Advertising in all its forms has never really shied away
from the fact that sex in its industry is a key mechanism to garner the
attention of its audience. The prevalence of sex has definitely increased and
is on the rise, moving on from the past when it used to be a more guarded
topic. Sex plays a direct role in selling a wide variety of products like
magazines e.g. FHM,
deodorants/perfumes e.g. Lynx and
obviously sex-related products e.g.
Condoms. Issues do arise when adverts become too explicit or racy and if
they mislead the consumer heavily, such as the banned Lynx advert of 2011
featuring Lucy Pinder, a UK glamour model. The problem of sex in advertising
does not inherently lie with these campaigns for which the audience broadly
recognizes as acceptable due to the nature of these products. The problem is
when it is used indirectly to advertise other products. An example of this is
when Microsoft’s Office XP advert of 2007 was banned due to complaints of unneeded
nudity, quite understandable when such unexpected raunchiness comes from an IT
manufacturer!
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| 'School's out.' campaign 2014 |
There has been one brand which has been particularly slated
for using gratuitous sexuality in their advertising, American Apparel. The
worldwide clothing company’s ex-Chief Executive Officer Dov Charney was famous
for steering the company’s advertising strategies, but steering the strategies towards
inevitably disaster. His raunchy and misogynistic campaigns propelled him into
infamy with the press from 2003 onwards, culminating in his job loss in 2014.
The advertising campaigns showed for example, young (almost too young) women
essentially naked bar some minimal clothing in some very inappropriate settings
such as riding a cycle with their bottom completely on show. This degrades women in
general and portrays them as weak and vulnerable, as cited by many journalists
like Cobb 2011. The campaigns in some sense were a large reflection of
Charney’s ‘pervy’ nature, according to media outlets, which is the most obvious
and likely correct judgement. But is it possible this is not the whole truth?
To answer this you have to ask, ‘Where do you draw the line?’ I think if you can answer this
question with definite certainty, you must be underestimating the question’s
complexity. Realistically, the line moves around all over the place in this day
and age, mainly due to our friend the internet. The internet is such a fluid
environment with example platforms like Instagram having often very revealing ‘selfies’
from the public and models posting equally exposing photos to gain followers
online. Also, being in such a trend orientated culture in regards to body image
and fashion, things like ‘twerking’, ‘side boob’ and general promotion of
certain body shapes as more desirable than others just fuels the fire for the
argument that the internet is becoming a more innately sexual and revealing domain.
Therefore, when many advertising mavericks live and die by the notion that
‘advertising is simply a reflection of our society’ like Jon Steel, surely the
internet which contains such a vast array of sexualised things should rightly
play a justified part in advertising campaigns to reflect this changing society.
Now, what I mean by this is not that it is always fine to have overtly sexual
adverts, but this ‘line’ which reflects what’s wrong and right in terms of sex
in adverts is if anything becoming less visible and harder to judge due to this
online factor.
So, the internet is a large part of society, but is it large enough? In my opinion it
is not large enough yet. It still
does not incorporate all the older audiences who make up a big proportion of
the people that watch these adverts on TV and may be more guarded towards the
subject due to less online involvement and likely stricter upbringings. In
addition, with the internet being most people’s escape from everyday life, even
if they think it is totally fine when they are looking at something online that
is overly sexualised, it may not be fine in a more public television
environment due to current social conventions. So there is one rule for one environment
and another rule for a different environment which makes the issue more complex
and this does not apply just to sex, but for many other things such as violence
or swearing.
Although, I see these environments becoming more similar as
the internet age develops, with increasing social connectivity online, these
almost forbidden subjects are starting to be discussed and critiqued via forums
and other social media, hence giving a better and more proactive way to allow us to draw this hard to judge line for
sex in advertising. In all consideration, the power is more with the people
than ever before and deciding what is right and wrong in advertising and more
broadly speaking in the media, is not down to a select few as it was in the
past, but it is now shifting towards the masses.
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