Sex Sells
“mmmm…”
“uh…yes…”
“JOYCE WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING?” My mum rammed in my room.
I did not speak, I just looked at her emotionlessly.
“Naughty you! I am disconnecting the internet!” She then stormed out the room furiously.
“MUM, WATCH.” I said.
The lady on the screen took out a bar of chocolate and bit it seductively while melted chocolate slid along her shiny tanned naked body. In the last bit, a bar of chocolate labelled “1848, 76% dark chocolate” floated in the air.
As I clicked ‘skip ad’, I slowly turned to my mum and stared at her.
“Oops, well that is a weird advert.” She said in her normal voice.
“But still I do not want to catch you watching dirty stuff!” She added sternly.
As usual, I eye-rolled her and went back to the make up tutorial.
Do you remember how you get that weird warm feeling in your pants when you saw two almost-naked men and women kissing intimately (and then pulled out a perfume out of nowhere) when you were young? Yes, sex sells. Sexual content in advertising has been on every bit of the media for the past 30 years.
“Advertisers use sex because it can be very effective,” said researcher Tom Reichert, professor and head of the department of advertising and public relations in the UGA Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
“Sex sells because it attracts attention. People are hard-wired to notice sexually relevant information, so ads with sexual content get noticed.”
(http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2649-sex-sellsmore.html#sthash.svTeUpQW.dpuf)
It is not the sexual content I hate (to be honest, I actually enjoy it). It is the gender stereotype I despise. Women are depicted as passive and complement to men all the time. Men are always depicted as dominant to women. Like the picture below, 4 well-built shiny man are all looking down on the women, one of them even pressed down her hands oppressively. This advert by Dolce & Gabbana is a perfect example of ‘sex sells’ in advertisement. Although I might seem furious about it, I cannot take my eyes away from the advert, why is that?
All animals are made to reproduce, including us, humans. So when we are exposed to erotic stimuli, it stimulates a region in our brain where we experience positive emotions. Basically, we are made to have sex. That is why we will get aroused and exceptionally excited when we see sex scene or erotic content. Hence, companies take this fact for granted and make the advertisement sexual and tantalising to grasp our eyes.
Nonetheless, while we are slightly enjoying these sexy people, these advertisement are slowly infusing us with gender stereotype needle by needle. Have you ever seen an advertisement with a hot guy and a fat woman or vice versa? No. Exactly. Almost every ‘sex sells’ advertisement we see opts for sexy ‘perfect woman’ and muscular hot ‘perfect guy’. We look at these advertisements everyday, they slowly brain-wash us with the ‘gender construction’ unwittingly. It is like being whispered in your ear everyday ‘you need to have big boobs, big butt, abs and ‘skinny-every-other-part’’.
Notwithstanding the surging trend of promoting large-sized woman and healthy physique, the usage of ‘perfect’ models is still abundant in the media. No matter how hard Emma Watson try to empower women through motivational speech, no matter how many Women’s Marches take place, the fact that the ubiquitous ‘sex sells’ we are looking at everyday will not ease the matter of the subtle brain-wash effect. It is evident how the people fat-shamed Lady Gaga’s body in the Super Bowl, we can still see the gender construction has not been mended.
You might say its unfair to men because the ‘sex sells’ is all about women being objectified and degraded. It is not true, the most prevalent trends are feminist and women empowering issues, which in turn abase men’s image. Indeed, women are the ones being belittled and discredited along the history but as the feminist trend grows stronger, aren’t the men being looked down on and rebuked more?
“Men are stupid, we don’t need men to live!”
“Never trust men.”
These phrases might sound like women-strengthening, might make you think “Yes, I am a strong independent woman.”. Nevertheless, they are just patronising men to enhance their self-image. To me, they are stepping down on men to make women more prestige. Back to ‘sex sells’, I am glad to see more and more large-sized women on covers but I have also noticed no ‘imperfect’ men on covers, all of them are still, as usual, muscular and shiny. Even the ‘reviewed’ advertisement of A&F chose a hot man with well-built physique.
The ‘sex sells’ in advertising is quite an obscure topic among the internet as it is overwhelmed with feminist content. Yet, ‘sex sells’ is the true back-hand behind the scene lurking in our crippling society.
With thanks to Ellis Wiggins
