by Matthew J. Geiger

Created on: December 24, 2009

Sex appeal is a powerful selling point that advertisers can use to attract the attention of males and females.  As an essential survival instinct for our species, sex has a strong influence over our human brains.  From a social standpoint, however, sex sells is a reality that also helps objectify both women and men.  As such, all advertisements that use sex to sell products degrade women to some extent.

Modeling a product gives consumers an opportunity to see what they might like a product to do for them.  Throwing in some sex appeal attracts the attention of the opposite sex while playing on the vanity of the same sex.  Although expectations of consumers in sexiness may be entirely unrealistic, it is human nature to inflate our perception of ourselves and our allure, thus advertisements are designed to exploit our psychological weakness to want to be seen as more desirable to the opposite sex than what we are.

Furthermore, advertisers may be devious for using our follies against us, but our culture helps ensure these tactics will be successful.  When a person is sexually attracted to another person, there is generally an initial physical component to that attraction; however, a healthy relationship is the progression from a physical attraction to an appreciation for another person’s far deeper, broader attributes.  Because we are people of a society that primarily has one mate at a time while our impulses do not shutdown when in a relationship, we all objective the opposite sex to some degree when we focus on physical attributes of those we notice walking down the street.

Women, as well as men, are degraded when others view and treat them as little more than sexual objects.  The actions of strippers and prostitutes, for example, degrade all women, because these professions require their agents to act like living objects versus complex human beings.  Whether or not someone has any qualms against being degraded, the objectification of one person helps objective all women and all men as sex toys.  Once people are viewed as little more than objects, they do not need to be regarded as individuals who deserve respect and a certain level of treatment.

Most advertisements certainly do not degrade women as much as prostitution does, yet our society is saturated with these images valuing women by this one aspect of their beauty.  The same is true for men.  For those who cannot match such ideals, ads can deeply hurt them on a psychological level as well as a social level.  Meanwhile, these advertisements also encourage an unhealthy preoccupation with an ideal image of sex that few individuals can live up to.  

Advertisements often use sex appeal to varying degree in order to sell their products.  Whether simply including only supposedly beautiful people in ads or constantly throwing out images of sex, they exploit the tendency of consumers to degrade the opposite sex by focusing solely on the sex appeal of a person.  When ads hurt self images of individuals or encourage us to objectify people beyond what we already do naturally, they can be very harmful to individuals and our society as a whole.

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