Sex Sold… Now What?
Sex sold… What can the future hold for a society that made such a purchase?
Sex sells, and in the age where everyone has an unlimited connection to everything, sex reaches everyone — young and old — through whatever we consume. As easy as it is to find girls lip-syncing to songs on Tiktok about sleeping with multiple dudes at once or guys that haven’t gone half a day without masturbating in the last three years, what was once a marketing strategy has grown into aspiration and addiction amongst a younger generation.
The question is: what can become of sex selling in a world where sex is everything and everywhere. The “if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it” money-making attitude would only mean that if sex sells, more sex would equal more money, but has sex now seemingly been reduced to an advertising necessity and what does the future hold for said selling of sex?
The future is now — where sex has been normalised amongst the younger generations. Gone are the days where sex had any mystique and gone are the days of those awkward first sex education lessons, all because a child’s first exposure to relationships was hearing Cardi B “sing” about her WAP (google the abbreviation mums and dads). Celebs show up on the internet in see-through clothes attempting to show enough to get seemingly stone-age men drooling and teenage girls thinking that this is the key to happiness. Reality TV is reduced to watching models shag on hidden cameras and social media influencers cram feeds with millions of half-naked beach selfies (not that I’m complaining though, I guess I’m part of the problem) that convince young girls to stop eating and to pump a Lego set’s worth of plastic into their faces and tits in the pursuit of an unattainable figure.
The question isn’t “what will the future be like?” but instead “can there even be a future?”. Increases in plastic surgery and abuse of diet pills and muscle gaining supplements run rampant in our society, with the goal of everyone being to transform themselves into the most physically attractive human specimen possible. When do we cross the line from seeking the betterment of our physical and mental health, to chasing an unattainable physique to try and look like a clone of the last influencer you saw online, or the last celebrity you saw half-naked on the front cover of that beauty magazine.
Will society progress so far we end up in a dystopian society a la Brave New World where erotic play is a dedicated hour from nursery ages, everyone is sterile from tripping on their soma “holidays” and everyone shags everyone else with no boundaries? Or will people see what’s going on and attempt to regress to the old ways or can censorship not even help the situation anymore?
In the present day, it seems like most people have just been born into the world where sex is now a fundamental in all aspects of contemporary culture, and they just end up living with it not knowing anything else.
My guess is that because sex sells, we’re just living with our purchase. I guess we can’t even be surprised to see preteens dancing provocatively for Tiktok or people getting surgery and hiring professional editors for their Instagram posts. Posting homemade porn on Onlyfans will be an option for anyone who’s not sure where they’ll get their next meal, but if that doesn’t take your fancy you can always do lip-filler surgery from your basement if you’ve got syringes handy.
Do we plunge into the orgy of a future where everyone’s a supermodel, or do we try and fight back with censorship? Regardless of our next choice, one thing is for certain:
Sex sold, and we bought it.
