final

Pedophile Vagueness Ads
A significant number of children designer houses use children models in a sexual suggestive way. However, most houses avoid this approach.

Summary of previous study:
The previous study by Reichert and Lambiase (Peddling Desire: Sex and the Marketing of Media and Consumer Goods, 2006, Sex in Consumer Culture) reveal that 71% of prime time television contains sexual imagery, language or behavior. The research also finds that there are 2 literatures in television; they are television programming and advertisements and they promote one another. The study then further explains that there are more divisions in the media’s sex literature. Most sexual imageries are heterosexist imageries of women, but some are images targeted to homosexuals in a vague way so to not displease heterosexual audiences. What this article has found is that a product or a person must sexually brand themselves in order to make sales. The sexualization of products often involve other people who are sexualize. However, they then found that only 17% of ads in newscasts and 23% on entertainment sites uses sexual induced advertisements.

Corpus, Method and Purpose:
The purpose of my research is to use the same content analysis and survey as the previous study to see how sex influences children advertising instead of advertising in general. My corpus comprises of a series of ads that appeared in Google from 16 industrialized countries. My method is quantitative content analysis where I code each ads as sexually suggestive and not sexually suggestive. Then they were coded to whether they in fact use children models or not. Also, whether or not these advertisements came from famous brands.

Findings:
I found that out of 126 design houses, 36 houses choose to depict children in a suggestive manner, 33 choose to not use kids at all, and 57 houses choose to depict children in a mild manner. The big houses such as Dior kids, Armani Junior, Versace Young and etc are split equally in their decisions to use children in a suggestive pose with roughly half of these houses choose not to associate sex with children. In the ads where children are depicted erotically, the children were usually not given suggestive clothing; it is rather the way they pose that makes them seem eroticized. There are advertisements that sell children bikinis and fancy underwear. However, advertisements from countries such as Canada where laws for children modeling are strict, children wearing underwear are only photographed from the waist up. Overall, it seems that children design houses are conservative when it comes to sex in their advertisement literature. However, the conservativeness of the design houses might be solely because of fear of lawsuits. I’ve had a hard time marking which ads are sexually suggestive and which ones are not. There are a lot of vagueness in ads that feature children.
When I compare my research to the chapter in the book, I found out that in children advertisement literature homoerotic content almost does not exist. There are no ads promoting boys swimwear. In addition to that, almost all the boys in children advertisements are fully covered. It is rare to even see a boy’s arm or ankle in children clothing ads. I also can’t find a boy that is clearly making a suggestive pose. On the other hand, there are ads for little girl’s bikini, sleeveless gowns, kimono and so on.
When girls are posed in an erotic fashion in these ads, they are also dressed in a children’s outfit that resembles adult clothing. Therefore, I conclude that the purpose of the eroticization of children in this ad is to make them appear more mature and thus making the product resembling adult ware. This phenomenon happens because designers want their products to be along the lines with famous clothing designs or houses and there are no famous houses of children’s fashion.
Conclusion:
The literature of the mini study doesn’t really fit well with the literature of the prior study. This is because the previous study is more focus on the adult world, whereas things turns out to be different for children. Sexualizations in the children world carries a different meaning and not everything that is found in the world of adult advertising can be found in the kids world such as homoeroticism for an example. Also, another thing that makes the adult advertising so different from children’s are the laws required. There are laws that are designed to protect children from obscenity and children need parental consent for them to appear in advertisements.