Sex Sells, But At What Price?

In today’s society a person cannot turn on the TV, drive down a highway, or open a magazine without being bombarded with advertisements. They are literally everywhere you turn especially those portraying women in negative gender roles and as objects. In her article, Image Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture, Jhally says, “Sexuality provides a resource that can be used to get attention and communicate instantly” (Jhally 253). Basically, as the cliché goes, sex sells. Using sex to sell products has obviously become embedded in our culture but what has caused these companies to think that selling women as a commodity is acceptable?

Society has become so desensitized to sexualized advertisements that they are not even given a second thought. These ads have become absorbed into our culture and are exploited now more than ever. As Jhally explains, “The iconography of the culture, perhaps more than any previous society, seems to be obsessed with sexuality. The end result is that the commodity is part of an increasingly eroticized world” (Jhally 253). The fact that sex indeed sells has prompted advertising agencies to zone in on this option and has only increased the number of sexualized ads exponentially in recent decades. It has come to the point where the women being objectified are featured as the commodity more than the product that is actually being advertised.

While many people are quick to complain about the advertisements objectifying women, no one is willing to take a stand against them. By buying products from companies who create these sexualized advertisements, we are telling them that their advertising strategy is working. As Hesse-Biber states, “As long as a woman viewed her body as an object, she was controllable and profitable” (Hesse-Biber 40). If women are putting themselves out there to be objectified and thought of as a commodity then there is nothing to tell men and the rest of society differently. Until women take a stand against these types of advertisement then their bodies will continue to be used as a selling agent.

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Works Cited

Hesse-Biber, Sharlene Nagy. The Cult of Thinness. 2nd Ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Jhally, Sut. "Image-Based Culture." Gender Race and Class in Media: a Text Reader. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2003.