ABSTRACT
Sexuality is a fundamental characteristic of people that influences their thoughts and behaviors, their orientations toward others, and life in general. For example, marketers are primarily concerned with micro-level effects; they want to know how sexual information evokes reactions within viewers, and how those reactions influence consumer behavior. The authors use tools from a variety of disciplines including consumer behavior, historical, epistemological, rhetorical, and postmodern perspectives. For those interested in pursuing postmodern or interpretive consumer research on sex in advertising, his article provides a fine starting point. One of the authors remembers that every time sex in advertising was mentioned, a colleague thought it referred to sex differences: individual differences regarding women and men, with no sexual meaning at all. Still others consider sex as inseparable from conceptions of social power, and this perspective is discussed eloquently by Kilbourne, who makes the argument that sexualized images of women maintain unequal gender roles through objectification, dismemberment, and disconnection.
