Analysis
Nivea’s Advertisement – Gender Objectification
Gender is the differences between males and females culturally and socially. The difference was found in the meanings, beliefs, and practices associated with ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’. Objectification is a process. This process is an individual treat some people as an object instead of human being. In our culture, mostly women have treated ad their object from the past till now. For example, in the past, women are not allowed to work and study, they are only an object to help to do cleaning and give birth. Even nowadays some rural area still used women as an item of trading. In today’s world, most of the culture support patriarchy system. Patriarchy system is a hierarchy system political, cultural and economic structure are controlled by men. While the opposite is a matriarchy, a hierarchy system that women rules the world. From this two concept, our culture had automatically set what men and women should do. These have led to gender inequality, stereotyping and so on issues.
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Women were treated as an object of male sexual desire rather than the whole person. Women objectification showed through media, such as advertising, magazine, poster and so on. Women were judged by men through media or publicity such as beauty contest. Moreover, women were placed in the plastic surgery reality show and judge whether she need plastic surgery or not.
We choose Nivea’s advertisement as our advertisement to talk about women objectification. The reason we choose this advertisement was due to the advertiser had brought out the issue of objectification. In the advertisement, there is a lot of scene showing woman body part, such as half naked when she bathes, her boobs and so on. The way that showing woman body part linked to sex. A woman in the advertisement was treat as a sex object to seduce the
Furthermore, the author attempts to explain and decode the possible motives to use such a disturbing ad by stating that perhaps the ad is simply designed to get our attention, by shocking us and arousing unconscious anxiety. Kilbourne continuous by asserting that the plausible intent is subtler and it is designed to play into the fantasies of domination and even rape that some women use in order to maintain an illusion of being in control (496
Violence against women, objectification of women including their body parts, and segregation of women as the weaker sex is used as a marketing scheme. This is simply designed to get our attention by shocking people and by developing unconscious anxiety. Both solutions are ultimately putting a concrete version of this inequality into our culture. Kilbourne mentioned in her talk series that we are exposed to hundreds and thousands of advertisements on a daily basis, if the majority of these advertisements somehow objectify women then we, as a society, become numb to the actuality of this problem and think nothing of these womanizing images. This is not to say that men are never objectified in advertisement because they too are captured with a woman concentrating on a certain body parts rather than the man himself.
Dehumanization is the process through which someone asserts control and power, treating the person as an inanimate object with no dimension or surface; becoming an object means being acted upon rather than being the active subject. It is easier to be violent to someone who one already feels power over. Dehumanizing women and men is similar to pornography, where either violence or status (men over women) promotes “power over other” (Kilbourne 420). According to Jean Kilbourne in her essay, “‘Two Ways a Women Can Get Hurt’:Advertising and Violence”, advertisement is portraying women’s body as objects that both lead to dehumanization, violence, and mistreatment toward women. Considering the opposing characterization between males and females, femininity refers to submissiveness and vulnerability that is often depicted in advertisement.
The 1960s clearly illustrated gender formation for women. At this time, the master narrative contained ideologies which described what an ideal woman was. One part of the ideology for women was how women were suppose to look. Beauty standards set up by men were to be conformed to, otherwise a woman who did not conform would be seen as undesirable. Thus, a restriction is placed on something simple as appearance.
Anthropology: Arab Women in the Middle East and Diaspora Introduction The world comprises of a rich mixture of people from different cultural backgrounds. The comparative study of the different human societies, their cultures, and their development process over time is the general scope of this paper, under the broad topic, anthropology. The paper narrows down to the anthropology of Arab women in the Middle East and Diaspora. Further, three concepts have been chosen for discussion in this essay in regard to the Arab women.
Radical thinkers will have to take a smaller role in society. The most influential people spread sexist propaganda. Bridging the gap is changing the messenger. It 's refusal of society to tolerate ignorance of any kind towards another group of people. But we live in an environment where one man 's ear considers trash is another 's pile of gold.
As well as feeding off of the sources and material presented earlier in this paper, the analysis to come will also use Erving Goffman 's categorisation of gender to analyse how the women (and some men) are depicted on the front covers of Playboy and Good Housekeeping within said timeframe. In his study Gender Advertisements (Goffman, 1985), Goffman gathered hundreds of advertisements from magazines in various positions and poses and analysed poses and how they portrayed masculinity versus femininity. His way of analysing advertisement differentiates itself and makes a broader distinction of what is considered sexist or not, by showing much like the Heterosexual Script earlier on in the paper, what was considered appropriate roles for men and women. In Goffman 's ' analysis of advertisements, he suggests several variables used when analysing a depiction of both men and women.
For example look at Mesopotamia, once farming started their women were bound to house chores because the men were tending the fields. With the men taking over the essential jobs making them the reason why they survive a patriarchy developed where the man rules the house and men can hold high up political offices and women can’t, making men the center of attention because they are ruling and supporting the lives of the women and children. Like in China under the Shang Dynasty male children were preferred and women were hardly seen outside of their home unless they were peasants. Social classes or ones rank in society popped up too
A patriarchy is a system where men dominate, and women are marginalized. The patriarchy can be traced to Aristotle’s writings in Ancient Greece, where he spoke of women as subordinates of men. Aristotle was also dependent on dualism (dividing reality into different spheres). In the case of men and women, men were seen as the rational and women, the emotional. These labels lead to sexist behavior and thus oppression of women, because they were seen as less than men.
In today’s society, consumers expose themselves to thousands of advertisements every single day; yet, many fail to realize the effects that these products being sold by advertisements have on certain groups in our society, particularly women. Specifically, advertisements today do not just sell products; instead, they sell the impression that women are objects of men, especially in a sexual sense. As a result, it is important to understand that the constant sexual objectification of women in advertising has led to a change in our society by creating a culture that strives for the unobtainable image of beauty that consumers see on advertisements
The analysis is conducted on a theoretical framework of gender
Patriarchy is a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it. This influenced the life of almost all ancient civilizations because it was apart of the main infrastructure. For example, in the Gupta Empire, many Indian families had patriarchal influence, headed by the oldest male member. All family members worked together to condition their crops. Since drought was colloquial, they had to work closer together.
The men and woman of the advertisement are standing in different levels and positioned in a manner to imply a hierarchical placement of power and control within relationships between men and women. Inequality is expressed by having a man restrain and other stand on top of the woman as she cannot escape. Through this ideal, a major theme of the objectification of women is expressed, indirectly. Moving away from the “powerful” men, and looking at the woman now, she is wearing a provocative outfit that consists of black lingerie and stilettos. She is viewed, through her outfit, as an object of desire for the men that surround her.
Now a day’s objectification of women in society is becoming a developing trend in entertainment media especially in music videos and in advertisements. Women are focused strongly as sex objects. They are used as to sell their products or to get high ratings to their music albums. To make a video album hit, women objectification is considered as the only way to do so. Women are portrayed as pleasurable products or objects in music videos.
According to Heilman, Block, Martell and Simon (1989 as cited by Schneider, 2005) males achieve more than females. Nonetheless when it comes to traits augmentation, women who takes men’s occupation, does it is better than men, same as when men took the women’s job (2005). In terms of how both gender perceive each other, studies has shown that males and females held different views on the content of gender stereotypes among various cultures (Der – Karabetian &Smith, 1977; Jackman, 1994; Rosenkrantz et al., 1968; William & Best, 1977, Schneider, 2005). Also they held the same view in gender stereotyping, for male perceive that there is high stereotyping in women and that others are gender – like (Schneider, 2005 as cited from Rudman, Greenwald, & McGhee, 2001).