Search results for sex in advertising

One form of advertising I am excited and interested in “reading” is the emerging practice of ambient advertising.  Where traditional outdoor advertising may be placed on a billboard with a particular message and/or images, ambient advertising may have that same message and/or images but it seeks to have interaction with its environment or given location.

Given ambient advertising’s special characteristics, it provides a great opportunity to “read” what is said on those advertisements culturally when the male and female body is the focal point of the ad.  Consistent with non-ambient advertising, we tend to see representations that ‘naturally’ give the male body strength and power and one which gives the female body as much strength and power as only in relation to how much the male body allows.

When looking at this dynamic realized in ambient advertising we see the female body as one that is to be gazed upon and scrutinized. Furthermore, the female body is not only just scrutinized and gazed upon in these advertisements but also provides its spectators (male or female) authority over that female body; that authority is usually sexually charged. The following are some examples:

This is not to say that the male body is also not put on display in ambient advertisements. However, those bodies are generally treated with sexual ambiguity and where they are displayed sexually the themes are generally different than where they are when a female body is displayed. The following are some examples:

Understanding that advertising, as an institution, has a function of reflecting our societal norms and considering the body as cultural text (a la Susan Bordo) what we can then “read” in ambient advertising is that culturally the male body has a certain power that the female body does not. This then materializes into a reality where the female body is seen as compliant which continues to enforce an environment where a woman’s body is not hers.

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Steve Grimes has his Master of Arts degree in sociology from St. John’s University in New York, is currently seeking a Master of Science degree in media studies from CUNY Brooklyn College, and plans to be enrolled in a Ph.D. program within the next two years.  He is, at the moment, engrossed in all things cultural studies and his blog, TimelyDonut, is an avenue to express that.

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Lindsey V., who recently sent in the excellent film clip in which “scientists” “tested” gendered battle gear, also sent us a link to images showing that the breast size of two video game characters — “Ivy” from “Soul Caliber” and, to a lesser extent, Lara Croft from “Tomb Raider” — have increased over time (source).

Ivy:

Lara Croft:

What might drive their ever-inflating breasts?

Speaking in terms of advertising, Sut Jhally wrote that advertisers must:

…now worry about clutter and noise. That is, how do you make your ads stand out from the [5,000] commercial impressions that people are exposed to [every day].  So if you’re Pepsi, you’re not just competing with Coke anymore. You’re competing with every other advertiser who wants our attention. As advertising takes over more and more space in the culture, the job of the individual advertiser gets harder and harder.

Martin Barron and Michael Kimmel make a similar argument about the rise of “extreme” and violent sexual acts in pornography.  The increase in the sheer amount of porn that emerged with the Internet has created a competitive market in which “sexual victimization of women is a currency” (p. 350).  You have to get noticed somehow.

So, insofar as this boob inflation is a trend, we may be able to explain it, at least in part, with the greater number of cultural products.  Proliferation creates conditions in which each one has to up the ante to “stand out” against the “clutter and noise.”

Sources:

• Barron, M., & Kimmel, M.S. (2010).  Sexual violence in three pornographic media. Journal of Sex Research, 37, 161-169.
• Jhally, S. (2000). Advertising at the edge of the apocalypse. In Anderson, R., & Strate, L., Eds. Critical studies in media commercialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 27-39.

Thanks also to Caroline Heldman; I borrowed some of the text in this post from a forthcoming co-authored essay.

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.

Most Americans, when asked if they are affected by advertising, will say “not really.” They say they skip the print ads in magazine, ignore the ones on the street, mute TV commercials, and are generally too savvy to be swayed by their messages.

Here’s some data illustrating the not-me phenomenon. The Kaiser Family Foundation asked 15- to 17-year-olds whether they and their friends were influenced by sexual content on TV.

Seventy-two percent of teens say that sexual content on TV affects their friends “a lot” or “somewhat”:

But only 22 percent say that sexual content on TV affects them “a lot” or “somewhat”:

Advertisers know that most Americans are wrong about whether advertising affects them.  That’s why they spent $117 billion in 2009 trying to convince you to buy their product. It works. So it must be affecting somebody, right?

Images borrowed from Strasburger’s Children, Adolescents, and the Media.

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.

In their article, The Male Consumer as Loser, Michael Messner and Jeffrey Montez de Oca try to explain the recent rash of advertising featuring mediocre men.   These ads, and their film and television counterparts, skip the hunky-manly-hunk-dude in favor of less hunky men: young, heterosexual, usually white males who are short on cash, low on maturity, and have a penchant for irresponsibility. They dominate Judd Apatow “bromances” (e.g., Knocked Up), frequent TV sitcoms (e.g., The Drew Carey Show), and are used to sell everything from Mike’s Hard Lemonade to Twix candy bars. These are not studs. They are moderately good-looking, but small, skinny, chubby, or otherwise uncool compared to real hunks.

On the face of it, the mediocre man is a self-deprecating character who undermines idealized masculinity by being likeable despite being decidedly non-ideal.  Messner and Montez de Oca, however, show that the mediocre man, nevertheless, reproduces notions of men’s superiority over women.  The women in these narratives tend to be of two types: “sexy fantasy women” and “real women.”  The men bond over the unattainability of the sexy fantasy women and the burden of maintaining relationships with real women, their girlfriends, wives, and mothers.  The “real women’ are usually portrayed as bitches, harpies, and nags, while the “sexy fantasy women,” upon interaction, often turn out to be just as bad.

The viewers are meant to identify with the mediocre men, who revel in each others’ company, happy to be dudes free from the clutches of the women in their lives, even if they aren’t sleeping with supermodels.  The mediocre man may be kind of a loser, indeed, but he can thank God he’s a man. P.S.: Women suck.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in an example of the “mediocre man” narrative, the trailer from the movie, Hall Pass:

(Probably in the end they realize they love their naggy wives, but whatevs.)

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.

The cover of January Cosmo is as sexed-up as ever — on newsstands at least. But we got a copy of the version the mag sends to advertisers, and it’s significantly more chaste. What’s going on here?

Note the miraculous disappearance of “60 Sex Tips” and “Orgasm Virgins” — suddenly, Cosmo‘s appropriate for your grandma! Or your grandma’s favorite retailer — a tipster suggests that the cleaned-up cover is meant to be “more appropriate for conservative [advertising] clients, which the ad sales team is hoping to fool.” If so, they’re not doing a very good job — the table of contents in the ad-friendly version still lists both the sex tips and the orgasm piece as cover stories.

A spokesperson for Cosmo offered this terse comment in response to our queries: “It is common for magazines to have different versions of the cover.”  We decided to see if this was indeed common at other publications. Caroline Nuckolls at Teen Vogue told us the magazine usually has just one version of the cover — but of course, Teen Vogue has a cleaner image to start out with, and less to hide. So we called Maxim, known for its lad-mag raunch — a source there told us they too produce just one cover, which goes out to newsstands, subscribers, and advertisers alike. This isn’t to say that no magazine does what Cosmo‘s done, but it’s not an industry-wide standard.

Of course, it’s not a surprise that a publication feels it needs to put its best foot forward to attract ad dollars — still, creating whole new cover lines is a pretty big step. Which coveted advertising account merited such a drastic cleanup? Some high-fashion brand? (Current Cosmo advertisers include Dior and Chanel.) Mainstream car or consumer products companies? (January’s issue includes an ad for Chevrolet.) Maybe they’re gunning for that Candie’s account? Whatever the brand, Cosmo assumes the ad buyers don’t read very carefully, and don’t know that the mag’s been providing sex advice and orgasm pointers to eager middle-schoolers for decades.

Send an email to Anna North at annanorth@jezebel.com.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

Most of us are clear on the idea that patriarchies are defined by sexism: the valuing of men over women.  In our American patriarchy, however, this is matched and perhaps even superseded by something called androcentrism: the valuing of all-things-masculine over all-things-feminine.  We know we live in an androcentric society because masculinized things (playing sports, being a doctor, being self-sufficient) are imagined to be good for everyone (we encourage both our sons and daughters to do these things), but feminized things (playing with dolls, being a nurse, and staying at home to raise children) are considered to be good only for women.

This means that men are teased and ostracized for doing feminized things, as we have demonstrated in advertising for McCoy Crisps, Hungry Man, Solo, Chevy, dog food, Miller beer, beef jerky, cell phones, Dockers, the VW Beetle, and alcohol (see here, here, here and here).

This tendency towards androcentrism means, also, that companies can count on both women and men buying masculinized products, but only women buying feminized products.  It’s smart business, then, to masculinize everything.  In a New York Times article, for example, Patton reports that Mercedes masculinized its SLK in response to a finding that “too many” women were buying it, something that threatened to feminize the car:

Mercedes says that 52 percent of the registered owners of first-generation SLK’s are women and 48 percent are men; the company would prefer the figures to be more on the order of 60 percent men and 40 percent women…

The standard thinking in the industry is that lots of women will buy a car that appeals to men, but many men — certainly those who wish to avoid the girlie-men label — won’t buy one associated with women.

This logic helps explain the, admittedly tongue-in-cheek (I think), hyper-masculinization of the Honda Odyssey in this commercial, sent in by Nancy N. She writes:

The choice of the black car, the music, and lighting all direct the viewer to think, “this isn’t just a mini-van, this is a man-van, and you aren’t a pansy if you buy it.”   …[It is] “technology packed “… with distinctly harder edges. Overall, Honda is trying very hard to override the notion of a “mom car” to sell to a broader audience.

See also: “how to give the perfect man hug” and “how I sit on the bus”.  And for more examples of androcentrism, see our posts on the phenomenon in  sports (see here and here), cartoons, schools (see here and here), and Cosmo.

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.

Wakeboarding Santa in Hamburg, Germany (courtesy of The Big Picture):

Christmas Across Cultures

• Christmas Cultures
• Santa’s Evil Side Kick
• Black Pete (NSFW; trigger warning for images of blackface)
• Politics and the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree
• The Pagan Roots of Christianity

On Discourse:

• Have a “Gay” Holiday!
• “Christmas” vs. “Holiday”: The Rematch
• 12 “Mums” Makes the Workload Light

Racializing Christmas

• New York Times Gift Guide for People of Color
• Black Pete (NSFW; trigger warning for images of blackface)
• Holiday in the Hood
• The Hazards of Historical Amnesia

Gift Guides and the Social Construction of Gender

• Gender, Technology, and Toys ‘R Us
• Gift Giving with Gender Stereotypes
• More Gender Gift Giving and Advertising
• Another Gendered Gift Guide
• Or, you could just buy her a clothesline

Sexifiying Christmas

• Sexy Women as Toys
• O-O-Oh Santa!

Christmas Marketing

• Fun with the 2009 Target Catalog
• 1930s Ad Touting Razor Technology
• Gap Thinks Girls are Vapid

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.

Jessica B. sent in a link to a really great post over at Pigtail Pals. The author, Melissa, analyzed the contents of a number of holiday-season catalogs advertising toys. She tabulated how many girls and boys appear in each, how many are shown doing gender-stereotypical vs. non-stereotypical activities, and the main themes of the toys.

Here are the results for Toys ‘R’ Us:

Images from the catalog:

Wal-Mart:

Target:

It’s particularly striking to me how few images there are of girls and boys playing together, a predictable outcome, I suppose, of our insistence that boys and girls need different toys — since, if must play with different toys, they won’t be playing together.

Melissa discusses the specific images on several pages of the catalogs — check her full post out for more commentary.