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Springs’ rules and casual humor toward sex in advertising held for many de-cades, but began to take a series of contradictory modifications under an-other significant shift in American life. When the postwar baby boom generation came of age, the advertiser’s audience had dramatically changed.

The Puritan ideal, which stressed the importance of hard work and rewards, had gradually dropped out of favor with youths and had given way to plea-sure seeking. The widespread availability of birth control also contributed to this new sense of personal freedom. When Dr. Alfred Kinsey published his 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, the uproar was volcanic. But by 1966, when William Masters and Virginia Johnson published a far more intimate and revealing study, Human Sexual Response, the book hardly created a stir.

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As advertisers faced increasing pressure to communicate with youth, adver-tising agencies ever attuned to the tenor of the times began to create new im-ages and craft their messim-ages in provocative new ways.

During the 1960s, the social forces of feminism hit Madison Avenue.

Feminists not only addressed the old issues of pay inequities and a lack of opportunity, but also challenged the roles assigned to women in a male-dominated society. Works such as Betty’s Friedan’s The Feminine Mys-tique (1963) argued that society conditioned women from childhood to think of themselves only as wives and mothers or sex objects. In contrast men were to believe that they could do “men’s work” and become leaders in business and politics. Yet women of this era were better educated, more socially and politically aware, and almost half had joined the work force.

No longer did women accept that they had to get married, start a family, and dedicate themselves to homemaking. Nor did they accept that they had to be pretty, sweet, and demure. This meant that women were no longer go-ing to be influenced by the same advertisgo-ing and promotional messages that may have motivated them a few years ago.

Three ad campaigns reflected this change in society’s attitude toward women. The prewomen’s liberation Maidenform campaign had shown women acting out their supposedly exhibitionist fantasies while display-ing their Maidenform bras. One openly erotic advertisement pictured a curvaceous young woman with the headline, “I dreamed I took the bull by the horns in my Maidenform bra.” As the years went by, the campaign por-trayed women who turned these dreams into reality by penetrating tradi-tionally male-dominated domains, such as financial offices, architects’

drawing rooms, and even pool halls. But the ads increasingly infuriated feminists because they pictured the scantily clad women with fully dressed men. And by the late 1960s, some women were burning their bras and not wearing them at all, so Maidenform discarded the campaign.

To reach the new woman, Virginia Slims targeted women buyers and launched one of the longest-running, most successful campaigns in adver-tising history. With its slogan, “You’ve come along way, baby,” and compar-ative photographs, the campaign contrasted women of today with those of earlier eras. But the turning point came in 1973, when Revlon’s Charlie per-fume campaign displayed confident, pant-suited young women pursuing traditionally male-oriented activities. By the end of the decade marketers also realized that growing numbers of women were earning higher salaries.

Thus, ads now not only depicted the attractive, professional woman at work but also increasingly pitched her cars, homes, and life insurance. In the 1980s, these values began to reassert themselves in sexually charged ad-vertising from perfume to blue jeans

“The most risqué copy I have seen was for Paco Rabanne’s men’s co-logne,” said David Ogilvy (1983, p. 28). One of television’s sexiest 30 seconds

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called “Man in Bed” opened with a French-accented man stirring himself awake as the telephone rang. “Hello,” he yawned into the phone. “You snore,” a woman’s voice informed him. “And you steal the covers,” he re-sponded jokingly. As the conversation continues, paintings and discreet camera angles hid his nudity; the viewer never sees the woman. In a gen-der-role reversal it was now the woman who rose at daybreak to go on a busi-ness trip, leaving the lovesick man in bed. A two-page print ad also ran, showing the man in bed, with the commercial script expanded and printed alongside. As a promotional stunt, department stores across the country hired actors to lie on beds placed in store windows and talk with passersby who called from extension phones placed on the sidewalks. Sales for Paco Rabanne went up 25%, and in 1981, the advertisement, created by Ogilvy &

Mather, was voted the best to appear in magazines. This foray into sexual ad-venturism continued with Calvin Klein’s promotion of Obsession perfume, whose ads suggested that an erotic fantasy world awaited consumers.

Using sex to sell to teens also became a common image-building tactic.

The once humble “dungarees” became big fashion, and big news. For ex-ample, in 1980 Sergio Valente, Bon Jour, Calvin Klein, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Jordache spent nearly $40 million in advertising. When Calvin Klein introduced his jeans campaign in 1981, controversy arose over the sexy ads and commercial spots featuring teen star Brooke Shields seducing audi-ences with her provocative “Know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” Three network-owned stations in New York banned the ads. Nevertheless, sales of the expensive jeans jumped nearly 300% fol-lowing the first wave of commercials (“The ‘80s,” 1990, p. 19). In another controversy that same year, the Chicago Transit Authority pulled hundreds of bus billboards for the Bon Jour brand due to citizen complaints. The ads showed a model’s torso with her jeans unzipped far enough to hint that she was not wearing underwear. And Jordache ran ads of blouseless young women astride similarly clad young men. Many people objected to the sexy jean ads, but before long, people paid extravagant sums for denims that dis-played designers’ names on their backsides.

These emerging trends also coincided with the marketers’ attempt again to redefine the way they advertised to women. Now advertising showed women in two different worlds: the traditional one, a rerun of the 1950s with stay-at-home moms, and a modern one filled with women who hold jobs, have career goals, and derive pleasures from outside the home. Ads creatively addressed such issues as maintaining control without being a superwoman, combating fatigue, balancing work, and so on.

At the same time, a new genre of advertisements emerged that focused on the sensibilities of a new breed of woman, who in turns objectifies men—that is, “reverse sexism.” In an upbeat parody one such Diet Coke television commercial featured Lucky Santos as a construction worker,

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who in a reverse role, is the object of attention of a group of female office workers. Some ads were far more explosive, tapping into some women’s

“I-don’t-need-a-man-attitude.” Under the new direction, Bodyslimmers lingerie showed a women from the neck down wearing a one-piece under-garment; the copy read: “While you don’t necessarily dress for men, it doesn’t hurt on occasion to see one drool like the pathetic dog that he is.”

Another ad for Hyundai cars featured two women arguing that men buy powerful cars because they are worried about the size of their penis—but the word is never spoken. One says, “He must be overcompensating for a

… shortcoming.” When a handsome man drives up in an economy Hyundai, the second woman muses, “I wonder what he’s got under the hood?” Of course, all women did not share the mindset of the women in this advertisement, so admakers continually faced the challenge of how to reach a new balance, adjusting approaches in favor of women and follow-ing the currents of culture.

Expanding sexuality is both prevalent and significant today. The topic is probed, brooded on, and encouraged in adult education, literature, televi-sion, films, the Internet, and a myriad of publications—many catering to such specialized interests as homosexuality, sapphism, nudism, and fetish-ism. Scan recent women’s magazines and one will be inundated with innu-endo from Bruce Weber’s photographs for a Calvin Klein advertising insert in Vanity Fair to the Victoria Secret lingerie fashion show on the Internet.

Same with Abercrombie & Fitch’s racy summer retail catalog, which is dis-played in tightly wrapped plastic, intended for buyers 18 or older, and fea-turing young, unclad male and female models in what the company touts as sexy in a wholesome sort of way. By the standards of Playboy or Pent-house, the book might seem tame; yet, in fact, today’s youth-oriented ads touch on every area of sexual pleasure and perversion.

Even so, the advertising is far less sexually explicit than much of what people can readily find elsewhere in their lives—in films, in magazine fea-tures, on cable TV, and in literature. Advertising’s explicitness does not pro-vide proof of the depravity of its creators and sponsors, but is epro-vidence that some of the restraints in force are outdated. The irony is that in Europe and South America, where advertising is allowed to deal with sex more openly, the ads don’t come across nearly as sexy as American advertising, which is generally less explicit.

If today’s young generation of readers are less shocked by open sexu-ality than their grandparents’ coquettish suggestions, can culture be far from a time when any sexual inclination will be freely portrayed in ad-vertising? Can we then see an end to representations of women as sexual objects, which traditionally has been the basis of sex in advertising? And will the next generation be unimpressed with sex as a selling point? This kind of advertising does attract considerable attention and readership.

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And it will continue to do so as long as there is sexuality itself. People will be dressing, scenting themselves with perfumes, and beautifying with cosmetics, not only to interest romantic partners, but also to give hidden pleasures to themselves.

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Chapter 4