an unrealistic ideal for both a sense of self-worth and what society/potential partners/rando hook-ups expect from us. It’s undeniable that our definition of ‘sexy’ is heavily influenced by the image that mainstream advertising sells to us – an image that we’re more than happy to buy into - but is diversifying models really the solution? Currently we’re waging war against skinniness but we’ve gone through all these motions before. From Ancient Greeks to the Victorians to the waifish figures of the ‘90s we’ve always had body ideals in some form so should we be championing the idea of diversification or eradication? Has the time come for us to fall out of lust with the idea of ‘sexiness’ and remove it from advertising altogether?
It’s not even just a moral matter that has caused society to turn its back on the concept of sex selling. As the age of the Internet dawned upon us and rapidly evolved into the highly sophisticated state we know it as today, marketing moguls found that they can no longer simply churn out suggestive images and that’s that. As a society we are saturated with sexually implicit and explicit images and, thanks to the Internet, we can access all types of sexualised media round the clock and streamed directly to our homes at our request. As a result, we have become completely desensitised to these types of images and, thus, the once intriguing glimpse of some side-boob in an ad-campaign now registers as little more than a run-of-the-mill 0.27seconds Google image search.
Another game changer, courtesy of the Internet, which has only crept up over the last several years, is the viral video. In the age of cat memes and eagerly sought after retweets companies are shunning the age-worn concept of sex appeal and are instead creating the kind of videos that our nearest and dearest spam our inboxes with. As we stare unresponsively at secondly updates from our multiple social media accounts open in consecutive tabs it
takes something spectacular, something far outside the norm, something that could act as an icebreaker down the pub when conversation is lacking to constitute an effective advert these days. Tiny horses, flash mobs and unlikely animals friends, that’s what we want nowadays. Nudity? Over it.
And so it seems that I have created more questions than I have answered but our numbness to sexual imagery and how it is exploited for financial gain has meant that this topic is rarely a talking point. As our discontent grows towards objectification and the portrayal of unrealistic ideals surely an industry that capitalises on using the human form as a commodity, and one that wields such immense influence, should come under our scrutiny pretty darn soon! Can we truly argue that creating an image of sexuality for a capitalist agenda has any real artistic merit? Can we ever consider selling the human form liberation? And, what seems to be becoming the case, are we just plain tired of the whole thing?
Text by Hannah Grange-Sales.
