Sex sells…Everything
When walking into any small kiosk or supermarket, the display of magazines and newspapers are always arranged in the front. Passing by, it’s hard to avoid the provocative poses the women and men are in, on the covers and pages you flick through. We’ve become so used to this to the point where seeing a half-dressed woman on the front of a magazine is normal.
Why?
Why, when an advertising company sits down and discuss ways of promoting or selling any type of product, does the natural instinct have to be to place a half-naked human on screen? When watching YouTube videos, TV programs or movies at the cinema, there are floods of advertisements where products such as cars, food, perfumes, clothes etc. are promoted by an extremely fit model that represents the stereotypical description of what everyone should desire.
To simply put it, sex sells. We, as humans, are driven by our sexual desires and animalistic instincts. Seeing an advertisement where an extremely attractive woman is eating a vanilla yogurt makes a viewer sit and try to imagine themselves as that woman or being with that woman. The next time they pass those yogurts at the supermarket, the recollection of what that advertisement made them feel will most likely make them want to buy them ‘just to see what they’re like.’
It’s the fact that more often than not, when we walk down a street and see advertisements in store windows or billboards, the majority of the space is filled up with an attractive person in some sort of sexy pose. Sex shouldn’t be the main way used in order to sell a product. It has become a cliché and overused tactic. Normalizing seeing a half-dressed person can be good in the sense that it promotes being comfortable in your own skin, but it can also be bad as it still sexualizes the gender, promoting the idea that someone is there are there to be sexualized for the benefit of an audience or the product they are trying to sell.
A good example is the use of sex in films. It has gotten to a point where a sex scene in a movie is considered a necessity or part of the usual structure now. In trailers, there is typically a wide shot of a shirtless male celebrity or female celebrity in a bikini, walking around in slow motion to capture the interest of viewers. There is no use denying that we, as humans, find the appearance of other humans fascinating and a motivation to do things. An Oscar-winning movie such as ‘Whiplash’ brought in $13.1 million in America with a movie about the struggles of being a musician and fighting for you dream when being pushed down constantly. ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’ a movie based on a book about BDSM and a sexual relationship between a journalist and rich man, brought in $166.2 million. When promoting ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ there was a focus on the sex scenes over the plot, plastering the actor’s faces all over the country and releasing the movie on a popular holiday, Valentine’s Day. This theme and promotion brought in an incredibly massive audience.
Why?
Sex sells.
Everyone has fantasies and wants. Using this to their advantage, companies are able to capture people’s attention by tapping into it. This can be through the images they are showing or the promises that they make to their potential costumers. In beauty and health products there tends to be common phrases used promising to improve ones appearance to themselves or to others so they desire them more. What attracts potential buyers to products is not just the desire they have to the person promoting it but also the desire to be as desired as that person is. The first and foremost thing that can guarantee acknowledgement from a viewer is promises of being good to improve themselves. Everyone has insecurities and the want to be more sexually desired.
There are theories as to why sex does sell. Males are theorized of to have evolved into people that want to reproduce with as many females as possible, guaranteeing the chance to produce offspring, maintaining their genes and heritage. To maintain this they aim for promiscuous women that evidently are available i.e. through their sexual behaviour, appearance. Females, on the other hand, are thought of to be in the want of financial security, long-term prospects and good health. Keeping this in mind, when thinking of advertisements directed towards the different genders, male-aimed ones tend to have a promiscuous female in it compared to female-aimed ones that show a more well-dressed, wealthy male with romantic imagery.
A famous company that is known for embracing the use of the idea that ‘sex sells’ is Abercrombie & Fitch where they have shirtless male employees standing outside their stores, doused in their signature cologne. Someone walking past will, from then on, associate the brand and smell with the image of well-trained shirtless men, offering to take photos with customers.
This doesn’t mean to say that it is always effective. Using sex to promote or sell something can cause controversy which can, in turn, destroy a campaign or product, and to a greater extent, a company. An example of this could be the use of a sexuality to promote a charity or science research. The affiliations between the two are not strong enough for it to be a successful use of it and could cause offence.
Where does the line end? When does using the sexuality of humans to sell a product become tacky and unpleasant to see? Maybe if we focused more on the product and trying to promote what it’s actually beneficial for instead of the model that is on the advertisement page, we would be able to progress into viewing each other less as objects and more as peoples.
With thanks to Sam Packer
