It will not get any better and it will not get any worse. People that market products know that they will get further with an attractive man or woman selling a product than they will with other types of ad campaigns. They know that the image of the person selling is impressed in the mind of the buyer, and when the buyer goes into buy a product, they are likely to choose their product because that image is in their mind. In addition, you are a baby at nearly 30. Because many people cannot resist it, they enjoy it, cannot control their urges, and find decent alternative interest, hobbies to occupy/ keep themselves busy, and they do not make an effort to alter, change their behavior and bad habits. Many could be in denial that their addicts to sex, pornography and do not seek treatment for it. The way the western culture is now, and has come to be over recent decades, it’s only going to get worse and I suppose it’s not surprising it was going to get like this in mostly secular western societies. Jones 3 For many sex is an obsession and popular culture and how “social culture” is in western/developed countries, can be to blame for it. The sexualisation of girls for instance is awful, and the effect and impact it has on them. Adolescent boys need to think about the other things than trying to get laid. People become so consumed in it like BDSM, it takes over caned controls, rules their lives, ruins their marriages, etc. It all depends on the target audience; but a large part of it is: something interesting enough to immediately grab a large part of your attention. A rather conservatively dressed woman will grab less male attention (and less female attention, for that matter) than a more revealingly dressed woman. Then of course is the ideal- what men find appealing, what woman aspire to be like (as in make razor adds- what woman find appealing, what men aspire to be like. These ads feature men with apparent phobias of shirts/t-shirts/any kind of chest covering). As for why it is more common nowadays – we are more accepting and open about sex, and we allow more to be shown. Its likely sex always sold (look at the Georgie comics in Jones 4 the war. They claimed (jokingly) that the amount she revealed correlated directly to ground gained by allied forces) but the stricter society didn’t allow advertisers to use it. And when society was even stricter (i.e. Victorian) people did not aspire to be sexy as much as now, because it was not as socially approved- they aspired to be modest more (although it depended on class/ situation/ product) so sex would not have sold then like it does now. In future: well, your reaction is not an uncommon one; people are desensitizing to sex as an advertising ploy. This suggests, if advertisers have any sense, they will switch to other ploys rather than sex, although the people in ads are usually going to be ridiculously good looking. I recently viewed an interesting video that would go along with the topic of sex. In the video, the car is four inches longer than the previous car the woman had. She sirs in the car and it makes her moan uncontrollably. (Sex sells – Amusing ld car ad: Paloopah. 2006, December 20). Research has shown, the more seductive the model, the more it left the women bored and uninterested. (Goodman, Robyn: MSNBC, Does Sex Really Sell') Sex selling to the masses can fall into the category of Photoshop. Photoshop is the top image editor on the market. It is very complex, very rich and is the choice for professional photographers, graphic designers, and digital artists. “These days, altered images are ubiquitous; the fairytale world threatens to engulf our own. The Jones 5 illusion is more complete, too---with digital technology it’s harder to see the smoothing. Stalin would have drooled at the possibilities.” ( Byrne, David. 2009, March 30th). It’s a mindless pleasure that’s programmed into us naturally to enjoy- also, we are given the natural urge to have sex in order to continue human life, we are compelled to have sex for biological reasons and visual/verbal stimulants make us think that we have a better chance of satisfying these needs, even if we don’t know it, it taps into a part of our brain and manipulates us. Our hormones make it something which appeals to us and companies play on that…it’s sort of like a biological need (or want), which people long for without really understanding why. Sex gives people physical pleasure and sometimes-emotional contentment too- there are so many people who can’t control their hormones that these ads appeal to. Here’s an Example for you. Let us take girls gone wild. Do you think all those Spring Break tapes would sell if it would say: Girls dressed nicely doing community service or helping the elderly cross streets an do their shopping' NO!!!! People buy them because they want to see liquored up girls doing things their parents would not want them doing. See Sex Sells. Jones 6 The sociological mindset is based around the idea that if you are sexy, you will be successful in all aspects of life! You’ll get all the men/girls you want, you’ll have the perfect job, the perfect mate, the perfect house, the perfect car. You get my drift. It is all a big hype to be sexy. So manufacturers want to promote “sex” so people will buy and be drawn into that perfect image. It’s a promotional gimmick. The media, directly or indirectly, associates something with sex. They make you think that you will get sex, be more attractive to people seeking sex etc. Because sex drive is in the more primitive parts of the brain (hippocampus), it does not always go through higher thinking (cerebral cortex) first. If we look at evolutionary psychology, we are so preoccupied with sex for the same reason we are with food: survival. If people did not have sex, there would be no procreation and the human species would die out. Is less more' Yes, sex sells on a number of different levels in a number of different ways, but none of them are simplistic. One could not simply take a product and place it in the arms of a (for example) female model, and expect the target demographic to purchase the product. There are many taboos regarding sexuality, particularly in British culture, it is partly these taboos that make the human animal so responsive to the suggestion of sex and sexual desires. The use of sex as an advertising tool is both effective and dangerous; too much sex and the target beneficiary may either notice the ‘sex’ in the advert (be it a model or simply connotation of sexual desire) and either not have time to notice the product or the sex on display that took hold of the attention of the audience was so great as to detract from the product. Jones 7 Sex in the case of nudity, can cause offence, feminine viewers tend to see sex in an advert as effective only when the product or scenario of the product in use can be directly related to sex, sexual desire etc. In our patriarchal society, women are seen to be objects of desire, there are many different viewpoints on the ethics of this ideal but an ideal it remains despite academic discourse, as such femininity is associated with being less than equal to the dominant ideals of ‘the male’ , as such the codes used to market objects to women are different to those used to market an item to men, but as the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and many adverts have both codes embedded within them, and (to reify advertising techniques) await the right decoder to become apparent. As such the interpretation as to the sexual content of the text depends. Absolutely, sexual imagery portrayed by advertisers, and the media is distorted and unrealistic. Sexual fantasies are okay and part of what every person likes I guess; they are FANTASIES, which is why they do not portray reality.