Essay --

Sex in Advertising Advertisement is supposition to be the foundation and economic lifeblood of the loudness media, and the primary purpose of the mass media is to apportion audiences to advertisers. The 130 billion advertise industry is a muscular educational force not only in the United States. For example, the come American is exposed to over 1500 ads a day and will drop 1 1/2 years of his or her life notice TV commercials. Ads sell a great deal more than products. They sell values, images and concepts of success and worth, love, perk upuality, popularity and normalcy. Although ads sometimes seem to be trivial, their cumulative effect may be serious. Moreover advertisements ar, in my view, a product of cultural evolution. If we get the product as the individual, the customer (and sales) as the resource, advertisement is supposed to arouse the fitness of the product. In the course of time advertisements thus will prepare towards an optimal evolution of the adapted min d. One if the themes that are prone to playation are human mate-selection criteria. Basically, two advertisement strategies could be used 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 opposite sex. This means that advertisement would pair products for one sex with the input signal of the other sex, thus exploiting the possible excitation the stimulus would evoke which accordingly 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 equal 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 masculine perception. Indoctrination through identification is the main strategy. Thus, the use of sex in advertising is a two-edged sword. Althoug h it is extremely powerful and effective when aimed at one gender, it much 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 commonwealth in that world. If advertising uses the sex appeal, it must be carefully aimed and tastily 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 behavior 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