Sex Sells

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SEX SELLS
Writer’s Tool Unchanged
from Sophocles to Present
The purpose of this paper is to show a common writing angle that has been use by writers throughout time to sell their works.
The word sex will perk-up anyone’s ears! So it is obvious that throughout time writers of all types have used sex to get readers/viewers attention. As one of the earliest playwrights, Sophocles knew what it would take to get the attention of his ancient Greek audiences, and it isn’t any wonder that it is this same element that has been used throughout time and even today by writers to get reader’s attention.
As a result the storylines are parallel; in that Sophocles’ drama King Oedipus the advertisement would probably mirror that of today’s popular daytime TV talk show dramas: I accidentally murdered my father, married my mother and got her pregnant.
So famous is Oedipus and his demented sexual situation, renowned doctor of psychiatry Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams wrote, “Modern authors have therefore sought to achieve a similar tragic effect by expressing the same conflict in stories of their own invention. If the Oedipus Rex is capable of moving a modern reader or playgoer no less powerfully than it moved the contemporary Greeks, the only possible explanation is that the effect of the Greek tragedy does not depend upon the conflict between fate and human will, but upon the peculiar nature of the material by which this conflict is revealed.”
Freud went as far as naming Oedipus’s relationship quandary describing it as an Oedipus Complex, a desire for sexual involvement with the parent of the opposite sex and a concomitant sense of rivalry with the parent of the same sex; a crucial stage in the normal developmental process. “Falling in love with one parent and hating the other forms part of the permanent stock of the psychic impulses which arise in early childhood, and are of such importance as the material...