Now, having said all of this about what kinds of sex seems to be associated with a heightening interest in products and possibly increasing brand equity and encouraging people to buy them. We need to ask another question that I've mentioned to you earlier. And that is, what kind of sex is it that the ads actually sell? Now if we look at the vast majority of images that can be said to be sexual or erotic in nature. We see that most of the time what we are seeing happening is that they are depicting homos, heterosexuality in one form or another. This is the norm one male, one female and more than that it's the male in the dominant position and the woman who is in the passive and receptive position. Now furthermore it's also the case that the ad usually if it's a, a print ad in particular focuses on the foreplay rather than on the actual sex itself. And you can see that in this particular image where the man is dominant the woman is submissive. Where this is a prelude to sex. And many people have also pointed out that if you look carefully at the man's pants, you can see a very strong suggestion that he's sexually aroused at this particular point and time. So this leaves little to the imagination. But is in fact a clear use of erotic imagery. To sell, but it sells heterosexual relationships with the man being dominant. But some ads go further than this, to leave little doubt that the couple is actually engaged in sexual intercourse. In this particular ad for Candies. You can see a man and a woman who are pretty far along in the process of sexual engagement. The man is there between the woman's legs. She's not had time to completely remove her clothes, and little is really left to the imagination. Now sometimes this heteronormativity gives a way in advertising to a variety of non-traditional alternatives. Sometimes we see for example one man with several female partners. Now this it turns out is a widely shared American male fantasy among heterosexual men. And so advertising plays on this and there are many ads that will actually show this situation where the man has ,ore than one woman at his disposal. Or at least is engaged with her. And then at top of those kinds of variants from the heteronormativity, one man one woman, male dominant. We see situations in which, sometimes the female partner assumes a more active and dominant role. This again, being a kind of sexual fantasy that some people have, the advertising will play on that as it does in this, particular ad that you can see, on screen now. Now an oddity is that we very seldom see one woman with multiple males. That maybe because of ma;e competition for female interest, but it just doesn't work out very well to have a group of men and only one woman. But it does happen, it's just not a very common kind of thing. Now beyond that we also see that there are things that are not always heterosexual in nature. Sometimes we see gay relationships depicted in ads. Not most of the time or all of the time but it does happen and increasingly so. Here's an ad that shows two men who are clearly partners. It's an ad for a fairly innocent product, for Tylenol headache relief. And we see that the two men are in this intimate relationship. They're sharing a bed, and they're talking about one of them having a backache and things like this, so it's really a kind of ordinary every day situation. But it's one involving two men as opposed to a heterosexual couple. Now there are other situations also that complicate this, where we see men involved with each other, and what we need to call homoerotic rather than homosexual relationships. Because there's no clear indication that the men are engaged in sexual behavior. But it does push the limits of what has been traditional and, and usual in the way that men relate to each other. By keeping significant difference between, distance between their bodies, not touching very much except in certain particular stylized ways. Abercrombie and Fitch, over the last decade or so, is known particularly for having pushed the limits here. And in this ad, which I must admit, I was rather shocked by when I first saw it of two men lying on a bed with their pants down somewhat. And you can see that one of them is wearing boxer style underwear and the other tighty whities. And perhaps you could say that this is an ad showing that Abercrombie & Fitch sell both types of men's underwear. But it's also a very suggestive situation of why the men are exposing their bodies to each other and are touching in the particular way that they are. This is again advertising pushing and playing with the limits of what is possible, and, and, being really sort of, for a lot of people, outside the norm of what is usual or typical. But suggestive, and therefore very avant garde. And perhaps attracting a set of people who want to be that way. Now, another aspect of the kind of things that advertising says about sex is the humor that's sometimes there. Sex can be funny. And advertising makes it that way sometimes. I want to show you a few instances of that. We begin here with one that is not a real ad, but it is a European parody using beer bottles. And just being particularly funny. It gets one's attention. It's rather cleverly done. But it is just a humorous parody of sexual imagery. More specifically and closer to home in America, here is a double entendre ad for a body wash that is quite familiar to a lot of younger Americans. Where women play around with the idea of balls. And this refers to a part of the male body as well as actual balls that you play games with. And so this is meant to be sort of adolescent kind of humor and it was one that was very popular when it appeared around 2009. >> So no one wants to play with dirty equipment that's why you have to keep your balls clean. The problem is a bar of soap just doesn't cut it. See? Still dirty. >> Well how can guys clean their balls so they are more enjoyable to play with? >> Well, there is finally a tool that can really get the job done. The axe detailer, cleans your balls. Why don't we start with these small balls. With the soft side for lather, and the rough side for scrubbing this can make any balls sparkly and new. Go ahead and play with those clean balls, Denise. >> Wow. >> So what we see here are various ways in which sexual imagery, is played with. Or look at the following one, this one is really suggestive. It says, it'll blow your mind away. And here is a woman trying to put a huge sandwich in her mouth. And her mouth being a, a great deal smaller than that large sandwich. Now, of course, we can see in this that this could be sexual as well, in which the woman is putting something that's very large into her mouth. And, I think, there's no question that that was what was intended and being played with when an ad like this was created. This is an ad for Burger King, from the year 2009. It turned out to be so controversial on the internet that the company was quick to point out that this was produced locally for the Singapore market by the local branch agency. And not a campaign that they were using on a worldwide basis. In fact the company didn't like it very much in the end because it caused such enormous controversy. But look at this one. This is an Italian ad. It, which uses sexual humor to attract people's attention. It's about a restaurant it, it uses bread, but the way the bread is arranged in the basket is very suggestive of phallic imagery. Or how about this one, for the Hard Rock hotel in Las Vegas? Where it says, simply, get ready to buck all night, from 2004. Now we can see in the image that the woman is standing there beside, perhaps, a bed but our underwear are way down on the bottom part of our legs. This ad was extremely controversial as a bill-, a billboard. And in fact, it was required by the City of Las Vegas to remove this, because it just went too far. So, sometimes that does happen. That community standards and such that the things that advertising does just push a little to far and it has, they have to pull back sometimes. Now one question that's asked about all of this is that, is sometimes advertising actually pornographic because it goes so far. Now, of course, this has to do in answering a question with what with means to call an advertisement pornographic. And that is not a simple matter. Look at this ad, for example for a cologne, Tom Ford for Men. This is men's cologne and we see it here between a woman's breast. She has her hands on her breast. She's pulling her breast up. Her mouth is wide open. The bottle is there. Suggestive perhaps of mammary intercourse. But we have to ask the question, is this just erotic and sexy? Or is this verging on pornographic. Now in an encyclopedia entry Edmond Miller has attempted to talk about erotica as an alternative to pornography. Because sometimes things will be said when they are artistic to be erotic rather than porno, pornographic. And he says this about it. As a literary genre, pornography is writing that has sexual arousement as its primary objective. Erotica, by contrast, is such material with an artistic pretension. Thus, the descriptive term pornography implies a statement about intentionality and instrumentality. Without reference to merit, whereas the term erotica is evaluative and laudatory. Now someone else is going on to say that the only difference really, between erotica and pornography is erotica is the stuff bought by rich people who call it art. And there may be some truth in that because when we get down to trying to define what the difference is it's a very narrow line itself. With erotic meaning artistic pretensions and pornographic being just things that are meant to arouse. So we see sometimes forms of advertising that we might wont to call erotic or perhaps even pornographic. And here's one that I'll call to your attention where we see a woman and a dog engaged with each other. And this is one that, for a lot of people, would push the limits suggestive of bestiality being eroticized. It's certainly not the old vanilla one man, one woman male dominant kind of advertising images that we've seen before. Or another kind of way in which the limits have been pushed fairly far, in the early 2000's we saw this ad appear in Europe where for the first time, of full frontal male nudity appeared in an advertisement. And here is a French sports figure who appears in this ad for a men's cologne and he's naked, his body is shown off. And Europeans will sometimes say, and what's the problem. I mean this is what the body looks like. He's a good looking man, so we're showing him. But in America we tend to be much more prudish about these kinds of things. And this very same ad shown in America had to be edited and it, and in it we don't see how his full body as it's shown in this particular European version of this. And then finally with regard to the question of what kind of advertising. Or what kind of sex does advertising sell? If we go back just a little bit in time, we can find places where advertising really was for a lot of people overstepping the limits and bounds of propriety. In this 1976 advertisement, a young girl mimics a sexy adult woman. She's made up, her hair is dressed up, she has cosmetics that are meant for her at seven or eight years old. She's holding a stuffy animal. She's looking very seductively at the camera. And on top of all of that look at the product itself and how phallic it actually is. So a lot of complaining occurred around this ad one particular person. Jean Kilbourne who is a specialist in sexism and advertising, complained bitterly about this. And we've seen this sort of really overt sexuality of children and the eroticisation of children disappear in the last few years. It's not something that happens any longer in American advertising. So the bottom-line on all of this is the question of what is it that advertising says about sex? So we see it everywhere. That's one of the things, even the most innocent products seem to have it. Bread and fast food for example evoke sexual thoughts and imageries. Sex is not it turns out just a part of committed relationships, but it often enters casual ones as well. And sexual relationships in advertising are not limited to heterosexual, vanilla kinds of situations. But they also occur among same sex partners and groups. Even with animals. And include a wide variety of alternative sexual practices and behaviors. So what you see here in this, in this lecture is a huge variety of things about sex in advertising. Namely, that it's everything. That it's been used for a long time. That in addition to a question that's not entirely clear in its answer or whether it actually sells. Sometimes, maybe, yes it does. But it's not clear that it always does. We find that what's happening culturally and socially is that an awful lot of ideas about sexuality are being promulgated through these ads as well. And we find role models for what relationships between men and women and other sexual partners might be all about. And advertising is not here just following, but it's in some ways pushing the limits of propriety and society. You can follow this up by having a look at the piece on sex and advertising in Ad Text. And with successive lectures this week in which we explore some more detailed aspects of the relationship between sex and advertising. This course is a collaborative venture of Duke University and the Advertising Educational Foundation.
