Companies in the U.S. spend billions of dollars each year on advertising. No matter how small or how large a business is, it depends on advertising to reach out to the public. According to all these businesses, it is apparent that the easiest way to grab a consumer’s attention is through sex and sexual images or inferences. The problem with this is that it leads companies into objectifying the human body, especially a female’s, in order to increase sales. Women are dehumanized and are solely represented as sexualized bodies with distinct, recurring features in most advertisements. Femininity begins to have a concrete depiction of what it is a woman is supposed to look like and do.
As young girls mature into women, they begin to notice ads differently. “They are in the process of learning their values and roles and developing their self-concepts” (Kilbourne 258). Therefore, when they see advertisements with women in innocent, passive, even submissive roles these adolescent girls are brought up thinking this is the way they should behave. This is clearly demonstrated in the advertisement shown for SKYY vodka, where the man is towering over a woman that is laying on her back in a bikini. Not only is she laying between the man’s legs, but the view is focused on her silicone stuffed breasts, while the man is wearing a suit and both of his hands are clenched making fists.
Besides ascribing a role to femininity (ex. Passivity), advertisements are also guilty of objectifying women by using sexual imagery to promote their product. At the same time, men are portrayed as having the power and the intelligence. Esquire magazine is a great example of this kind of advertising when proposing that “heterosexual social life consists of mutually agreeable dialogue between male consciousness and female anatomy” (Breazeale 236). When men are not present in the ad, it is still quite evident that women are objectified no matter where you look. For example, in the shown advertisement for American Apparel, it is just a women with her legs spread and the company’s name across her thighs. Even though this ad objectifies this model a great deal, it does not compare to the blatant representation shown in the ad for mushrooms. In this case, the woman has nothing to do with the product advertised, yet the company has placed a model in a bra right next to a can of mushrooms. These ads are all summarized by the picture in the middle where an artist places a bar code by a model’s breasts signifying the theme behind all sex related ads.
Works Cited
Breazeale, Kenon. "In Spite of Women.” Gender, Race, and Class in Media: a Text Reader. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003. 230-243.
Kilbourne, Jean. "The More You Subtract, the More You Add." Gender, Race, and Class in Media: a Text Reader. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003. 258-267.
Pictures:
http://mitchieville.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/americanapparel.jpg
http://www.usask.ca/art/a31701/site/britski/skyy.jpg
http://blog.uprinting.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/fungtastic1.jpg
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyRseice63V3-IcQOHgH5RrtmqEZfNlTYv_v-VrSDxtUpKoon4KABYohKlwZ400TI-Qag_-RV94EKHpYixLw1fWYca67jSuVt8XAPUcr5k3haX9R_HcuzeCu6CP7PzxGHEMfQF2ARNHWg/s400/tom_ford_blog1.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3196/3002975501_ab1d4a97ba.jpg
http://fc07.deviantart.com/fs28/f/2008/153/0/7/Sex_sells_by_igy.jpg
http://media.photobucket.com/image/sex%20sells%20ads/corinne82/25cents/volvo.jpg
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