Essay --

Sex in Advertising Advertisement is thought to be the mental institution and economic lifeblood of the mass media, and the primary purpose of the mass media is to sell audiences to advertisers. The 130 billion advertising industry is a powerful educational force not only in the United States. For example, the average American is exposed to over 1500 ads a day and will spend 1 1/2 days of his or her life watching TV commercials. Ads sell a great deal more than products. They sell values, images and concepts of success and worth, love, sexuality, popularity and normalcy. Although ads sometimes seem to be trivial, their cumulative effect may be serious. Moreover advertisements are, in my view, a product of cultural evolution. If we take the product as the individual, the customer (and sales) as the resource, advertisement is say to enhance the fitness of the product. In the course of time advertisements thus will evolve towards an optimal exploitation of the adapted mind. One if th e themes that are prone to exploitation are human mate-selection criteria. Basically, two advertisement strategies could be customd to exploit mens and womens cognitive adaptations to mate-selection and the prototypic triggering-signals associated with this complex. The first strategy is sensory exploitation of the foe sex. This means that advertisement would pair products for one sex with the stimulus of the other sex, thus exploiting the possible excitation the stimulus would evoke which then would be diametric with the product. The second strategy could be called comparison with a normative self. In this case, the product for one sex is paired with same sex-stimuli that would be a correct stimulus for the other sex, and the product is what makes the d... ...women are used in advertisement in order to exploit male perception. Indoctrination through identification is the main strategy. Thus, the use of sex in advertising is a two-edged sword. Although it is extremely powerful and effective when aimed at one gender, it often does so at the social expense of the other. Since public live in a social world, consideration must be given to the feelings of the people in that world. If advertising uses the sex appeal, it must be cautiously aimed and tastefully done. There is no sense in appealing to one sex by offending the other. Bibliography Morgan, Joan. When Chicken heads Come Home to Roost My emotional state as a Hip-hop Feminist. New York Simon and Schuster, 1999. 74. Cahn, S (1994) Coming on Strong. Cambridge MA Harvard University Press. Pornography and Sexual Aggression edited by Neil M. Malamuth and Edward Donnerstein, 1984