“The very language of tody’s advertisements is charged with sexuality. Products in the more innocent fifties were “new and improved,” but everything in the eighties is “hot!”—as in “hot woman,” or sexual heat. Cars are “hot.” Movies are “hot.” An ad for Valvoline pulses to the rhythm of a “heat wave, burning in my car.” Sneakers get red hot in a magazine ad for Travel Fox athletic shoes in which we see male and female figures, clad only in Travel Fox shoes, apparently in the act of copulation—an ad that earned one of Adweek’s annual “badvertising” awards for shoddy advertising.”

—Jack Solomon, from The Signs of Our Times: The Secret Meanings of Everyday Life, 1990.