Ethical perspectives on the erotic in retailing

Purpose – To define erotic retailing in the context of shops selling sexually arousing products to women, and the ethical implications of High Street “porno-chic”. Its purpose is to assess the moral implications of access to sexual imagery and products in the High Street and examines the boundaries of its acceptability in society.

Design/methodology/approach – The approach is inter-disciplinary, with two objectives; firstly to demonstrate the value of archived source materials to explore and structure the research problem in depth and secondly to turn directly to a primary philosophical source, to provide a new ethical approach to the research problem.

Findings – The findings demonstrate a typology of erotic retailing, the interrelatedness of the commercial opportunity with social and cultural developments in the late twentieth century and propose a philosophical answer to the ethics of erotic retailing.

Research limitations/implications – It is concerned with the development of new theoretical frameworks through the use of complementary research methods.

Practical implications – Its practical implications concern the future opportunities for a rapidly expanding field of commercial activity and a solution to the ethical problem of “selling sex”.

Originality/value – It engages with an emerging area of retailing, exploring and defining an emerging problem concerning the marketing and selling of erotic products and the ethical evaluation of the problem using a philosophical analysis.

The research has two objectives; firstly to demonstrate the value of visual archives to explore and structure the research problem and secondly to provide a new ethical approach to the research problem. The findings demonstrate a typology of erotic retailing, and the inter-relatedness of commercial opportunity with social and cultural developments in the late twentieth century. The conclusion proposes a philosophical answer to the ethics of erotic retailing. Its practical implications concern marketing opportunities for a rapidly expanding field of commercial activity and a solution to the ethical problem of ‘selling sex’.

The paper was initially delivered to the Design History Society conference, Norwich and was accepted for the Contemporary Issues in Retail Marketing Conference (CIRM), Manchester Metropolitan University, both in 2003. The author was invited to deliver the paper at Oxford Brookes University (2004). It led to further semiotic analysis in the case of the Beau Bra company’s advertising at the European Association for Education and Research in Consumer Distribution, Lund University, Sweden (2005) and recently in an article in the Journal of Management History (2006).