ABSTRACT
The perspectives of this book stake out but a small, sturdy base camp from which to explore sexual appeals in advertising and marketing. As much as one fifth of advertising uses such appeals (Lin, 1998; Reichert, Lambiase, Morgan, Carstarphen, & Zavoina, 1999; Walker, 2000)/ 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. Among all this visual "sex noise/" the most common metaphor for sex is a woman/s body, although men/s bodies are being commodified as well, as Barbara Stern reminds us in this volume. These appeals to sexual impulses are nothing neWt of course; Aristotle discussed them to help speakers connect with particular audiences in The Rhetoric. Young men, he said, "are prone to desires and inclined to do whatever they desire. Of the desires of the body they are most inclined to pursue that relating to sex, and they are powerless against this" (1991 translation/ p. 165). Aristotle/s ideas, of course, are deliberate stereotypes, but that they hold true more than 2/300 years later is proof of their power.
