Sexiness and Selling: Consumerism’s Pornographic Imagination

Abstract

This chapter examines the role that sexiness plays in selling consumerism. The adjective ‘sexy’ has gained a certain ubiquity and influence in contemporary media and culture. It is used broadly to describe not only individuals who are considered sexually attractive, but also a wide variety of commodities, particularly those that adorn or accentuate the body, and practices and experiences which are not directly related to sexual activity, such as hairstyling and shopping. Sexiness has become more than a catchall description of desirability. It has become a mode of communication that is used to sell not only a wide variety of commodities but also a certain kind of pleasure to which consumerism promises access. The maxim goes: sex sells. But in the analysis of consumer media texts it is not enough to merely assume this. We need to account for how sex sells, and why images are considered sexy (Schroeder and McDonagh, 2006: 220). In typography, the lettering of the word ‘sex’ has an ‘eye’: that semi-circular part of the ‘e’ that forms a closed slit (Carter, 2000). The argument made in this chapter builds on this suggestion to claim that sexiness is produced partially but significantly through visual forms of communication. Consumer media construct narratives of sexiness and sexual pleasure through the presentation of bodies and it is precisely the visual consumption thereof that can be reconfigured as a sexual act in its own right (and thus pleasurable).