Department of Advertising

Sexuality and Nudity

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

As this web site develops, in the space below we will provide a bibliography of articles and books relevant to this topic. To the extent practical, bibliographic references will be annotated.

Anyone interested in submitting additional bibliographic material for this reference page, or for any of the others at this site, is welcome to send such material via e-mail to jef@mail.utexas.edu. Please type the references in the same format as is used here, and keep the annotations to a few sentences.

  1. Lawrence Soley and Gary Kurzbard (1986). Sex in Advertising: A Comparison of 1964 and 1984 Magazine Advertisements. Journal of Advertising, 15 (3): 46-54, 64.

    Based on a content analysis of sexual portrayals in ads that appear in 1964 and 1984 issues of general-interest, women's and men's magazines, the authors suggest that although the percentage of ads with sexual content has remained constant, sexual illustrations have become more overt during the twenty-year time interval. The article also reports that female models in the ads analyzed are more likely to be portrayed as suggestively clad, partially clad or nude than male models.

  2. Lawrence C. Soley and Leonard N. Reid (1985). Baiting Viewers: Violence and Sex in Television Program Advertisements. Journalism Quarterly, 62 (1): 105-110, 131.

    A sample of 806 television program ads that appeared in TV Guide during 1980-1982 are examined for the presence or absence of visual portrayals of and verbal referents to violence and sex. Results show that violence and sex are predominant features of television program advertisements with network ads containing these elements most and ads for cable and public broadcasting programs least.

  3. Daniel C. Bello, Robert W.Pitts, and Michael J. Etzel (1983). The Communication Effects of Controversial Sexual Content in Television Programs and Commercials. Journal of Advertising, 12 (3): 32-42.

    The effect of controversial sexual content in commercials as well as in programming is empirically examined on three measures: interest in commercial, affect toward product, and purchase intent. Excerpts from an actual program (Vegas) and actual commercials for a product (Calvin Klein Jeans), controversial or noncontroversial, are used in the study of college students. Results indicate that apart from merely making the commercials more interesting, the controversial content does not significantly improve the communication effectiveness of the advertising. For males, however, the noncontroversial ad is found to be less effective when following the controversial programs.

© 1995, 1996, 1997 Jef I. Richards
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