Smarter people than me are also fascinated by it

Sex in advertising, that is.

Lisa Wade, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Occidental College and a blogger at Sociological Images. As she often takes on the issue of sex and sexism in advertising and other media, we often end up sharing links.

The most recent one she shared (via Facebook) is a Pinterest board of ads that use subliminal, and not so subliminal, sexual symbolism.

And by "not subliminal", she means stuff like this:

And this:

And...

Some are subversive:

Others are rather creative:

As an educator, Lisa provides links to analyses of the images. As an adman (and ad critic), I find this both useful and entertaining. Here's hoping the Sexual Symbolism board will continue to expand, and that people will actually learn to make and/or identify better ads because of it.

Pornterest

Today, Buzzfeed published an amusing post about how the word "porn" is used on Pinterest (a social scrapbooking site where people gather favourite online images) to describe anything they like looking at.

And not just the trendy term "food porn" either:

"Fishing Gear Porn"

"Word Porn"

"Real Estate Porn"

What I found particularly amusing about this (besides the fact that someone innocently called their board "dog porn") is that this morning Jezebel had a post about the actual Pinterest of Porn, called "Snatchly". (The link is safe — it goes to a signup page.)

Worlds are colliding. Or, rather, "words".

But let's just hope this overuse of the p-word doesn't end in tragedy, when an innocent sweet tooth in need of some delicious Pudding Porn ends up instead conjuring up two girls and a cup over on the wrong network.