One of the things that I've learned over the years is that it's always a good idea to know who's telling you the story and why they are telling it. These are particularly important questions to ask when it comes to telling the story of sex in our society. (To see why telling the story of sex is important, see my original post on writing an evangelistic talk about sex.) In God's kindness, while wandering aimlessly around the net earlier in the year, preparing for a talk on pornography (there's a theme here!), I stumbled across a fascinating masters thesis on sex in advertising by Ilona Pawlowski at Canterbury University in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The guts of her research involved coming up with a coding scheme for rating the sexual content of adverts, and then trawling through over 140 different copies of a selected group of women's magazines. I found out all sorts of interesting things—like the fact that 50-60 per cent of your average women's magazine is made up of full-page advertising! (No guessing who's paying for what we read, is there?) But the most fascinating thing for me was this statement in her introduction:

This analysis found that sex is a tool used by advertisers in almost every advertisement that appears in women's magazines, particularly those targeted at the youngest age demographics.

And when she says “almost every advertisement”, she should know; she studied and coded over 5000 ads for their sexual content.

Completely outrageous sexual content is now so commonplace in advertising, we barely notice it. But reading sections of this study made me stop and think about how blatant it is. Whatever else may be true about those who are telling us that ‘anything goes’ sexually, we can be sure that many people are telling the story purely for profit. The only reason that so much advertising is sexually provocative is that advertisers are overwhelmingly convinced that the best way to bypass your brain and gain emotional attachment to their product is to use something other than your brain.

And so the evolutionary story that we are just animals wired for sex is complemented every day of our lives by images of impossibly beautiful people, wearing impossibly little clothing. The message is simple: if you can't be open about sex and see sexy people and cope with sexually explicit material, then you are sexually repressed. What the study does is point out ‘scientifically’ how shameless the use of sex in advertising actually is.

In the context of my evangelistic talk, this became another way of talking about whether we are free or living in bondage when it comes to sex. If the newspapers and magazines that carry the popular stories about scientific breakthroughs in understanding human biology and sexual functioning are the same magazines and newspapers that rely on outrageous sexual content for their continued financial existence, then you've got to at least ask the question about bias, don't you?

When you ask who's telling the modern story of sex and why they're telling it, it's hard to escape the conclusion that we've cheapened sex beyond recognition. But when you actually talk to real people, I don't think that many of them think sex is really that cheap.

So to pull together the posts on this topic so far, I used this research and Sam Brett's blog video and the idea of stories that make sense of our world to ask the question “Have we been sold a lie about sex?” My prayer was that it would create a space into which to speak the story about the dignity of humanity and the wonder of our created nature in a way that wasn't immediately ridiculed. The basic point of the second half of the talk was that God's picture of sex is so much better than the picture the world gives us.

Next time I'll tell you what I said about God's picture of sex and how we got to talking about Jesus.

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