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The wider culture is supposed to counterbalance for this.

Taking things to the extreme: maybe people are by default violent and will kill a few people in their lifetime to get their way. But the culture counterbalances this.

Likewise everyone old enough to have a sex drive has seen enough publicity with barely-clad attractive women to know the ruse. Of course, people are still vulnerable to these things (cf. onlyfans, etc.) but at some point you have to establish that the rules are clear and if people still want to indulge the fantasy of a beautiful woman by buying a car, well, whatever.

Sure, we still put backstops to this with drugs, gambling. But the use of sex as a tool for attention grabbing is way too wide a net to cast.




In the UK, the advertising regulator is supposed to handle this; see https://www.asa.org.uk/type/broadcast/code_section/10.html

Mild amusement can be had from the example cases in the sex section: https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/offence-sexism.html

(I note that vaunted free speech zone America is actually more restrictive in what sexual material can be shown on TV or even marketed; there isn't a US "Babestation" TV channel, is there?)


In Brazil there was a lot of social pressure (from NGOs or similar "civil society" groups reflecting elite class views, but anyway) to curb what was becoming an arms race in beer advertising. Now beer advertising is very modest about female skin, and instead focuses on time with the guys and so on.

TV coverage of the yearly five-days Mardi Gras has also dialed back very very significantly over the past decade. Internationally we can see the case of F1 "Grid Girls". The culture sometimes puts backpressure on this.

(Societies have odd contradictions on sex generically. In relatively relaxed, women-breastfeed-in-public, close-physical-contact among strangers Brazil, topless sunbathing is not only frowned upon, it's illegal. People will snitch on tourists and the police will go and arrest them.)


>Likewise everyone old enough to have a sex drive has seen enough publicity with barely-clad attractive women to know the ruse.

Clearly not, for the simple fact that they do it anyway. It works, else you wouldn't see it in ads.


This is what Slavoj Zizek terms the "cynical function of ideology". People can know the ruse and enjoy it anyway. No one goes to e.g. striptease joints expecting complete sexual gratification.

(The following video analyzes a fragment of the movie "West Side Story" and it's fully SFW)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzztNjZqbOQ




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