17.20 Sexual imagery in magazine ads.

In what ways do advertisers in magazines use sexual imagery to appeal to youth? One study classified each of 1509 full-page or larger ads as “not sexual” or “sexual,” according to the amount and style of the dress of the male or female model in the ad. The ads were also classified according to the target readership of the magazine.⁵ A logistic regression was used to describe the probability that the clothing in the ad was “not sexual” as a function of several explanatory variables. Here are some of the reported results:

Reader age is coded as 0 for young adult and 1 for mature adult. Therefore, the coefficient of 0.50 for this explanatory variable suggests that the probability that the model clothing is not sexual is higher when the target reader age is mature adult. In other words, the model clothing is more likely to be sexual when the target reader age is young adult. Model sex is coded as 0 for female and 1 for male. The explanatory variable men's magazines is 1 if the intended readership is men and 0 for women's magazines and magazines intended for both men and women (general interest). The variable women's magazines is coded similarly.