SEX NO longer sells. The Economist, oracle of the international business community, says so. Quoting everyone from the Chartered Institute of Marketing — “Using sex to sell has been overdone and has reached saturation point” — to the advertising trade paper Campaign — “There’s a lot less flesh flashed around in advertising” — the magazine this week toppled one of the truisms of our times: that sex is the supreme marketing tool.

Phew! What a relief. Recognising that the naked bimbette cannot shift their deodorant, or that the copulating couple don’t raise the sales figures of their instant coffee, advertisers may now stop bombarding us with explicit images. You cannot cross a high street or watch a programme on commercial telly without being head-butted by someone’s private parts, or someone simulating an orgasm. The money men have sexualised everything. From cooking — think of Nigella’s porno-food telly offerings — to children's clothes — a cherry on the crotch of knickers for nine-year-old girls — they have taught us that we can appeal only by being sexy and that sex (no matter your age, or inclination) is the ultimate achievement.

Given the all-pervasive nature of the market, it has been easy to brainwash most of us into thinking that sex is the trigger behind every human word or deed. It lurks behind people washing windows as well as drinking wine; it hovers over the unwrapping of a chocolate bar as well as the unfolding of a newspaper.

The result is at once exhausting and irritating, like being confined to a classroom of testosterone-fuelled teenage boys. And, just like one of these spotty, hormone-raging, porn-site junkies, the marketing world has lost all sense of proportion when it comes to sex, inflating the importance of a pleasurable, occasional activity into the only game in town.

It has also turned us all into (often) unwilling voyeurs. Everywhere sex is throbbing, sweating, oohing and aahing. This might hit the spot for a certain type of sexually frustrated man and woman. The rest of us, though, want our bit of nudity or other people’s fornication only when and if we choose it.

The result of all these decades of assault has been to harden our sensibilities like a smoker’s arteries. A society that allows thongs for little girls and passes for public release Michael Winterbottom’s film of a couple who are genuinely “at it” can no longer get worked up about sexually-explicit imagery.

Indeed, tits and bums and orgasms have become part of our everyday currency, as familiar as the Queen’s head. This is true not only in Britain, but on the Continent as well. In Italy manufacturers sell everything from dishwashing soap to cruises with a full-frontal photo of a naked woman; in Germany, Fa shower gel ads have been using naked women with come-hither looks for so long that the Fa-Frauen have become part of the cast of national characters. Having made sex so banal, advertisers cannot hope to keep it enticing as well. Why should we part with our money for something ordinary?

There is a feminist, or at least female, dimension to the great sex turn-off. Marketing gurus have woken up to the fact that women may represent 45 per cent of the working population, but they represent more than 60 per cent of the purchasing one. Women are out there buying — whether as a single professional woman on the look-out for the accessory for herself; or as the wife doing her husband’s clothes shopping, the office manager buying the company’s must-haves or the PA (and these are still mostly women) doing her boss’s Christmas gift list.

To entice women, advertisers cannot bank on the naked babe or the sweaty couple. As a strategy for seduction, this is about as successful as the first date who says: “What do you say, let’s skip the foreplay — your place or mine?” Hence, Cadbury, the maker of Flake, has dropped its highly suggestive advertising campaigns — which played on the phallic shape of their bestselling chocolate bar — to woo us instead with a message of spiritual nirvana. Dove, the soap manufacturer, recently rethought its marketing strategy to include “real” (read unbotoxed, uncollagened size 12 and up) women.

In changing their chat-up lines, the marketing gurus are voluntarily carrying out what Anna Diamantopoulou, the former Greek Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs in Brussels, wanted the European Commission to enforce with a new directive. Last year Ms Diamantopoulou called for a “EU-wide code for advertising and media” that would have brought sex-crazed advertising under the rule of the European Union’s commissars of political correctness. She needn’t have worried: women consumers don’t need legislation to make themselves heard. Their purse will do.

So what will replace sex as the greatest marketing tool? Many advertisers point to humour as a great magnet. Playful puns, slapstick comedy, witty subtext: as in real life courtships, a humorous approach can seduce far more often than an in-your-face attempted pick-up. A new, more playful advertising would also tap into our post-September 11 anxiety: we want to purchase security for ourselves and our loved ones, and a playful format offers the familiar comfort of childish days.

Whatever the future brings, an end to 24/7 sex is something to cheer about. It was time someone showed the money men that their come-ons are a turn-off.

Cristina Odone is deputy editor of The New Statesman

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