Abstract
This essay discusses advertising for sex tonics in Western Indian newspapers between 1900 and 1945. It specifically focuses on the emergence of a new paradigm of tonic advertisement—the marital happiness advertisment—after 1935. Arguing that tonic advertisers always sought to develop appeals grounded in prevously circulating conceptions of sexuality and the body, it first examines pre-1935 forms of advertisement submitted by local businesses and global corporations. It then turns to discussion of the marital happiness ads, which stress the modern husband's need to satisfy his wife sexually, demonstrating that this trope was strongly influenced by the development of global sexology. These ads, however, resorted to a hybrid reasoning, which also included the kinds of logic found in earlier advertisements, especially those about ‘semen anxiety’.
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