Sex Sells
Is there anything on TV nowadays that says differently?
It doesn’t matter what you put on there will always be some eye candy to help draw in the numbers. That doesn’t mean that that is the case in everything, but if it isn’t in the TV shows themselves then it’s the adverts. I remember one advert that drove me crazy over the holidays from Boux Avenue, wherein a group of women walk around their house in their underwear, while outside the snowman is getting more and more turned on by them that his carrot nose pops off. I have asked many people if they have ever just wandered round their house in their underwear with their friends and, surprise surprise, no one had. So why would this make a good advert? For that one special reason- sex sells.
And it’s not just in the world of TV either. While working at my local shop I often have to put newspapers and magazines out in the mornings and still find it odd how certain tabloids rely on scantily clad women to sell their papers, and some magazines use a juicy sex story from a famous celeb to get their magazines bought.
Back when I was a teenager I remember the most popular magazine among people my age was either Nuts or Zoo magazine. I still find it astonishing how things like that made any money considering they looked like they were written by the teenagers buying them. Anyone who says they were buying them for the articles was obviously lying. There was only ever one reason for someone to buy this- naked women.
With all this sex being thrown at us from the second we open our eyes it should come as no surprise that this can cause people to either become like the folks in Geordie Shore, or go the opposite direction and become repulsed with the thought. I was neither of these things, I was always stuck somewhere in the middle. I would watch these shows and see these magazines and think that everyone should look like that, little did I know that that was a two way street. For every magazine and TV show showing off attractive women, there is always one showing attractive men too.
My teenage self was shallow, and sad. If I look back I honestly don’t think I can be proud of who I was then. I had the chance to go out with a few girls when I was younger, not many as anyone who actually meets me would understand, but there was a few. Did I ever actually give these girls the time of day? No. I was after the holy grail of the girls in my year at school, so no wonder I ended my secondary school years still a virgin. The girls I was after were also after a certain type of guy- the type with chiselled abs, amazing hair and a sculpted jaw, basically everything I am not.
Any male who was considering a Diet Coke might reconsider once they watched the advert where a guy with all these features is mowing a field shirtless only to end up sprayed in Coke. There is next to nothing true about that advert. People who mow those fields would be wearing the appropriate safety gear, usually a ride on mower, and the group of girls wouldn’t all be so perky and attractive. So why would they show the advert in this make believe land? Because sex sells.
If by now people still haven’t realised how much they are exposed then I can think of one more example within the videogame world. The most popular RPGs of the modern age don’t treat women as fairly with their choice of armour. Yes there is a practicality in wearing less because it won’t restrict the movement, but how likely would anyone find it to rush into battle only for their opponent to charge against them wearing a bikini? If there is one thing that Game of Thrones has done right it is giving their female characters appropriate battle armour.
Using Game of Thrones as another example though, when people who were unfamiliar with the show were being convinced to watch it the words “boobs and dragons” were thrown about a lot. I doubt many of the people who found this enticing would have been enticed by the dragons alone. If that were the case then the 2002 film Reign of Fire and 2006 Eragon would not have been such cinematic bombs.
In the golden age of comic books there was a huge number of female characters whose outfits were incredibly skimpy. Emma Frost from the X-Men series is a prime example. Would people still have bought the comic books if the women inside them wore their pyjamas, and had average sized boobs? The currents readers would tell you yes, but when they first started picking them up they cannot deny that this wasn’t a reason why their eyes fell on the cover in the first place.
This is a trend that has gone on for a long long time, and I think with everyone becoming more obsessed with having the perfect body and looking as good as they can that this is a trend that is only going to increase. It probably won’t be long before an advert for coffee contains half naked men and women just for that extra sell.
