Sex Sells
But should it?
Boy do I regret ritually burning all of my A-Level media notes because let me tell you, I spent TWO YEARS studying in great detail why sex sells and without them all I can do is throw out phrases like ‘the male gaze’. I even did a project on it from the point of view of female characters in the Harry Potter series. Trust me I can feel my teacher’s burning disappointment in me from here. Let’s do what I do best and muddle on anyway shall we?
Sex sells, but should it? Being an editor this week has allowed me the great pleasure of reading through my classmates’ articles before they’re published and one (very funny) article focuses on an advert about mattresses. What this advert gets so right is that it promotes the idea of consensual sex in a really humorous way and the article highlights this and therefore the author writes from a positive viewpoint like, why shouldn’t we use sex to sell? But what many companies get so wrong is that instead of promoting sex in a healthy way, they use their adverts to fetishize men and women in order to sell products in such a way that by the end of the advert, you’re not even entirely sure what it is they’re selling because a scantily-clad man or woman has just been running through the streets of Paris for five minutes. Perfume companies are some of the biggest culprits when it comes to advertising this way and what we have to understand is that through the medium of sex, the company isn’t selling a product, it’s selling a lifestyle. Do you want to ride around a glamorous country in a sexy jumpsuit on an expensive motorbike? Buy Chanel’s new Coco Mademoiselle perfume and you too can be just like Keira Knightley. Now the lifestyle isn’t what I have an issue with, nor is it the product; what I’m trying to pull up here is that the emphasis throughout the entire advert is on Keira Knightley’s bum. It’s so in focus that when the advert first aired, my mom and I were so deep in our discussion on whether we thought she was using a body double, we completely missed the point of the advert, which was the perfume.
Why is this kind of advertising harmful then you ask? Well because it allows us to become so desensitised to the human body that it actually starts to normalise things like sexual assault. Sex is everywhere; in our programmes, our adverts, our books and our video games to the point that we start to assume that it’s just ours for the taking. Writing from a feminist point of view, many of these mediums show men with the upper hand and women appear to be merely accessories. Ever played Grand Theft Auto? You can take regular trips to strip clubs and a favourite past time of players is assaulting and or running over prostitutes. How about Game of Thrones? Daenerys and Khal Drogo had a great love affair, one which began with an arranged/forced marriage in which he raped her- but no one remembers the ugly parts do they? I don’t know if it’s just me making the leap here, but no one seemed particularly outraged when Taylor Swift revealed that a DJ she had been taking a pictured with grabbed her bum- no one except Taylor Swift of course. And why should they? We see bums every day on TV, I can guarantee you that you’ve seen much worse on HBO- even online publications such as Buzzfeed make it a habit to record in length every time Jon Snow gets naked on an episode of Game of Thrones.
Buzzfeed is actually the worst for this, or perhaps at least level with The Sun and The Daily Star, for using sex and nudity to entice readers to click on an article. They claim to be a platform for equality yet write entire articles on the Canadian Prime Minister’s bum and Jon Snow’s sex scenes and this is just another way that sex continues to make up revenue. Not only does it promote sexual assault but this kind of advertising is harmful to someone’s image when it’s not consensual and it’s also just plain embarrassing. Kit Harrington (Jon Snow) has actually called out articles such as this before but was met with the familiar cry of radical feminism screaming “we’re allowed to write all the uncomfortable articles about you that we want because you’re a man and therefore it’s not sexist”. It may not comply with the traditional meaning of the word sexist, but it’s still fetishizing someone who’s just trying to do a job and humiliating them at the same time- reducing them to nothing more than a sexual fantasy.
So does this mean we should stop using sex to sell altogether? Absolutely not; we’ve come leaps and bounds from the small minded, sexually oppressed society we used to be when table legs had to be covered because they resembled women’s ankles too closely and might ‘accidentally arouse’. But as we continue to move forward, let’s not use this newfound sexual freedom to exploit people, and let’s certainly not become so desensitized that we can’t empathise with sexual assault survivors.
