Sex As A Salesman

Sex sells. Ask Madonna. Her book Sex sold more than a half million copies in one week. A combination of pornography, sexual fantasy, and sadomasochism, the book featured the blonde superstar exposing herself in front of a window, pulling a man’s nipple with her teeth, and hitchhiking naked on a busy Miami street. To say nothing about the naughty stuff. “The [book] project,” wrote Entertainment Weekly magazine, “was designed as almost-anything goes, although Madonna and Warner drew the line at pedophilia, violence, and sex with religious objects.” In praise of her “restraint”, the magazine quoted her stylist as saying, “Madonna is a very moral person”. Everything in our culture, it seems, has something to do with sex, whether it’s our choice in coffee or cars or a cruise line. Sex can still sell about anything. “Jeans”, Calvin Klein was quoted as saying, “are all about sssexx”. Apparently. In Klein’s mind “jeans” must have little to do with jeans. For some, it is equally important that sex be politically correct. Increasingly women are now being pictured as sexual aggressors, rather than available sex objects. Voluntarily though, some ask for it. Some ladies today quickly want the advertising industry that’s willing to expose erogenous zones to beep them. How do we tell what is misogynistic from what is not? Need I say that sex today sells marriage? It has become a major criterion for picking your soul mate, or “Mr. Right”, as the case may be. A friend of mine is quoted as saying, “We don’t marry who we do because that’s our choice. We do because we just have to. So if a man is cool enough and you won’t mind your kid to be bald, then you marry him. But if it so happens that my husband is not good in bed, I sure will go sleep outside”. Don’t we just love the honest 21st century woman? It has been said that when we “fall madly in love” about 25 percent of our brain is automatically disabled. When falling into love leads to falling into bed, the other 75 percent is sure to follow. Sex is not like playing cards. When you are dealing with the power of sex, it is increasingly difficult to stay in control of the game. Nollywood is quickly punching the buttons on sex as a salesman even in movies that are meant to be moral and modest. Even though her audiences have been structured by the entertainment industry to become voyeurs, the Nigerian entertainment industry never fails in providing images that leave Nigerians voyeuristic. While some people confuse a mere spark of emotional electricity for love because it feels good, check their status again against the background of love; they often get electrocuted by a “love” ingénue or enthusiast who was merely a primary source of the electricity channeled into the current they identified to be the generator of the conducted spark-sex.