Sex in Advertising

Even before I knew there was such a thing as an advertising business, I learned that sex was often an important attention-getting element.

As a teenager in Chicago, I worked in a Standard Oil service station. I remember being intoxicated by the smell of gasoline-the pink, cold and sweeter ethyl more than the pale, dry regular-transfixed, too, by the sound and feel of the pneumatic grease gun with its whooshes and pops as I snapped it from one silvery nipple to another beneath some chopped, channeled and lowered 1950 Merc.

Even more than the sounds and smells and work in the place, I loved the coming in early and the leaving late. It legitimized my loitering in the back among the tool benches and files and vises. That's where the changing lockers were. And where there were lockers, there were pictures of women.

It was dim and hushed and it smelled of oil back there. Every available surface was covered with ads torn out of magazines hawking some automotive product or another. The girls in them beckoned, ripe with the promise of much more than an oil additive or a more effective carburetor or wiper blade.

Where they got all those ads I knew not. But I lingered and leered and, though vaguely, recall them all. I remember the ad with the Jane Russell look-alike who had huge bosoms and wore a tight-fitting sweater, both hands wrapped suggestively around a shock absorber. And how could I forget the ad for the welding rods, the one with the girl in the low-cut bathing suit-her cleavage trying to climb off the page-juxtaposed with the words, "A good technique and the right rod for the job"? Dozens of these ads there were, papered everywhere, some new, clean and freshly hung, others streaked, greasy and curling away from doors and walls, dangling hard and yellowed with strips of cellophane tape.

I knew even then that, as daring as they seemed, as involving and compelling as they were, most of these ads were more about chauvinism and cocksmanship than about salesmanship.

In our little service station, we neither owned nor sold any of the products whose ads provided us with so much fascination. Not a one. Back then, advertising was the public's most accessible source of titillation. Today I sincerely doubt anyone looking for a sexual thrill grabs a magazine, races home and pants over the advertising. Unless we're talking about the Victoria's Secret catalog-but even that doesn't seem as sexy today as it once did. And maybe someone is still clinging to a copy of Vanity Fair with Calvin Klein's sexually explicit 116-page "outsert" in its original condom like wrapper. That, somehow, promised to rise above the mass of what we call "sex in advertising." But really, once you've slipped off the sensuous sleeve, how racy is a black-and-white photo of a guy groping himself with blue jeans under a shower? It all depends on what you're into, or used to, I guess. I once knew a guy who got off on a certain section of the Sears catalog. But that was in the Fifties.

Certainly any cursory look at today's advertising scene will reveal that sexual themes are more pervasive than ever. But how sexy are they? As we've all learned, a lot of sex is not the same as good sex.

In New York we have a thing called Channel 35. This is our cable TV sex channel. Many major cities have one now. Ours is sort of a blue version of the New York Post in that it's hard to find anyone who will admit to having anything to do with it. Nevertheless, it's there. And on any given night, that's where you'll find sex in advertising. Because on it, sex is being advertised.

Want an escort? Just call and she'll come a-knockin'. Channel 35 parades an assortment before you in all sizes and colors. Black, white, Asian. They even sort them according to class. You can get everything from a tall, svelte blonde in an evening gown to a jeans-wearing, leather-jacketed gum-cracker. Gay sex? Lesbian sex? Group sex? It's got it all for you. S/M? Got that, too, you pathetic wimp.

If you're in the market for sexual apparatus, here's where you'll find it. There are stores pushing all the latest gimcracks, plus latex gizmos measured by the inch, foot and yard. They've even got a woman who'll come over and pee on you. Of course, they've also got people who will just talk dirty to you on the phone. But why get it only in the ear when you can get wet all over?

In such a world, what can poor Calvin Klein, Georges Marciano and the other national purveyors of sexually directed merchandise possibly do to keep up?

It's not easy. The mass media have codes and rules and guidelines designed to protect our puritanical sensibilities from prurience. The FCC or some such body grants greater latitude to-or doesn't even supervise-cable television. Needless to say, the boys over at Channel 35 play with a less-restrictive rule book.

Consider this. If you do a soap or shampoo commercial that is intended to run on one or more of the major networks, you can't show a man or woman who appears undressed in a shower. It's against the networks' code of decency to show so much of a person, even though that's the normal, natural, approved form of dress for taking showers. You are required to shoot close-ups, being careful to crop out or edit the sensitive areas.

In many newspapers, you can't run an ad that shows a belly button or more than an inch or so of cleavage.

Over in England and in other parts of Europe, pretty much anything goes. There they allow the public to see nudity in all its logical glory and nobody gets particularly excited or upset about it. Right now, in Scandinavia there's a commercial running for a condom that uses an animated penis to get the point across, balls and all. I gather that one has raised a few eyebrows. But in a way, isn't that what advertising is supposed to do? Get folks to pay attention?

Now, I happen to believe most things in this world-in advertising or elsewhere-occur as a result of somebody trying to get away with something that's not supposed to be done. I call it the boomerang effect. Tell some people what they can't do and they'll generally come right back at you with a brilliant but sneaky way around the prohibition. (Look at Prohibition.)

Look at Victorian England. It was beneath the cloak of morality that the most deplorable sexual behavior flourished. When you have to be careful not to utter the word petticoat in public, what do you do to let off steam? You go home, strip, bind, gag, flog, rape and sodomize your maid, what else?

Anyway, a lot of the people who attempt to put sex into advertising are just trying to stretch the rules to capture your attention. And to a large extent, they're doing a damned fine job of pushing the edge of the envelope that contains the rule book. A rule book that, like all rule books, is hopelessly behind the times.

Even so, there is advertising out there that manages to flirt with some fairly dodgy and sensitive issues. Of course, the most artful and daring examples appear in magazines. Unlike other media, magazines issue little in the way of blanket prohibitions. They tend to accept advertising on the basis of its congruence with the publication's editorial policy and the appropriateness for its particular audience.

In all upscale fashion magazines, nudity has become almost commonplace, the controversial specifics masked by natural situational elements rather than by contrived editing or framing. There are perfume commercials and ads that clearly suggest putting it on means a ménage à trois is in the offing. Scan recent magazines and you'll be inundated with innuendo. There is fashion advertising with a sadomasochistic bent, jeans and sunglasses ads pushing the pairing of older men and very young girls, ads that clearly depict the idea of extramarital sex. In fact, today's ads touch on every area of sexual pleasure and perversion.

Critics of advertising will tell you that it has become too sexually explicit and that the use of sex in it too widespread. They might be right, but as is so often the case with zealots, when they're right, it's for the wrong reasons. Advertising is far less sexually explicit than much of what we can readily find elsewhere in our lives-in films, in magazine features, on cable TV, in literature. That advertising is as explicit as it is is not proof of the depravity of its creators and sponsors but is evidence that some of the outmoded restraints still in force are highly motivational. The irony is that in England, where advertising is allowed to deal with sex fairly openly, the advertising doesn't come across nearly as sexy as our advertising, which is less explicit.

Also, far from being demonic manipulators who slip subliminal sex images into ice cubes-a charge leveled at advertising people by those who have nothing better to do in their lives than to imagine such nonsense-ad people are too busy, too responsible and too scrutinized to waste a second thinking of such crap. Besides, putting sexual images in ice cubes or drinks doesn't conjure up particularly appetizing imagery. Sexual excretions in your Scotch? Yuck!

And how about those who swear the face of Old Joe Camel, the cigarette cartoon character, is really a drawing of male genitalia? I wish they'd come off it. What company in its right mind wants consumers going around calling its product symbol Old Scrotum Face?

Same with the new Pepsi can. Recently, it was brought to my attention that to some people the typography and graphic representation on the front of the can might depict a man's penis and testicles. And, once pointed out, darned if it doesn't look like that to me, too. But is such a thing intentional? Are you kidding? You think the second-largest soft-drink company in the country wants America's mothers thinking their daughters are walking around publicly grasping, let alone placing their lips on, guys' units?

Why would anybody knowingly do something like that? Do these people think every major company in America is as sex-crazed as they are?

That's not to say there are no abuses.

Sex in marketing is often unnecessary and even undesirable. In too many instances, it's just a lazy cop-out. When you can't come up with an ad that's truly distinctive or compelling, there's always that old fallback: Why not put some pussy in it? There are still too many people concerned with selling things like machine tools who simply must regress to the big-boobed babe. That's boorish as well as stupid. Unless a product is truly sexy-sexy to use, look at or be seen in-using sex to market it just won't work. And trying to is nothing more than gratuitous tastelessness.

Yes, on television, too many spots continue to demean women or insensitively treat them as sex objects. And yes, even some of today's magazine advertisements may be going too far.

But that still leaves much that is smart and artful, charming or entertaining, and, certainly, the sheer volume of such ads reflects our continuing fascination with one of the more engaging aspects of life.