Objectification Of Women In Advertising

The objectification of women contains the act of ignoring the personal and intellectual capacities and potentialities of a female; and reducing a women’s value/worth or role in society to that of an instrument for the sexual pleasure that she can produce in minds of another. The representation of women using sexualized images that have increased significantly in the amount and also the severity of the images that’s been used explicitly throughout the 20th century. Advertisement generally represent women as sexual objects, subordinated to men, and even as objects of sexual violence, and such advertisements contribute to discrimination against women in the workplace, and normalize attitudes which results in sexual harassment and even violence

The answer is that first, sexual advertisement can adequately draw people’s attention even though those sexual images have little importance to their products. Advertisements are the means of popularizing the products, to promote the products advertisements have to persuade the consumer to buy the goods, sexual objectification occurs when ads use women as decorative or attention getting objects with little or no relevance to the product category .

Advertisement plays upon emotions, creating a scenario that heightens the consumer’s emotional state. They build a fantasy in which the consumer’s life is better because of the product. 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 existing asymmetry in terms of social power between men and women was strengthened through these images, as the stereotyping of women in these categories was associated with lower degrees of social and control. In his book ‘Gender Advertisements’ Erving Goffman describes how feminity and masculinity displayed within western media. In his analysis, Goffman addresses several trends and patterns in how feminity (and masculinity) is portrayed as well as the messages this conveys to the viewer. According to him women are portrayed as soft, vulnerable, fragile, powerless, dreamy, childlike and submissive . Goffman described a number of symbolic ways in which indicative behavior displays the subordination of females to males, the ritualization of subordination is accomplished by using social connotation associated with elevation, location positioning, and body posture . Individuals are then strategically placed in position and posture within these images in order to suggest a certain social power. Much of the attention of sociologists (notably Jean Kilbourne, Sut Jhally and Erwing Goffman) has focused on ways in which women