Essay --

Sex in Advertising Advertisement is thought to be the foundation 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 years 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 supposed 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 the the mes that are prone to exploitation are human mate-selection criteria. Basically, two advertisement strategies could be used to exploit men's and women's cognitive adaptations to mate-selection and the prototypic "triggering-signals" associated with this complex. The first strategy is sensory exploitation of the opposite 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 paired 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 perfect 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 humans 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 carefully 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 Life 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