@zeyneparsel and Stephanie S. both sent in a link to a new craze in China: peach panties. I totally made the craze part up — I have no idea about that — but the peach panties are real and there is a patent pending.
I thought they were a great excuse to make a new Pinterest board featuring examples of marketing that uses sex to sell decidely unsexy — or truly sex-irrelevant — things. It’s called Sexy What!? and I describe it as follows:
This board is a collection of totally random stuff being made weirdly and unnecessarily sexual by marketers who — I’m gonna say it — have run out of ideas.
My favorites are the ads for organ donation, hearing aids, CPR, and sea monkeys. Enjoy!
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 3
Albert — August 21, 2014
I would usually agree that there is enough (or rather, way too much) sex in advertizing as it is (some other examples on Pinterest are awful), but this is not marketeers 'running out of ideas'. I think this one's actually pretty smart and creative, and I totally want one.
Bill R — August 21, 2014
They make the peaches look fat.
Bianca Copello — August 21, 2014
I will say that I think this is more a clever cultural twist than it is deliberately sexual for marketing purposes though. From what I've seen, in Asia peaches are often parodied as butts because they look like one upside down. There's even emoticon packets (on KakaoTalk, for example) where it's a character with an upside down peach for a head, and part of the joke is that from behind, it looks like a butt. So, with the cultural idea established and accepted that a peach humorously represents a butt, it was rather clever and smart to go ahead and give it cute lace underwear.
Granted, are they taking advantage of the sexuality of it? Probably. But I think it was a clever marketing twist based on a pre-existing established idea as opposed to just mindlessly trying to sexify everything because sex sells.