Advertising is everywhere: in public transport, in stores, malls, in the streets, on TV, Internet and so on. It just surrounds us wherever we go. We cannot escape it. Moreover, we are affected by it even if we don’t want to be. However, this effect is not uniform, it is gender linked.
What is also noticeable is that today ads tend to become more and more “sexual”. The use of sex appeal becomes the dominant method of catching and holding our attention. Does this really work, or is it a mere myth, which marketers believe, but customers disprove of? Facing it, sex in advertising does work. Sex is the second strongest of the psychological appeals, right behind self-preservation. Its strength is biological and instinctive, the genetic imperative of reproduction. However, the differences in male and female psychobiology cause different approaches to and perceptions of sex, both the act and its outcome. For many products it is possible to find (or invent) a sexual connection. However, the sexual connection is much easier to set up for men than for women. For men, as long as a woman looks young enough and healthy, she is desirable. Thus, in advertising it is easy to get a man's attention by using women's bodies and associate getting the woman if he buys the product. It is playing on his instinctive rather than intellectual view of the world. The use of sex in advertising to women is a much more difficult proposition. Women are looking for more both in advertisements and in men. To sell to a woman, advertising relies on the modern idea (only a few hundred years old) about how men and women relate - romance. Rarely does the romantic appeal contain the blatant sexual messages that appear in ads aimed at men since such messages would counter the intellectual view. Although an ad may use a man's body as an attention getting device, he is usually shown in a romantic rather than sexual context. Sometimes women advertising contains sexually appealing female models, which should arouse in women-customers the desire to look or the feeling of looking the way the model does. In such a case, the message is usually successful as long as the sex appealing image is not to blatant or overt. Thus, it is clear that sex is a strong appeal to use in advertising. However, it is a gender linked appeal. Sex easily sells to men; it can be an adjunct to women.
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