Who are the main targets for these ads, men or women?

Sex appeal is a powerful selling point that advertisers can use to attract the attention of males and females. As an essential survival instinct for our species, sex has a strong influence over our human brains. From a social standpoint, however, sex sells is a reality that also helps objectify both women and men. Modeling a product gives consumers an opportunity to see what they might like a product to do for them. Throwing in some sex appeal attracts the attention of the opposite sex while playing on the vanity of the same sex. Although expectations of consumers in sexiness may be entirely unrealistic, it is human nature to inflate our perception of ourselves and our allure, thus advertisements are designed to exploit our psychological weakness to want to be seen as more desirable to the opposite sex than what we are.

Most advertisements certainly do not degrade women as much as prostitution does, yet our society is saturated with these images valuing women by this one aspect of their beauty. The same is true for men. For those who cannot match such ideals, ads can deeply hurt them on a psychological level as well as a social level. Meanwhile, these advertisements also encourage an unhealthy preoccupation with an ideal image of sex that few individuals can live up to. Advertisements often use sex appeal to varying degree in order to sell their products. Whether simply including only supposedly beautiful people in ads or constantly throwing out images of sex, they exploit the tendency of consumers to degrade the opposite sex by focusing solely on the sex appeal of a person. When ads hurt self images of individuals or encourage us to objectify people beyond what we already do naturally, they can be very harmful to individuals and our society as a whole.