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Sexual liberation for women is often seen as a means of empowerment. Yet challenging the conventional Chinese beliefs of what constitutes a “good woman” might threaten men’s power, resulting in sanctioning. This study aims to uncover the link between women’s liberal sexual attitudes and an extreme form of sanctioning – sexual harassment.

Using data from Chinese Health and Family Life Survey, structural equation modeling is applied to examine the hypothesized relationships between sexual harassment and individual and community characteristics, as well as the direct and indirect effects of liberal sexual attitudes.

The author found that a woman’s liberal sexual attitude has a positive direct effect on sexual harassment. Whether the woman resides in rural or urban areas is not directly linked to sexual harassment, yet liberal sexual attitudes among urban women mediate the effect of geographical location, leading to their greater risk of being harassed. Youthfulness and women having a paid job are risk factors for sexual harassment but self-rated attractiveness is not.

The results reflect a conservative societal view of women’s sexuality, even though it is often believed that China’s sexual revolution is on the way – which plausibly refers to the greater permissiveness for heterosexual men. This study thus illuminates the importance of gender egalitarianism in the process of liberalization of social and moral attitudes toward sex.

This study thus illuminates the importance of gender egalitarianism in the process of liberalization of social and moral attitudes toward sex.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the content and approach of parent-adolescent communication about sexuality were associated with three adolescent sexuality variables (sexual attitudes, combination of all behaviors and advanced behaviors).

Survey research with adolescents was conducted in classrooms at school. Participants were 473 adolescents (196 males, 253 females and 24 unreported) in grades 9–12 from two high schools (one urban and one suburban) in a large midwestern city.

Adolescents who described their parents’ communication approach as open, or who did not engage in conversations about sexuality with their parents reported lower rates of sexual behavior, when compared to adolescents whose parents dictated such conversations. Females were found to have more conservative sexual attitudes than males, and both mothers and fathers were found to have a direct role in talking to their children about sexuality.

Findings from the study may offer guidance to parents and help adults aiming to empower youth to make healthy sexual decisions.

This paper aims to explore the “love motel” concept by examining the changing attitude of consumers in Taiwan. This will increase knowledge of the sector and define love motels.

The literature review charts the development of Taiwanese love motels from a dual origin: American motels and Japanese “love hotels.” This is followed by an empirical qualitative study consisting of a two‐stage collection strategy: focus groups of hospitality and tourism professionals to gather a wide range of opinions on the subject area, followed by semi‐structured interviews with consumers.

The findings split into three interrelated areas: growth of Taiwanese love motels due to more liberal attitudes towards sexual practice; a change in the public perception of motels due to increased standards and an increased satisfaction with the personal consumption experience; these hotels are designed for couples.

The empirical element of the study is an exploration of consumer experience in Taiwanese love hotels. Because of the sensitive nature of some of the data that were gathered a qualitative approach has been adopted.

The sexual associations with this product appear almost coincidental. If the love motel product is considered in its purest form it is simply a hotel product that provides complete anonymity for its guests. Therefore, despite its application in South East Asia, this hospitality concept has potential to be applied in a variety of guises.

The phenomenon of “love hotels” is absent from the hospitality management literature; the paper begins to fill that gap by beginning a discussion on this possibly controversial sector.

This paper aims to examine the role of personality in how people respond to sexual appeals in advertising. The impact of three traits (extraversion, neuroticism and openness) was tested.

A mixed‐factor experimental design was used. Gender, level of sexual appeal (manipulated over two levels) and participants' standing on each of the three personality trait scales were the between‐subjects factors. Relevance of the product to the appeal, which was also manipulated over two levels, was the within‐subjects factor. The sample comprised 156 undergraduate students, and each student was randomly assigned to either a mild appeals or an overt appeals condition.

The results show that levels of extraversion and openness directly affect responses to advertisements as measured with attitude towards the advertisement.

Recommendations are made, including that overt sexual appeals should not be used on a target audience of “introverts”, or people who are characterised as quiet, shy and reserved.

This research extends existing work on the effect of individual differences on consumers' reactions to advertising and is the first to show that personality traits affect responses to sexual appeals.

This paper aims to examine how exposure to sexual images activates the urge to yield to temptation in a subsequent unrelated context.

In Study 1, this paper uses empirical data based on an automobile expo to examine the correlational relationship between sexual imagery and indulgence. In Studies 2 and 3, this study examines the moderating effects of self-construal and gender differences on indulgent consumption, with different dependent measures. Study 4 distinguishes the sexual images into gratuitous sex and romantic love and tests the mediating role of sensation seeking.

For men, an independent self-construal increases indulgent consumption. In contrast, an interdependent self-construal facilitates women’s indulgent consumption. Having an interdependent self-construal has the opposite impact on indulgent consumption for the two genders: sexual images of romantic love attenuate the effect on men but boost the effect on women. Perceived sensation-seeking serves as the underlying mechanism.

This paper contributes to the literature on sex, reward-processing, context effects in marketing and indulgent consumption.

Advertisers, retailers, food courts and restaurants may use sexual imagery to promote more indulgent consumption with gender and self-construal as segmentation variables. Public policymakers and other concerned parties should also raise consumers’ awareness of the priming effect found in this research.

This research advances the literature on sex by demonstrating the priming effects of sexual imagery and further considers the simultaneous impacts of gender and self-construal on consumers’ subsequent indulgent consumption.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of unfair commercial practices in advertising and marketing law.

The differences addressed in the paper relate to the role or tasks of consumer law in regulating the marketplace.

A comparison of the UK, German and Nordic approaches reveal interesting differences at least in nuances in the approach to omission of information as an unfair commercial practice.

The paper provides useful analysis of the deeper understandings behind unfair commercial practices law.

Killing Eve (BBC 2018–2022) has been hailed as a feminist television show. Its cinematic production values call upon a history of espionage on screen, encompassing international intrigue and glamorised hyperviolent action sequences. Is this violent aesthetic a cathartic reference to newly visible feminist discourse or are we just being sold a new version of old fantasies?

In this chapter Killing Eve is examined in relation to a history of violent women spies on screen, from Emma Peel (The Avengers 1961–1969) to Sydney Bristow (Alias 2001–2006). While Villanelle (Jody Comer) appears to present an amoral account of postfeminist ‘empowerment’, Eve (Sandra Oh) carries echoes of second-wave feminist concerns with community, morality and ethics. With each season the differences between Villanelle and Eve unravel, raising questions about what constitutes ‘quality’ television and how that might intersect with old-fashioned ideas about women's liberation. While the show depicts each character as ‘liberated’ in some respects, they are both entangled in corporate nets which repeatedly put them in danger and pull them back into violence as a form of labour.

This paper aims to investigate consumer reactions to minority retail employees. The paper argues that despite the persistence of racism and homophobia in society, the vast majority of the population is strongly against these forms of discrimination. Because of the profound negativity of such behavior, the study hypothesizes that consumers will be motivated to see themselves unequivocally as individuals free of prejudice. As a result, rather than treating all people equally, the study proposes that consumers will overcompensate and exhibit favoritism toward a retail employee when the latter is a member of a minority group.

This study presents ten studies in which participants evaluated employees who were a member of a minority or majority group. Studies 1a–1d use sexual orientation to contrast reactions to majority or minority bank managers in four countries (USÀ, Germany, Italy and South Korea), whereas Studies 1e and 1f use ethnicity (White vs Black) to examine the same question (UK and Canada). Study 1g offers a single-paper meta-analysis, testing the robustness of the observed effect. Studies 2 and 3 examine the roles of political ideology and its associated values, and Study 4 examines choice of an advisor in an online, but consequential setting.

Across several contexts and countries, the study finds a consistent pro-minority bias in evaluations of service employees. The study show that, in the USA, this bias is prevalent among liberals, but not among conservatives. This difference in the impact of political ideology is explained by adherence to traditionalism.

This paper investigates consumer reactions to gays and Blacks and do not test for consumer reactions to other minority groups. Regarding employees’ sexual orientation, the findings of this study are limited to gay men only.

To elicit favorable evaluations from customers, managers may consider the match between employees’ sexual orientation or ethnicity and consumers’ liberal beliefs. In particular, managers may want to hire people from those minority groups in areas known for their liberal values. On the other hand, the findings suggest that managers should not worry about their new recruits’ sexual orientation and ethnicity in conservative areas, because the results suggest that conservatives show no favoritism toward employees in response to their group status.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first paper in marketing investigating consumer reactions to employees who belong to minority groups. The study reports a pro-minority bias that holds across samples and countries, thereby attesting to the population validity of the hypotheses. Further, the study identifies boundary conditions of the effect of employees’ group status by identifying managerially relevant moderators (i.e. political ideology and traditionalism).

Building on institutional theory, the purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for analyzing how consumer attitudes toward nudity in ads change as a result of modernization. Modernization is driven by the currents of pluralism and rationalism. The authors highlight the inherent contradiction of these two pillars and how this contradiction results in an inverted-U pattern in the relationship between level of modernization and consumer attitudes toward sex appeals. Consumers’ sexual permissiveness and their perceived insufficiency of regulatory control over sexual content in the mass media are the individual-level mediators of the two pillars.

The data were collected from three Chinese cities at different levels of modernization. A total of 811 college students from the three cities participated in the study.

The relationship between level of modernization and attitude favorability followed an inverted-U pattern. Female participants in the most modernized city possessed significantly less favorable attitudes to the ads than their male counterparts. Female and male participants were similar in their attitudes in the less modern cities. Sexual permissiveness mediated the relationship between modernization and male participants’ attitudes, but not with female participants’ attitudes. Perceived sufficiency of regulatory control over sexual content mediated the relationship between modernization and their attitudes among both male and female participants.

The paper makes an empirical contribution by testing the hypotheses regarding consumers responses to sex-appeal advertising with data collected from three Chinese cities at different levels of modernization. Additionally, it offers an institutional perspective on social attitude changes. Social attitude change is of great interest to researchers, but a systematic theoretical analysis is currently lacking.