OUGD503 - Secret 7 - Sexual References In The Media and Society

The whole Photoshop culture in the media, mainly in magazines, aids the sexualisation and suggestiveness of people on the covers, with the below being examples. The perfect skin, intense look in the eyes and the suggestive poses are all common within the media.

Not all sexual references are innuendo though, with some examples being just blatant, through the uses of both text and image.

Innuendo is common sight in advertising, with it mainly being based around something being subverted to look like fallic imagery.

It's also found in text form. Using text means that the image doesn't have to be quite as sexualised and so tend to avoid making as much as a stir. Note how the shape of the bra in the Calvin Klein advert looks like a 'u' and is placed next to the logo to show 'uck'...

The placement of hands are also a big thing. Clearly there are areas they can be placed that over-sexualise an image, but where the hand comes from is also important. A hand coming from off the screen tends to make the image look more intimate, the example that stands out in my mind is the hand on the steamy window in the film 'Titanic'.

Sexualised images are also used in music album covers as well, using many of the above features, as the Steel Panther and the Bon Jovi covers below show. The Bon Jovi cover wasn't actually used though, on the grounds that they didn't like the pink border.

Conclusions

Sexual Images are around everywhere, and some of them are very blatant and suggestive, as is the text that accompanies it. It can be made more intimate and therefore arguably classier by considering the outside of the image and the context it would be taken in, with the hands coming from outside the frame being an example of this. Sex is something that is synonymous with the music industry because of Rock & Roll, R&B and Hip-Hop, so it's no real surprise that it's the sort of thing that features on album covers. As far as finding appropriate places to display sexual images and references, album covers are the place, certainly more so than Skittle packets anyway...