ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses sturdy base camp and explores sexual appeals in advertising and marketing. As much as one fifth of advertising uses such appeals, but sexualized persuasion in the Western landscape looms larger than that because it surrounds us in films, music videos, television programming, Web content, magazine and book covers, and beyond. Another perspective about drive-by, consumable images is informed by postmodern writers Don DeLillo and Jean Baudrillard, especially in their focus on dissolving referents and endless simulations. In an important sense, this drive-by tourist trap or white noise as imagined by DeLillo mimics the attraction and repulsion of sexualized images in our society. Whether current advertising is documenting the ascent and ultimate demise of a public sexuality, no one can say. In this environment, however, it seems more important than ever to study advertising appeals among the sex noise and to provide knowledge about its cultural and economic impact.
