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. Now people equate skinny …show more content…
Pfeifer fails to address the fact that these advertisements are not only found in magazines but also on television. Women can decide not to purchase magazines. But how do they control the advertisement that comes up when they are watching the television? Additional means of telling the media besides boycotting, that it is not okay to exploit the insecurity of women and young girls’ needs to be developed. This can be through campaigns or other means. In conclusion, Teal has a persuasive argument. It is social injustice for magazine publishers and advertisers to take advantage of women and young girl’s insecurity in an attempt to sale the products. These images of unhealthy women published cause more harm and ill, than good. It affects both young and old, leads to depression, anorexia, bulimia, low self-esteem. The ultimate power lay in the hands of the people who purchase the magazines, and the moment there is not demand, there will be no supply. Boycotting is definitely an
Bordo’s primary target audience are females, teenagers and possibly even advertising companies, where she too, creates an effective argument. Bordo claims we are influenced by media to believe that it is imperative to achieve the “slender ideal body” and reflects on how dieting has become normalized. She states “In the late nineteenth century, by contrast, the practices of body management begin to be middle-class preoccupations, and concern with diet becomes attached to the pursuit of an idealized physical body weight or shape” (Bordo 484). Bordo discusses the associations that have been created regarding body weight.
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. This negative portrayal leads to self-hatred and a negative self-image for women. A major point of this is the idea of excessive thinness for women, which the advertising industry is dominantly influencing how women need to meet this standard.
In this sincere essay, Teal Pfeifer creates an logical appeal that enlightens readers about the desperate need to boycott the magazines that use impractical female bodies, causing damage to young women. Pfeifer’s analytical evidence promotes an informative tone that makes her more trustworthy. Pfeifer states that according to research of Liz Dittrich, “twenty-seven percent reported that the images of models exerted direct pressure on them to lose weight” (Pfeifer 255). Pfeifer creates reasonable appeal with specific evidence based on studies that have been performed supporting her purpose to inform the reader. This creates an informative tone by including evidence of the situation at hand relating to the amount of women suffrage through the images exposed to them.
In “’But Those Are for Boys!’ : Advertising’s Role in Naturalizing Harmful Female Stereotypes” published in the Arak Journal, Women and Gender Studies major Naomi Major is strongly concerned with toy advertising that generalizes boys and girls, in a way that portrays both genders as “two separate, homogeneous groups with contrasting interest.” Naomi expresses her concern by insisting that toy corporations produce products that promote domesticity, and materialism in girls. She argues that it is problematic because it negatively impacts the aspirations and future life hoods of many young females.
Whether we are realizing it or not, we are almost always surrounded by advertisements. The most used influential tools of advertising in today’s society are women. However, women are not viewed as models or actresses rather in these ads they are just objects for people to use, look at, abuse, and much more. In the fourth installment in a line of documentaries, “Killing Us Softly 4,” Jean Kilbourne explains the influence of advertising women and its relationship to gender violence, racism, sexism, and eating disorders. The advertisements emphasize the ideal female body.
Can advertisements really cause violence in people’s lives? Jean Kilbourne’s “Two ways a Woman Can Get Hurt: Advertising and Violence” talks about how advertising and violence against women can cause women to be seen as objects. The author discusses how pornography has developed and is now part of social media, which glorifies its violence that permeates society encourages men to act towards women without respect. Kilbourne uses logical and emotional appeals as well as ethical arguments to effectively convince readers to ignore specific advertising techniques. Jean Kilbourne author has spent most of her professional life teaching and lecturing about the world of advertising.
In today’s modern culture, almost all forms of popular media play a significant role in bombarding young people, particularly young females, with what happens to be society’s idea of the “ideal body”. This ideal is displayed all throughout different media platforms such as magazine adds, television and social media – the idea of feminine beauty being strictly a flawless thin model. The images the media displays send a distinct message that in order to be beautiful you must look a certain way. This ideal creates and puts pressure on the young female population viewing these images to attempt and be obsessed with obtaining this “ideal body”. In the process of doing so this unrealistic image causes body dissatisfaction, lack of self-confidence
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.
Award-winning lecturer, Jean Kilbourne, in her article, “’Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt:’ Advertising and Violence,” pulls back the curtain on how advertising may impact society’s view of women. Kilbourne claims the media portrays women as objects, which generates most of the violence or mistreatment they experience in reality. As a woman in today’s society, I completely support Kilbourne in every aspect present in this article that takes a stance on women’s rights and prosperity. Kilbourne begins her piece by purposing that women are sexualized and degraded in modern society by sexually aimed advertising.
This constant fixation on physical perfection has created unreasonable beauty standards for women, ones we cannot possibly achieve on our own. Such standards permeate all forms of popular media, particularly fashion magazines and advertisements. Women are bombarded with the notion that we must be thin in order to be desirable. These images project an
Men and women nowadays are starting to lose self-confidence in themselves and their body shape, which is negatively impacting the definition of how beauty and body shape are portrayed. “...97% of all women who had participated in a recent poll by Glamour magazine were self-deprecating about their body image at least once during their lives”(Lin 102). Studies have shown that women who occupy most of their time worrying about body image tend to have an eating disorder and distress which impairs the quality of life. Body image issues have recently started to become a problem in today’s society because of social media, magazines, and television.
From an early age, we are exposed to the western culture of the “thin-ideal” and that looks matter (Shapiro 9). Images on modern television spend countless hours telling us to lose weight, be thin and beautiful. Often, television portrays the thin women as successful and powerful whereas the overweight characters are portrayed as “lazy” and the one with no friends (“The Media”). Furthermore, most images we see on the media are heavily edited and airbrushed
“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
The idolization of slim figures are blinding teenagers to believe it is a necessity to practice these methods. As Blaid describes society’s perspective, “If you develop an eating disorder when you are already thin to begin with, you go to the hospital. If you develop an eating disorder when you are not thin to begin with, you are a success story,”(26-27) this is to point out how society has manipulated the point of view on health conditions to be viewed as a