Pornography, once resigned exclusively to dirty darkened back street shops, has been transformed from a vice to a commodity. It has been moved from the seedy shop shelves to the largest of advertising bill boards in the most highly visible locations in our towns and cities. The plague of pornography is everywhere in advertising. Television, magazines, shopping centres. We are being flooded with pornographic images in the ambient background.
My marketing teacher taught us the fact that sex sells. This week the UK high street has been flooded with graphic sexual images of women in the pursuit of selling a bag of crisps.
As reported on the BBC
Padraig Power, commercial and marketing director of the IRFU, said: “This advertising campaign is in very bad taste and one which the IRFU would not want to be associated with in any way.
“Firstly, its blatant exploitation of women is tasteless and base and quite simply unacceptable.
The power of sex in advertise cannot be underestimated. The nature of the images in these adds coupled with double entendre captions, like “are you staring at my crisps?” is so pervasive, so much that you cannot avoid these signs as you commute to work or go shopping. The Belfast Telegraph displays a photograph of a young man staring up at one of these large bill board advertisements; a scene that I have witnessed being repeated by many a man in the city these past few days.
In our society pornographic images have become part of the ambience. Christians need to be on their guard against attacks of the enemy in this age where pornography counts as one of the largest attacks on the sanctity of marriage and the break up of the family.
