How we talk about sex tells a lot about who we are. There are some stories you just don’t tell.
More important than a miscalculation of where you thought the bed was, is the issue that our culture has little to do with the stories that we don’t tell. Despite the lack of personal involvement, we are not going to talk about it.
One of these issues is sex in advertising. We are comfortable saying that sex sells, but we are not comfortable talking about what sex is selling. It is not shoes, beer or cars, but a depraved lifestyle that is so consumed by the visceral need for sex that people do not realize what they are buying.
Sex-driven advertising comes in three categories: funny, proactive and straight-up sex-selling.
Funny: a commercial poking fun at a particular type of sex, such as the Bud Light Lime ‘In the Can’ advertisement released in September. The commercial, made by Chicago firm DDB, shows people in different settings talking about how much they like to ‘get it’ or ‘give it,’ ‘in the can.’
The victims of this commercial are the ears of every bartender who has to hear one of those lines from anyone who orders a Bud Light Lime.
Proactive: Look no further than any Victoria’s Secret commercial. A short video on the company’s Web site takes viewers behind the scenes. There is no difference in how each of their commercials is designed. The format is to take a beautiful woman, put her in underwear and film her with music in the background.
It seems this format was changed only once, when Bob Dylan appeared in a commercial fully clothed. In addition to aging icons, these commercials can cause damage to a woman’s self-image, which cannot be fixed with a support bra.
Straight-up sex-selling:‘ These commercials are all about seemingly innocent girls who lose their inhibitions and approximate a behavior far from tame. Late-night television has been playing these same commercials of girls going crazy for years.
Then, there are the infomercials hosted by a dashingly handsome man and his sexy wife or girlfriend. The commercials, similar to the Victoria’s Secret advertisements, use a standard format.
An announcer explains how his search for young, hot co-eds has ended, and now he can bring footage that is ‘too hot to be shown on TV.’ These commercials damage the reputations of the young girls, who apparently do anything for a free T-shirt, and their fathers who stay up late.
These commercials, for everyone else, are great. They are helpful because they show us where we are headed: people living in depravity. There is no humor as there was in the beer commercial; no real sex appeal as there was in the Victoria’s Secret commercial.
The Girls Gone Wild video is one of the most depressing things to watch. It is a longer version of the commercial with all of the black boxes that state ‘Too hot for TV’ removed, with scenes as short as the commercial.
We need to know what we are being sold.
