LET’S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER

buy.OLOGY
Designed by Trung Pham Tuan



- 127 -
across the hood of the new 1966 Ford Mustang. Surrounding her, delicate
flower petals spell out the number six (in reference to both the year and the
car’s six-cylinder engine). The tagline underneath? Six and the Single Girl.
A National Airlines stewardess makes come-hither eyes at readers from the
pages of a glossy magazine, circa 1971. “I’m Cheryl,” reads the tagline. “Fly me.”
A year later, a 23 percent increase in passengers prompts National Airlines to
release a series of follow-up ads in which a pack of beautiful stewardesses vows,
“I’m going to fly you like you’ve never been flown before.”
The year is 1977. A seductive Scandinavian blonde bites down suggestively
on a pearl necklace before purring, “For men, nothing takes it off like Noxzema
medicated shave.” As the man in her life vigorously shaves his beard, the
blonde adds, “Take it off. Take it all off.”
Decades ago, these ads scandalized many Americans. What’s happening to
our culture, people wondered? Is advertising going too far? Are we being
corrupted by sex?
But the television and print ads from the sixties and seventies were tame
when stacked up against those of today. After all, bear in mind that the female
perched atop the Mustang, the Noxzema model, and the airline stewardesses
were all fully clothed—even the man shaving was wearing an undershirt.
Compare this to the nearly naked bodies that sell us everything from perfume
to alcohol to underwear nowadays. Take an ad I saw recently, for example,
which featured a nearly naked man with his hands cuffed behind him and his
mouth gagged, while a long, limber, luscious pair of shapely legs belonging to a
dominatrix appeared behind tempting him with her…German vacuum cleaner.
Or the ad featuring another nearly naked man, his briefs tumbling over his

loins, a woman behind him caressing his chest in an ad for, of all things,
Renova toilet paper. Or the one showing a silhouette of a Volvo’s driver’s seat
with its parking break extending in the air—precisely like an erect penis—over
the tagline, “We’re just as excited as you are.”
1

In 2007, the ads for designer Tom Ford’s new fragrance featured a naked
woman clutching the bottle either against her thoroughly Brazilian-waxed,
slightly spread legs or between her bare breasts. The same year, a German
company known as Vivaeros claiming to have bottled the smell of sex in the
form of a “beguiling vaginal scent” released a new perfume called Vulva (I’ll
buy.OLOGY
Designed by Trung Pham Tuan



- 128 -
leave the design of the logo to your imagination) and began selling it as a
fragrance for men.
2

Or consider the ads for two new fragrances recently created by the rap mogul
P. Diddy and singer Mariah Carey. P. Diddy’s cologne, known as Unforgivable
Woman, was released in the U.K. with an accompanying promotional film
featuring a fully dressed Combs and a nearly naked supermodel engaging in,
shall we say, intimate behavior (the ad was rejected in the United States
because of its suggestive content). Mariah Carey took a more sensual approach:
the thirty-second ads for M feature a naked Mariah crooning and caressing
herself in the cascading dew of a rain forest.
3

According to a 2005 book entitled Sex in Advertising: Perspectives on the
Erotic Appeal, roughly one-fifth of all advertising today uses overt sexual
content to sell its products.
4
If you need evidence, just browse through the
latest issue of Vogue, pay a visit to your nearest American Apparel store, or
gape at the latest twenty-foot Calvin Klein billboards overlooking Times
Square.
Or drop by Abercrombie & Fitch. When I visit the chain’s stores, inevitably,
my eyes are drawn to the mannequins in the front windows. It’s hard not to
look—the females are all designed with unnaturally large breasts and the male
mannequins with an abnormally pronounced endowment. And if men’s jeans
or women’s blouses are on display, usually there’s a deliberately placed rip
affording a peekaboo glimpse of checkered boxer shorts here, a lacy bra strap
there.
But it’s not just clothing and perfume companies using the overt suggestion of
sex to peddle their products. One billboard promoting Las Vegas’s Hard Rock
Casino features a pair of bikini bottoms lowered around a woman’s calves. The
tagline: Get ready to buck all night.
5
And what about a commercial for the
Nikon Coolpix camera featuring a naked Kate Moss with the tagline See Kate
Like You’ve Never Seen Her Before. Even family-style restaurants aren’t
exempt. In a witty but salacious takeoff on nonsmoking patch commercials,
Nando’s, an Australian chain of poultry restaurants, showcases a naked, pole-
dancing mother who’s fighting her chicken “pangs” but, unable to place a patch
on her bare, wriggling bottom, has to resort to Nando’s poultry chewing gum.
And let’s not forget Virgin Atlantic’s edgy ad campaigns. Since 2000, British
Airways—Virgin’s archrival—has sponsored the London Eye, the giant Ferris

buy.OLOGY
Designed by Trung Pham Tuan



- 129 -
wheel and observation booth that sits on the banks of the Thames. Yet when
the London Eye found itself experiencing construction problems that delayed
its opening by over a year, Virgin founder Richard Branson spied his chance.
He hired a dirigible to fly over the oversized Ferris wheel with a message
reading “British Airways can’t get it up.” (No lawsuit ensued, because no Virgin
logo appeared; yet consumers immediately recognized the rival airline’s tone of
voice.) Virgin’s ad for its in-flight entertainment system? Nine inches of pure
pleasure.
In short, sex in advertising is everywhere—not just in TV commercials,
magazines, retail spaces, and on the Internet, but on the side of the bus you take
to work, in the aisles of your local deli, even in the airspace above your head.
But does sex necessarily sell? How effective are scantily clad models, sexually
suggestive packaging, or heart-stoppingly attractive product spokespeople in
actually seducing us to buy certain products over others?
In a 2007 experiment, Ellie Parker and Adrian Furnham of University College
London set out to study how well we recall sexually suggestive commercials.
They divided sixty young adults into four groups. Two groups watched an
episode of Sex and the City during which the female characters discuss whether
or not they’re good in bed, while the other two watched an episode of the
decidedly unerotic family sitcom Malcolm in the Middle. During the
commercial breaks, one segment of each group viewed a series of sexually
suggestive ads for products like shampoo, beer, and perfume, while the other
two groups watched ads with no sexual content whatsoever. The question, once
the study was over: What do you remember? Turns out that the subjects who

had been shown the sexually suggestive advertisements were no better able to
recall the names of the brands and products they had seen than the subjects
who had viewed the unerotic ads.
What’s more, the group that watched Sex and the City actually had worse
recall of the advertisements they had seen than the Malcolm in the Middle
viewers—it seemed their memory of the sexually explicit commercials had
been eclipsed by the sexual content in the show itself. It would appear, the
researchers concluded, “that sex does not sell anything other than itself.”
6

Further research by a New England–based company called MediaAnalyzer
Software & Research found that in some cases, sexual stimuli actually interfere
with the effectiveness of an ad. They showed four hundred subjects print ads
ranging in suggestiveness from racy cigarette ads to bland credit card entreaties,
buy.OLOGY
Designed by Trung Pham Tuan



- 130 -
then instructed the subjects to use their computer mouses to indicate where
exactly on the page their gaze instinctively migrated. Unsurprisingly, the men
spent an inordinate amount of time passing their mouses over the women’s
breasts. But in doing so, they largely bypassed the brand name, logo, and other
text. In other words, the sexually suggestive material blinded them to all the
other information in the ad—even the name of the product itself.
In fact, as it turned out, only 9.8 percent of the men who had viewed the ads
with the sexual content were able to remember the correct brand or product in
question, compared to almost 20 percent of the men who had seen the
nonsexual ones. And this effect was replicated in the women—only 10.85

percent remembered the correct brand or product featured in the sexual ads,
whereas 22.3 percent recalled the brand or product in the ones with the neutral
content. The research team dubbed this phenomenon the Vampire Effect,
referring to the fact that the titillating content was sucking attention from what
the ad was actually trying to say.

THOUGH SEX IN
advertising has been around for close to a century—a 1920s print ad shows a
nearly naked woman hawking Shrader Universal valve caps, tire pressure
gauges, and dust caps—when American consumers think of the birth of sex and
advertising, a single name often comes to mind: Calvin Klein. Ever since 1980,
when a fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields told the world, “Nothing comes
between me and my Calvins,” the designer has become renowned for his
mastery of the art of sexually suggestive advertising. But those 1980 Brooke
Shields ads, whose implicit waft of adolescent sex drove up jeans sales to
approximately two million pairs a month, were just the beginning of a
marketing strategy that made sexual allure synonymous with the Calvin Klein
brand. Mopey shirtless grunge couples. Doe-eyed models. A sinewy teenager in
crotch-hugging blue boxer shorts poised over a pubescent girl in an obvious
prelude to sex. Over the next few years, Klein’s billboards of young, chiseled
males and slender, busty female underwear models created a huge media
sensation, making stars out of the likes of Mark Wahlberg, Antonio Sabato Jr.,
Christy Turlington, and Kate Moss—all players in a global empire that, by
1984, was worth nearly a billion dollars a year.
7

buy.OLOGY
Designed by Trung Pham Tuan

- 131 -
Naturally, these provocative ads sparked public outrage—not to mention
stories in Time, Newsweek, and People, among other magazines. CBS and NBC
dropped some of the Shields commercials in protest. Women against
Pornography opposed the ads. Gloria Steinem called them worse than violent
pornography, but even this didn’t come between consumers and their Calvins.
In fact, it helped sales, and soon Klein controlled nearly 70 percent of the jeans
market at major retailers like Bloomingdale’s. “Did we sell more jeans?” Klein
was quoted as saying. “Yes, of course! It was great.”
8

In 1995, Klein upped the ante. He released a series of provocative TV
commercials whose unsteady camera work, low lighting, grainy resolution, and
setting in what resembled a cheap, wood-paneled San Fernando Valley motel
room appeared to deliberately mimic low-budget 1970s porn videos. In them, a
throaty, off-camera male voice asked the pubescent models suggestive questions
such as, Do you like your body? Have you ever made love before a camera?
The American public was indeed aroused. The American Family Association
rolled out a well-orchestrated letter campaign to retailers, urging them not to
carry the Calvin Klein brand in their stores. Soon, the U.S. Department of
Justice even launched an investigation into whether Klein had violated child
pornography laws (turns out he hadn’t, and was never charged). In response to
the outcry, Klein denied all accusations of pornography, claiming they merely
depicted “glamour…an inner quality that can be found in regular people in the
most ordinary setting.”
9

In the end, Klein pulled the ads, but the controversy created news—and
more free publicity—in itself. And his new line of jeans, specifically tailored so

the groin and the buttocks seam are both raised to emphasize the crotch and
the rear end, became among the most coveted pieces of clothing of the year.
The designer kept pushing the envelope. It was working, wasn’t it? In 1999,
Klein ran full-page ads in several periodicals (including the New York Times
Magazine) that featured two boys no older than five or six jumping around on a
couch wearing nothing but Calvin Klein underwear. Naturally, this created a
fresh new wave of outrage among antipornography groups, child’s rights
advocates, and the general public. Though a company spokesperson claimed
that the ads were intended to “capture the same warmth and spontaneity that
you find in a family snapshot,” a day later Klein very publicly scrapped the
entire campaign, including a large billboard of the same boys that was set to
debut in Times Square.
10