Gratification

This Burger King advertisment is completely centered on the desire of men to be gratified by oral sex. Burger King is shamelessly using sex to attract men, and blatantly persuade them buy their burgers.

These portrayals of sex focus solely on the dominance of men. In Injuries that Injure, Lisa Wade and Gwen Sharp address the notion that sex sells and argue, “Advertisers use a limited version of sex: a nearly uniformly heterosexual version that presents men as active sexual subjects and women as passive sexual objects who perform for the please of the (implicitly male) viewer” (Ross, Susan 163).¹ In this ad, the woman is passively allowing herself to be orally penetrated by the phallic image of the hamburger.

Ads like these reinforce women’s role as an object of male pleasure, rather than an equal to be taken seriously. This is reflected in the work force, the jobs that women hold, and the pay gap. Ads like this also reinforce that women should remain in a subordinate position to men.

Some other infamous examples are:

Carl’s Jr and Paris Hilton: “She’ll tell you size doesn’t matter. She’s lying.
Ohhhhhh because the size of your burger directly relates to the size of your… yeah, I think you get it.

Budlight’s #UpForWhatever Campaign: “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night.”
To be fair, they released a public apology for this one, however the sexual implications of not saying “no” are extremely harmful.

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^{1 Ross, Susan Dente, Paul Martin Lester, Lisa Wade, and Gwen Sharp. “Selling Sex.” Images that injure pictorial stereotypes in the media. 3rd ed. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2011. 163-172. Print.}