Sex in Advertising

Perspectives on the Erotic Appeal

Tom Reichert, Jacqueline Lambiase, Tom Reichert, Jacqueline Lambiase

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135638207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Pubblicità
• Index: Business

Sex in Advertising: Perspectives on the Erotic Appeal is the first book to thoroughly tackle important issues about sex in advertising. What is it? Does it work? How does it affect individuals and society? Well-respected scholars and popular writers answer these questions as they address the following issues associated with sex in today's advertising environment: gender differences and representation, unintended social effects, subliminal embeds, appeals to the homosexual community, and new media. The book contains a blend of perspectives, including original experimental studies, interpretive and historical analyses, and cultural critiques. The definitive source on sex in advertising, this book:
*is centralized around a singular theme: Understanding how sex in advertising appeals work and why they are so prevalent;
*includes multiple perspectives to capture the richness of sexual appeals;
*brings together viewpoints from both well-known scholars and writers;
*provides a wealth of ideas and research questions for those interested in the topic; and
*contains discussions of sex in advertising from its roots in the 1700s to online advertising today and beyond. The book is must reading for advertising and gender researchers, scholars, and students. Anyone interested in mass media, consumer psychology, and popular culture will find this book an essential resource.

Chapter 1

One Phenomenon, Multiple Lenses: Bridging Perspectives to Examine Sex in Advertising

Tom Reichert

University of Alabama

Jacqueline J. Lambiase

University of North Texas

Although most Americans report being turned off by sexy ads and feeling less likely to purchase products that feature sexual imagery in ads (Fetto, 2001), marketers continue to use more sex in advertising for a greater range of products. For example, a recent ad in Linux Journal for computer hardware products featured the face of an attractive woman and this headline: “Don’t feel bad, our servers won’t go down on you either.” Although the ad is tasteless and sexist, it represents a use of sexual imagery and double entendre used to sell a brand not traditionally linked to sex. At the same time, brands traditionally associated with sex appeals—designer clothing and accessories, alcohol, and “better sex” videos—appear to be featuring sexual imagery that is increasingly explicit (Reichert, Lambiase, Morgan, Carstarphen, & Zavoina, 1999; Shapiro, 1993; Soley & Reid, 1988).

Despite the perpetual encroachment of sexual appeals into mainstream advertising, academic research has failed to keep up. According to Michael Ross, president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, “Health and science professionals are among the last groups who are comfortable with sexuality” (2001, p. 2). Ross argued that media coverage of sexual issues such as the advent and subsequent promotion of Viagra, along with the sensationalism of the Clinton–Lewinsky affair, has resulted in an American public better able to handle sexual issues than ever before. The academy, however, remains somewhat conservative regarding issues and research about sexuality (Bullough, 1994). Researchers who pursue sexual research risk scrutiny and aspersions from colleagues and administrators, even from those outside academe (see LaTour & Henthorne, chap. 5, this volume.) This may be one reason that appeals using fear and humor—strategies arguably as common as sexual appeals—receive more research attention and are better understood than sexual appeals. Researchers who eschew institutional pressures and ignore raised eyebrows, at least regarding sexuality in advertising, are brought together in this book.

Another factor that may be limiting the development of sex-appeal research is the cloaking of such knowledge within disciplinary boundaries or methodological schools of thought. These boundaries prevent scholars and students new to the study of this phenomenon from easy access to existing scholarship. Even within the chapters of this book, there is little cross-pollination among disciplines. Note, for example, that the chapter by Sivulka, an advertising historian, contains only one reference to work by advertising effect researchers or interpreters. Similarly, work by quantitative researchers LaTour and Henthorne contains no references of work by cultural theorists. Marketers assess reactions to sexual information, whereas scholars in the humanities are more interested in interpretations of the meaning of sexuality in advertising, and what it reflects about contemporary culture. Although scholars are talking about the same representations, they see them in different ways for different reasons.

Multiple Perspectives

Sexuality is a fundamental characteristic of people that influences their thoughts and behaviors, their orientations toward others, and life in general. Freud may have overstated his claim that everything people do can be linked to sexual motivations, but his ideas have had profound impact in the development of theories and research models about sex and consumption patterns, influencing studies about what people drive, what they wear, and what fragrances they use. Scholars from different research traditions vary in terms of the levels of meaning they analyze and the concerns they address with regard to sex in advertising. For example, marketers are primarily concerned with micro-level effects; they want to know how sexual information evokes reactions within viewers, and how those reactions influence consumer behavior. Important variables include attention, feelings about the ad and about the brand, memory, and intentions to purchase the advertised product. In this context, marketing research on sexual appeals is not only concerned with understanding how sex affects processing and purchasing, but also with providing useful generalizations to help practicing professionals make decisions about using these appeals. Research in this area rarely attempts to assess the implications of sexual appeals beyond negative reactions and damage to the brand’s image and reputation (for exceptions to this pattern, see LaTour & Henthorne, and Gould, chaps. 5 and 8 respectively, this volume). For example, Courtney and Whipple (1983) reviewed the sex in advertising effects literature and concluded, “advertisers would be well advised to … avoid overtly seductive, nude, or partially clad models” (p. 118). Their recommendation was based on findings suggesting that sex in advertising could be offensive and distracting. More important, their caveat illustrates the concern for protecting advertisers’ interests.

Humanities research sees sexual stimuli from wholly different perspectives, usually at a macro level. These scholars are interested in what sex-tinged advertising says about cultural myths, power, iconographies, relationships, development of gender identities and stereotypes, people’s fantasies, ethics, and shared grammars of the body as commodity. In this book, several authors approach their topics by writing histories of cultural movements and using these histories as places from which to address sexual appeals. Their projects, from many perspectives, chip away at the notion of an Advertising History that features big men and big campaigns. Stern, a marketing scholar, provides a history of masculine poses and stereotypes, whereas historian Sivulka documents the ways that culture and advertising reinforced long-standing images of sex roles. In another cultural history, Twitchell, an English professor, credits the feminist movement with power enough to critique the use of women’s images in advertising. Hicks outlines the development of sexual advertising for gays and lesbians, including the history of the gay and lesbian press as a forum for such advertising. When considering online sexual appeals, Lambiase recounts the growth of the Internet and its continued reliance on pornography Web sites, which have influenced technological innovation and new media culture in general.

Sex also means different things to different sets of scholars, be they from the humanities or social sciences. Marketers, sex researchers, and social psychologists view sexual information as stimuli with ascribed sexual meaning. They are interested in describing responses that viewers experience when exposed to sexual information (e.g., thoughts, feelings, and arousal; see Lang et al., chap. 6, this volume). Alternately, when some hear the term sex in advertising they think about gender. One of the authors remembers that every time sex in advertising was mentioned, a colleague thought it referred to sex differences: individual differences regarding women and men, with no sexual meaning at all. Still others consider sex as inseparable from conceptions of social power, and this perspective is discussed eloquently by Kilbourne, who makes the argument that sexualized images of women maintain unequal gender roles through objectification, dismemberment, and disconnection.

Because scholars from both the sciences and humanities have been discussing sexual appeals inside disciplinary boundaries, this collection allows dialogue to occur across those boundaries to create synergy among these varied perspectives. In addition, because sex is wrapped up in issues of power, sexuality, gender, and culture, it is important to talk about these appeals from multiple perspectives. Assessing the marketing perspective, for example, would only provide a very narrow outlook with regard to sex in advertising. Combining perspectives allows for diversity of perspectives to be represented in one area. As a result, anyone, no matter what her or his methodological predilection or specialty, may find familiar and useful views represented. More important, readers are likely to be exposed to new ideas from other viewpoints that can stimulate robust research questions in their own areas of expertise.

A benefit of this book is that it does not focus on only quantitative or qualitative research, but presents both research approaches. It includes chapters across disciplines from scholars who explore erotic appeals through a range of methods including empiricism, theory, interpretive analysis, and some of what lies among these perspectives. The more quantitative perspectives include studies of audience effects and individual difference variables, integrative reviews of past research, and new studies that build on past research using theory not yet applied to understanding the effects of these appeals. Definitional issues are addressed, as well as directions for future research. Qualitative perspectives include studies by scholars working in visual persuasion, rhetoric, cultural studies, media studies, gender studies, and others.

Outline of the Book

Part I contains a collection of chapters that represents a variety of approaches to the examination of sexual appeals in advertising. These chapters use tools from a variety of disciplines including consumer behavior, historical, epistemological, rhetorical, and postmodern perspectives. The section is valuable because it provides coherence regarding the different ways scholars and professionals have studied and described sexual appeals in the past. In addition, the material in these chapters should be valuable for those initiating research in this area, as well as for those searching for new research questions to pursue.

In chapter 2, Tom Reichert provides a review of the ways sexual content has been analyzed in the advertising and mass communication literatures (e.g., nudity, suggestiveness, physical attractiveness), including a brief summary of the ways the effects of sexual appeals have been studied. It is argued that past research often tested sexual appeals that contained a blend of sexual content, despite attempting to isolate sexual content. Suggestions to improve on and extend past research are provided.

Juliann Sivulka in chapter 3 uses landmark advertising campaigns, coupled with insights on psychological theory and cultural trends, to illustrate the use of sexual appeals in images and text throughout the 20th century. Included in her historical study are quaintly sexual advertisements from that century’s first decades, followed in the 1930s by some of the first nude photos of women used to sell products to women, both from Woodbury’s Soap. Springs Cotton Mills also successfully used provocative images and double entendre in the 1940s and 1950s, but under certain conditions that kept jaded readers in mind. From there, the chapter covers the use of super-sexed ads for blue jeans and cologne from the 1980s and 1990s.

Chapter 4 at first narrowly focuses on two representative Absolut Vodka ads from the 1990s, then telescopes to a much broader discussion of fetishistic images used in contemporary advertising. Jonathan Schroeder and Janet Borgerson explore how advertisers create powerful and positive images for their products via fetishistic themes, in order to build theory about the ways such images create cultural meaning.

In Part II, four chapters focus a spotlight on sex in advertising in the consumer context, by examining responses at both an individual and cultural level. One reviews the arousal construct and its effect on consumer advertising processing, while another on sex and alcohol uses cognitive theory to explain how arousal influences consumer responses to sexual billboard images. The third essay in this section examines new media interactivity and advertising from a rhetorical and critical theory perspective while the last chapter in this section explicates a theory of advertising lovemaps to link media images with personal experiences of sexual pleasure. Altogether, these chapters provide reviews, theoretical perspectives, rhetorical structures, and lessons for advertising professionals and researchers.

Michael LaTour and Tony Henthorne provide an overview in chapter 5 of their research as it pertains to arousal responses to sexual appeals. These researchers have been influential through their work because they bridge the gap between information processing investigations and emotional responses to sexual information. LaTour and Henthorne synthesize their research by providing a summary of their findings, especially as it relates to feminist and ethical evaluations. Last, the researchers provide a strong warning, as well as recommendations, to professionals and researchers alike for constructing sexual appeals.

Chapter 6 by Annie Lang, Kevin Wise, Seungwhan Lee, and Zaiomei Cai examines the influence of sexual appeals on alcohol billboard advertising. Lang et al.’s chapter is important because the limited processing model of message processing is used to explain how sexual information evokes attention, affect, and arousal, and how these emotional responses influence respondents’ processing of the ad. The model, developed by Lang, is described in the chapter and related research is cited within the chapter, with a useful review of the literature that explains how emotional information affects message processing. In addition, the chapter describes the use of procedures to test processing and outcome variables such as heart rate, skin conductance, facial electromyography, and speed recognition tests. These researchers employed methods, sometimes using multiple computers, to simulate naturalistic viewing of outdoor advertising.

Chapter 7’s rhetorical essay understands the use of sex in advertising as a species of broader dependence on “spectacle.” In it, Collin Brooke argues that sexually charged advertisements rely on a version of what Benjamin (1968) described as the “aura” of a work, and that this aura has waned in recent years. Evidence for this trend is located in commercials typified by Pepsi’s “Two Kids,” featuring supermodel Cindy Crawford and a storyline that completes the marketing–consumption circle, thereby blunting the decision-making process for consumers. This strategy is one that ultimately fails in a broadcast medium such as television, but has been deployed with great success online, through the proliferation of information agents. This latter strategy, promotion in the guise of providing information, may prove to be especially successful in a time characterized by information overload and image saturation.

In chapter 8, Stephen Gould goes beyond traditional marketing thought and practice to offer new ways to think about and conceptualize sexual appeals in advertising. He offers his theory of advertising lovemaps as a starting point for understanding the interplay between sexual meaning in ads and sexual experience in people’s lives. Gould outlines and describes the four dimensions of the advertising lovemap: differences related to individuals, products, culture, and advertising. For those interested in pursuing postmodern or interpretive consumer research on sex in advertising, his article provides a fine starting point.

Part III contains chapters written by popular scholars and authors who have addressed the impact of sexual appeals on culture. For example, James Twitchell talks about how we are all a part of advertising culture, which diminishes advertising’s effect on people and institutions. His point of view is countered by Jean Kilbourne, who talks about how sexual images pollute relationships, as well as individual and cultural identities. Wilson Key has written an original chapter for this book. In it, he describes the harmful social effects of subliminal sexual embeds in advertising and society’s complacency about such manipulation.

In chapter 9, James Twitchell works on the theory that myths about beauty or sexuality cannot be unwillingly imposed on culture through its advertising messages. In a reprint from his book Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture (1996), he asserts sexual images work in advertisements because these myths still have resonance with their audience. Yet he doesn’t discount the importance of addressing why advertising, in its “reflecting (and shaping)” role, depicts women in demeaning ways.

Jean Kilbourne in chapter 10 attacks the pseudo-sexuality sold in contemporary advertising, in an excerpt from her book Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel (1999). Almost all of these images portray passively sexualized women who are “young, thin, carefully polished and groomed, made up,...