Advertising: Media Sexualisation and Progress in Marketing

When I opened my laptop to finish a paper last semester, a banner ad showed a woman in a bikini draped over a car hood, selling motor oil. Two hours later, scrolling through the same news site, I saw a sneaker commercial featuring a female engineer in coveralls explaining the science of cushioning technology. The whiplash felt enormous. Both ads existed in the same afternoon, on the same screen, selling products to the same audience, yet they reflected opposite philosophies about how to reach consumers.

This contrast captures where advertising stands today: caught between an outdated reliance on sexualized imagery and a genuine, if incomplete, shift toward representing people as complex individuals rather than objects. Progress is visible in how major brands now market themselves, but the old tactics persist because they remain profitable and familiar, making the advertising landscape a battleground where dignity and exploitation still share space.

I grew up watching television commercials that treated women's bodies as props. Beer ads featured women in barely-there clothing laughing at jokes they were not invited to make. Perfume ads showed faceless torsos intertwined in scenes that had nothing to do with fragrance. My mother would mute the television during certain spots, a silent protest I did not understand until middle school, when I noticed that the women in these ads never seemed to be doing anything except being looked at. By high school, I learned the term "male gaze" in an English class discussion of film, but it applied just as clearly to the thirty-second spots interrupting our shows. The pattern was so common that it felt like the natural language of advertising, the only way brands knew how to speak.

Sexualization in advertising works through a simple psychological mechanism: it captures attention quickly, and attention translates to memory, which advertisers hope translates to sales. Research in marketing has long shown that sexually suggestive content can increase recall of an ad, though not always recall of the product itself. This gap matters. A viewer might remember the image of a woman washing a car in slow motion but forget entirely which car brand paid for the spot. The strategy also relies on outdated gender roles, positioning women as decorative and men as empowered by possessing the right products. Advertisements for razors, for example, often show women gliding blades over already smooth legs in soft lighting, while men's razor ads feature athletes and language about performance and strength. These patterns reinforce the idea that women exist to be aesthetically pleasing and men exist to achieve and dominate.

The shift toward less sexualized advertising began in earnest about a decade ago, driven partly by social pressure and partly by changing demographics. Younger consumers, particularly those in my generation, respond poorly to ads that feel manipulative or disrespectful. A campaign that tries to sell me protein bars by showing a woman in workout gear posing rather than actually exercising feels insulting, not persuasive. Brands noticed. Dove launched its Real Beauty campaign, featuring women of different body types and ages, which felt revolutionary at the time. Nike followed with ads showing female athletes sweating, grimacing, and competing rather than smiling for the camera. I remember seeing a Nike ad during the Olympics last year that focused entirely on a runner's face as she crossed the finish line, exhausted and ecstatic, and thinking that it was the first sports ad I had seen in a long time that made me want to move rather than want to look a certain way.

Even with this progress, the old tactics remain disturbingly common. Scroll through any social media feed and the ads still lean heavily on cleavage, tight clothing, and suggestive poses, especially for products like alcohol, fashion, and fragrances. A company that publicly commits to empowerment in its television spots might still use a sexualized image in its Instagram carousel because algorithms favor content that stops thumbs mid-scroll, and sex still stops thumbs. I have also noticed that advertisements aimed at men often sexualize women, while advertisements aimed at women often sexualize women too, just in different ways. A liquor ad might show a woman as a reward for male success, while a shapewear ad shows a woman contorting herself to meet an impossible standard. Both reduce her to her body, just with different goals. The assumption in both cases is that desire, whether for approval or for control, sells better than respect.

What strikes me now is that the most effective advertisements I encounter are the ones that treat me like a person with a brain. A skincare brand that explains ingredients and their functions feels more trustworthy than one that promises I will be irresistible. A car commercial that demonstrates safety features or fuel efficiency stays in my mind longer than one that uses attraction as a substitute for information. I am not alone in this. My friends and I joke about how obvious and lazy sexualized ads feel, how they insult our intelligence by assuming we cannot see through the manipulation. Advertising still has a long distance to travel before it sheds its reliance on objectification entirely, but the direction has shifted. Brands that recognize their audiences as thinking, multifaceted individuals rather than walking insecurities are the ones building loyalty. The question is whether enough of them will follow that path, or whether the quick attention grab of a sexualized image will keep pulling the industry backward. I hope we keep demanding better, because what we tolerate in advertising shapes what we tolerate everywhere else.

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