Here's Why Sex Doesn't Sell Anymore

Take a look at the lingerie ads of the past four decades, and you’ll notice they’re all pretty much selling the same thing: sex. But a new crop of lingerie brands are doing away with come-hither stares and perfect (or perfectly airbrushed) physiques. Instead, they’re using their marketing dollars to power discussions around issues a little more important to today’s women—especially Millennial women—than looking good in the bedroom.

Take Thinx, a six-year-old, New York-based company that specializes in moisture-wicking underwear for your period. (The stuff’s pretty magical: Most designs can hold up to two tampons worth of blood, eliminating the need for any menstrual hygiene products on all but your heaviest days.) When Thinx first got going in 2010, it was pretty shy about the whole period thing, promising to keep customers “covered every day of every month.” In fact, when the company launched a Kickstarter funding campaign in 2013, the word “period” was nowhere to be found.

Fast forward to the present, you can find multiple Thinx ads at some of the biggest subway stations in Manhattan. There are posters boldly advertising “underwear for women with periods,” showing women in black Thinx panties alongside suggestively dripping egg yolks and red grapefruit. Getting those posters up wasn’t easy: The ads’ images and copy were repeatedly rejected by New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) for being “too suggestive." Only after the company went to the press did the transportation authority finally grant approval. In trying to proactively talk about periods, Thinx had to confront the MTA’s own discomfort with the subject. And in the process, it gained the support of thousands of women pleased to see a brand advocating for more openness around the fact that—surprise, surprise—most women have periods every month.

Courtesy of Thinx

“When you’re having a period, leaks lead to embarrassing moments, and it’s very hard to have a conversation about a thing that’s embarrassing you and a product that stops you from having that embarrassment,” Thinx co-founder Miki Agrawal tells Allure of the company’s shift in marketing strategy. “In May of 2015, we brought in a new creative team and decided together that we didn’t want to say ‘time of the month’ or dance around the issue anymore, we decided to say ‘period’ and say it loudly and proudly. If we, who own a period-proof underwear company, can’t talk about periods without a sense of shame, how can anybody?”

Thinx isn’t the only company using advertising to challenge discrimination against women and their bodies. For more than a decade, Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign has raised awareness about the lack of diversity and authenticity in ads targeted at young girls and women. Aerie’s #AerieREAL lingerie ads call out its competitors for using excessive image retouching, which set an unrealistic example for the teen and college-aged girls that make up its customer base. The lingerie startup Naja has released ads to underline how most bra companies offer a single “nude” bra fit for light skin tones; Naja offers a much wider range of seven. The tagline? “Because one nude doesn’t fit all.”

“It’s important for us to make a social impact through advertising,” says Naja co-founder Catalina Girald. That impact doesn’t just encompass advertising: In keeping with its founding mission to “empower women,” the company employs primarily single mothers or female heads of households at their factories, implementing flexible work and childcare policies and paying for their children’s books, school supplies, uniforms, and school meals. The idea, says Girald, is to “empower the wearer as well as the maker of the product.”

Courtesy of Naja

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If you’re wondering why these brands care so much about feminist issues all of a sudden, the answer is pretty simple: It’s because consumers do, especially those all-important Millennials. “Millennials really do believe they can, are, and do make a difference by what they buy and the brands they associate themselves with,” says Mary Landor, global president of consumer brands at international brand consulting firm Landor. “That’s the reason we’re seeing all these different ads pop up, because Millennials are so susceptible to that.”

Pauline Maclaran, professor of marketing and consumer research at Royal Holloway, University of London, says that we’re currently living in a “moralized brandscape.” “In general, consumers are looking for something that reflects their own identity," Maclaran tells Allure. "[Increasingly] we want to do good...and brands are responding to that.”

In some ways, it’s hard not to be cynical about such ads. Yes, Naja may compel us to reconsider the lingerie industry’s narrow definition of nude, but at the end of the day, isn’t the company just trying to sell underwear? “To state the obvious, brands are usually looking to make money, and they will tap into the cultural environment to try to resonate with consumers,” says Maclaran. “They’re not necessarily doing it out of higher order ideals. But I think the outcome often has good results, even if they’re not doing it from the most authentic of motivations.”

Adam Wray, a writer and the former curator of fashion industry newsletter FashionREDEF, concurs. “Advertising plays a big role in shaping societal values, even if the ultimate motivation for a company is to make money.” He points to an ad released by Diesel last year featuring two androgynous models with the words, “this ad is gender neutral.” While Wray is skeptical of Diesel's intentions, he argues that the brand is nevertheless providing a beneficial platform for discussion. “If the downstream effect of running this campaign is that someone in Middle America starts to think differently about bathroom law bills, then maybe it’s a good thing. The same goes for companies advertising their stuff based on this conception of feminism.”

So yes, these brands are indeed trying to sell you underwear, but they’re also helping further important social causes. That’s certainly better than a billboard featuring another Photoshopped model in frilly underwear, don’t you think?

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