Your homophobia/sex negativity is noted.
Given this is a print ad, I think the primary payload is just “SEX DRUGS AND ROCK & ROLL” shouted as loud as it can to get the reader to stop flipping through the magazine and actually look at it, and then once it’s got the reader by the foveas it then says “Sony Playstation 2. Circle Cross Triangle Square.”
PS2 launched in late 2000 so this ad would be targeting tween, teen and young adult millennial boys and men, so the secondary payload here is to associate the PS2 brand with thoughts and imagery that demographic is interested in or curious about, such as clubs/raves/parties, girls, sex, party drugs, and sex with girls on party drugs at a club or rave and thus transfer some of that interest/curiosity to itself.
The tertiary payload would be to use association with more grown up imagery (also during this time were ads featuring four condoms in see-through packets bent into the Circle-Cross-Triangle-Square shapes among others) to set themselves apart from Nintendo, who generally maintains an all-ages friendly image, and especially during the GameCube era when they revealed The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker to much fan backlash at the “childish, cartoony” graphics. The PS2 looked more like a piece of AV equipment than Nintendo’s Barney The Dinosaur purple box, and could play audio CDs and DVD movies, VERY important socializing tools for teens in the 2000s.
Bottom line is it FUCKING worked. The PS2 sold like toilet paper. Sony sold 155 million PS2s worldwide, Outselling the GameCube (21.7 million and the Wii (101.7 million) combined And they did it with ads that said “Hey, if you’re grown up and with it enough to recognize what this chick is doing, ours is the game console for you.”
Bottom line is it FUCKING worked. The PS2 sold like toilet paper.
You really didn’t need the ads. PS2 absolutely dominated because they were the ones with the all of the huge publishers. Sega, Nintendo, and Microsoft couldn’t hold a candle to the sheer amount of great exclusives. It was only when Xbox 360 and later the Wii came out did the console wars start to shift.
You could present your valid argument without calling in homophobia.
It was this webcomic that put this idea in my head and I just can’t stop seeing it everywhere “I don’t like this because I’m a woman” comes up. The original commenter also slut shamed the model in the ad which is why I figure it’s either homophobia or sex negativity in general.
But yeah yeah I know homophobia is bad and you can’t accuse women of being bad.