When watching television, one simply cannot avoid seeing ads. Ads are extremely influential as they mirror the society. And what is the most common thing shown in ads? The presence of women. Whether it is a movie, TV show or an ad, a women has to be there. Why? Women are portrayed as pieces of furniture. This is because women are considered to be sex symbols and all they have learned about ads is “sex sells.” What do they tell about women? They tell that the most important thing is to look good. Girls, from a very young age, are told that it is absolutely necessary to look sexy. When seven year-old girls are asked about their wish list, they reply by saying that they want to be thinner and look like Barbie dolls. Females are taught to diet and be dissatisfied with their bodies. Media plays a huge role in making women anorexic. Studies have shown that one in five women suffer from eating disorder. 44% of women who are average, in one study, said that they think they are overweight. 69% girls said that the magazine models influence their ideas of a perfect body. Nine out of ten participants in a diet program are females. Eating disorder is known to have affected 24 million Americans and 70 million worldwide. The main purpose of the ads is to sell the product and arouse demand for …show more content…
The ad agencies? The producers? No. It is us who are responsible. We watch the ads. We see women getting displayed in an inappropriate manner. We have the choice to not buy the product. But what do we do? We buy it. Instead we must act. We must complain to the companies expressing our thoughts on their ads. The companies will have no option but to abide by it since ads are made for people and if people are not happy, there is no point in making them. Secondly, we must educate children not to get easily manipulated by the ads. Or as George Orwell puts it, “In a time of universal deceit-telling the truth is a revolutionary
Kilbourne is aware of the varying viewpoints on these ads and seeks to be fair. She anticipated claims that she is reading too much into these ads and made sure to allow for more than one interpretation of the images. Furthermore, some critics point out that men are also objectified in ads. Kilbourne, again, reasonably acknowledges these critiques. She agrees that the objectification of anyone is not a good thing while still supporting her initial assertion that the objectification of women in ads is more harmful.
Teal Pfeifer in her short story “Devastating Beauty” discusses the effect of portraying skinny ladies/models that are wear dress size 0 or 1 as the ideal body size in most advertisements. The author points out the fact that,this can be damaging to most women, especially young women who view these adverts. The young women who see these adverts begin to feel displeased with their bodies, and a vast majority of them venture into different kinds of diet. She further emphasized that adult females are not the only ones affected, but also young girls (Pfeifer 2). According to Slim Hopes, about 80 percent of girls below the age of ten have either been on a diet before and have stated that they want to be skinner and more pretty.
Everyday females are exposed to how media views the female body, whether in a work place, television ads, and magazines. Women tend to judge themselves on how they look just to make sure there keeping up with what society see as an idyllic women, when women are exposed to this idea that they have to keep a perfect image just to keep up with media, it teaches women that they do not have the right look because they feel as if they don’t add up to societies expectations of what women should look like, it makes them thing there not acceptable to society. This can cause huge impacts on a women self-appearance and self-respect dramatically. Women who become obsessed about their body image can be at high risk of developing anorexia or already have
Dissatisfaction amongst today’s youth regarding their personal body image is increasingly common, warranting a necessary change in the norms and behaviours that are portrayed to Canadian youth. The necessary change that must be implemented moving forward is the portrayal of healthy and attainable body images through media. A 2012 ABC News article stated the average model weighs 23% less than the average woman (Lovett, 2012). Such an appalling statistic is something that must be tackled as we progress toward the future seeing as it showcases to the youth of today that anorexia and unhealthy body weight is seen as desirable or attractive. The relation between such a statistic and anorexia is clear.
Ever wonder how hard women worked in order to obtain the same rights as men? Can you imagine being a female during the nineteenth century and marching to protest the right to vote? Throughout our history, the ability of women has been questioned. Many individuals view women as inferior to men and feel that women are incapable of fulfilling the roles that were originally designed for men. But, even now in the twenty-first century, women still face prejudice and are seen as simple objects.
Women are known to be beautiful people, but ads take the beautiful and makes it all sexual. Women aren’t treated as people they are used as objects, their bodies are turned into things, all for what the company
Position of Women in Advertisements The average American will spend around a year and a half of their lives watching television commercials (Kilbourne 395). Presently advertisements are controlling our everyday lives. In Jean Kilbourne’s article: “Still Killing Us Softly: Advertising and the Obsession with Thinness”, she discusses how advertisements negatively portray women.
Countless advertisements feature thin, beautiful women as either over-sexualized objects, or as subordinates to their male counterparts. The mold created by society and advertisers for women to fit into is not entirely attainable. More often than not, models are Photoshopped and altered to the point that they don’t even resemble themselves. W. Charisse Goodman suggests, “The mass media do not
“Advertising contributes to people’s attitudes about gender, sex, and violence,” states Jean Kilbourne in her article, Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt With advertising agencies standing by the notion that “Sex Sells” it isn’t uncommon to find sex tied into a number of advertisements seen everywhere on a daily basis. “Sex in advertising is pornographic because it dehumanizes and objectifies people, especially women …” (Kilbourne, 271). The objectification of women in our society is more prevalent than many would like to believe. Women being portrayed as passive, easy, innocent, needy, submissive and dependent beings create an understanding that women are less human than men.
Advertisements sell values, images, love and sexuality. Over the years advertisements have attempted a wide variety of advertising approaches like humor, sex, emotions. Advertisers use one of these appeals to ensure that the targeted audiences receive their message. The media’s framing of women in highly restricted and negative ways is a global phenomenon that cuts across all cultures and has endured a long passage of
GENDER & ITS ROLE IN ADVERTISING Nowadays, in society, the role of male and female have changed dramatically, as opposed to the prominent roles in history. Today women are changing to break out of the mold that which our society has placed her in. This is cannot be when it comes to role representation in the different advertisements. Nowadays different organization from medium to large are spending millions of dollars on developing their marketing strategies. They spent countless hours to study their target audience to study them so that they can attract them a better way to their competitors.
For example In Old Spice’s commercial “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” they create an image that men who use their body wash are manly, rich, and attractive, which I think most men would like to be represented as. Another example is in the Lux body wash commercial they create an image making it seem like every women using their body wash are happy, sexy, and stylish. To achieve these thoughts created by the audience advertisers use many different techniques
The media has such an influence on women that their mental perception of themselves can become distorted. Many of them see the pictures in magazines and social media and believe that they need to look like what they see to be counted as beautiful. The problem with this is that all the pictures they are looking at are photoshopped or retouched to perfection. This makes it impossible for girls to healthily look like these ideals because only 5% of the female population in America naturally comes close to portraying these “ ideal” body types. This highly affects females ideas of themselves and can lead to them using unsafe methods of weight control behaviors.
For example, girls will style their hair to “become more attractive” (Berger 2014), or they will purchase ‘minimizer,’ ‘maximizer,’ ‘training,’ or ‘shaping’ bras, hoping that their breasts will conform to their idealized body image” (Berger 2014). This all appears to be harmless activities, yet when body image is only addressed outwardly and not psychologically, there can be an increase in poor and destructive behaviors. For instance, body image dissatisfaction can lead to poor self-esteem, which can create a cycle of increased body dissatisfaction, followed by decreasing self-esteem (Stapleton et al., 2017). Ultimately, a teenage girl can find herself in a cycle of “depression, eating disorders and obesity” (Stapleton et al., 2017). On study in 2012 revealed, “Two-thirds of U.S. high school girls are trying to lose weight, even though only one-fourth are actually overweight or obese” (Berger 2014).
I’m going to solely focus on how femininity is represented in contemporary advertising. Types of Stereotypes in the mass media Commonly in the mass media, such as movies, TV shows and advertising women are generally portrayed with certain stereotypes. Women are often stereotypically shown as playing dependent roles to men, lesser beings to men and as sexual objects. According to research carried out by Steve Craig, in commercial advertisements women can be portrayed in several different variants.