In American advertisements and entertainment, sex is everywhere. Women in revealing bikinis are on TV, shirtless men displaying six packs are on billboards, and couples in intimate poses take up glossy two-page spaces in magazines. This is by no means unintentional. Media moguls make calculated moves when inserting touches of sensuality and eroticism into their publications, for reasons wrapped into one simple yet popular phrase: sex sells.
This idea then can reflect the opposite way in the eyes of their viewers, making them believe that if they buy, then they too will be more likely to receive sexual satisfaction like the ad models thanks to whatever goods they have purchased. It’s impossible to deny when viewing many of the media sources we see today that there’s a strong capitalist agenda linking sexual satisfaction with the purchase of various luxury items on the market.
A prime example of the relation ads can make between sexual satisfaction and buyers satisfaction is Calvin Klein’s 2015 ad titled “After Work Special”. Within the short eighteen seconds, two men begin contacting each other with implied interest in hooking up, one asking the other if he’s interested and the other requesting private photographs. The ad culminates with the two men intimately kissing and removing each other’s clothing in a dark room, before flashing briefly to one models face and finally overlaying with the logo for Calvin Klein jeans.
Captured all in dark lighting and mostly in above-the-waist shots, it’s nearly impossible to see the jeans either wear, placing the focus far more heavily on their sensual interactions. While the ad is rather unique for depicting two men together as their ideal, the basic theme of the commercial is still very much tried and true; with distinct imagery Calvin Klein jeans can be tied to sexual satisfaction, and if you buy them, you just might experience it too, regardless of how little they had to do with the depicted scene itself. Men aren’t the only ones targeted by carnally-driven advertising.
With society placing such heavy emphasis on the sexist need for women to dedicate large amounts of time on their appearances to please their lovers, an innumerable amount of ads nearly saturated in thinly-veiled eroticism are dedicated to them. One such example is Gucci’s ad for their perfume Guilty. The scene opens on their perfume bottle, before showing a woman driving down a futuristic highway. She stops to find an attractive man and follows him to a bar, the duo moving to a more private area to have sex, the imagery of their event closer to depicted than implied.
The ad finally ends with a backtrack to the woman turning away as though she had never truly followed the man in the first place. While this negation of the earlier theme is in place, it is much less distinct to the viewer than the erotic moments previously shown, signifying that sexual satisfaction may very well still be within reach when Gucci Guilty is used. Certain products can be easily experienced by two people involved sexually, and the media doesn’t let that opportunity go to waste. For those items, there’s an entirely new onslaught of seductive ads to be found.
The commercial for Sean John’s fragrance 3AM is a prime example of how sexual imagery can be used to make products appeal to consumers. Marketed as a unisex fragrance, the video stars company head Sean “Diddy” Combs and girlfriend Cassie Ventura. Scenes jump between the perspectives of both and vary between the two fighting and embracing, but ultimately the advert reaches unexpected heights of eroticism from televised productions as Ventura’s bare breasts are shown and the two clearly imitate intercourse while partially nude.
The ad concludes with an image of the 3AM bottle and its logo, wrapping all sexual imagery and its potential for buyers into the product. With such overt images and so few chaste scenes in comparison, the commercial relies almost wholeheartedly on the idea that the chance of sexual satisfaction can sell its scent. From sunglasses to ice cream products, from jeans to fragrances, sexual imagery has been used in millions of media sources for a number of years in an attempt to gain more buyers.
Men, women, and couplings alike are portrayed in lust-fueled advertisements designed to draw attention and interest, the items they promote sometimes only quickly tacked onto the end, placing almost all attention on the carnal scenery and viewers’ hopes that they too could experience the same when using such merchandise. When comparing more erotic advertisements to more chaste ones the same category, or attempting to link the item to the themes of the ad, it can often be clear to see that many sources of media attempt to use intimacy and many human’s hopes for sexual satisfaction to sell us various products.