*CLICK HERE FOR NAKED PICS*
In the world of advertising, sex is the golden ticket — but are advertisers at long last beginning to change their tact?
It’s difficult to have an opinion on sex sells because it’s quite literally everywhere. We are totally desensitised to images of dead-eyed milfs bending over a sink trying to flog us some fairy liquid, or to protein-shake-guzzling gym lads getting their big hairy balls out in brand new Mercedes. In fact, such propaganda has been beaten into us for so long that it has helped shape the bodily and behavioural standards that we live by to this day. Companies work to subliminally propagate these ideals — keeping men manly and dominant and women thin and subservient — for one reason and one reason only; sell, sell, sell. But as we are gradually waking up to the use of sex as a marketing ploy, companies have been forced into a radical change of approach.
Sex in advertising has been most synonymous with the fashion and fragrance industries for decades now — though the fact that sex sells is near universally accepted. The earliest examples of sex as a selling tactic have one common denominator; women are mere objects of attraction and are, without fail, subordinates to men. Vintage cigarette commercials would depict stick-thin sourpusses sucking on long, girthy cigars, or otherwise enveloped in thick plumes of white smoke, blown from the lips of a chisel-jawed man. Skincare adverts would have their female subjects sensually slather themselves with a translucent glaze, before showering off and running into the arms of their well-built husband. Where women are the bait, men are the prey — though the guilty parties would have you believe that they have since altered their approach. Emporio Armani thought they would be empowering young women everywhere when they roped in Beyoncé Knowles to be the face of their Diamond fragrance in 2007. The advertising campaign had Queen Bey standing tall, clasping a diamond-shaped bottle of perfume, looking a million dollars. No single man is in sight, though the campaign’s tagline, Can you Resist?, singularly undermines the entire thing.
Untold damage has been caused by weaponizing sex for marketing purposes. Whole generations of women have been brought up with the expectation of being beautiful items to be possessed by men, which gives way to unrealistic body image ideals. Kim Kardashian no doubt grew up thinking the same, culminating in the release of her commercially available sex tape in 2007, which propelled her to worldwide stardom. Kardashian built an empire on forty minutes of self-degradation, and in doing so reinforced the idea that it is possible to build a career on sex and sex alone — that playing to masculine carnal desires is the best way to make it to the top of a brutal industry.
Those men who have not been blindsided by porn and sexualised adverts into thinking it’s normal to possess women in this way are inevitably victims to the sex marketing machine themselves. Men have long been compelled by images of hyper-masculine adonises, massaging Old Spice into their bulging pectorals, into believing that men must be manly, strong and competent. Evidence of this burgeoning toxic-masculinity is to be observed on school playgrounds everywhere. Angry young boys threaten their rivals by taunting ‘I’ll get my big brother on you’, or ‘My dad’s bigger than your dad’, vying to become the alpha of the pack. While the red-faced, beer-bellied dads lock horns, the stay-at-home-mums stand idly by, rolling their eyes and proclaiming that ‘boys will be boys’, completely kowtowed into this position of utter ineffectuality.
Such gender roles continue to be deeply entrenched into our society — but at long last there is evidence to suggest that the tide is finally turning. No longer are we, the consumer, prey to our basest instincts. No longer are we so gullible to be coerced into buying god-awful celebrity scents by images of scantily clad young couples. We’re cleverer than that, and advertising gurus know it. In response, they have transformed their modus operandi into a revolutionary new model; adverts will still utilise images of half-naked models wearing the product in question, but as an ironic statement. Diesel pioneered this in 2010 when they released their Sex Sells series, comprised of several snaps of models strewn across settees, sporting a pair of Diesel jeans. The tongue-in-cheek tagline reads “Sex-sells… unfortunately we sell jeans”, exampling for the first time an explicit self-awareness of the sleazy methods used to manipulate our attentions. The kicker is; they showed us exactly what it is they are doing, and yet still had the cheek to use sex in order to flog us a pair of £50 jeans.
Explicitly sexual adverts have since fallen out of favour after the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) cracked down on risqué adverts in 2018, challenging advertisers to find much more subtle means to pull the wool over the consumer’s eyes. Nonetheless, the same lazy stereotypes are very much still applied. Women are, more often than not, cast to eat spoonfuls of creamy Activia yoghurt or to push trollies around Iceland. Men on the other hand are tasked with explaining difficult logistical problems in insurance adverts, or guzzling pint after pint of Foster’s lager. The exact same falsehoods are still being propagated — that women are capable only of comprehending trivial domestic issues or looking after their waistline, and that men are the much more competent (albeit slightly reckless) breadwinners.
Though sex in advertising has diminished, sexism in advertising is still alive and kicking. Decades of lobbying by gender rights activists and outspoken feminists have instituted an indiscriminate amount of change — the medieval attitudes exhibited in some of the earliest advertising still remain, only now with less nudity.
