Advertising Post...

For a great amount of years now advertising agencies have been targeting the "popular audience", which they believe to be men even when the product was intended for women or the household as a whole. Not only were they targeting men but white men in particular forgetting about the other groups in the world, females and non-whites, creating issues of sexism, race and power. In addition to all this, they were also representing women as sexual objects resulting in the insecurity of women.

On the image to the right, the viewer can see a man with his back to the viewer, sitting on a chair with a woman across his laps and his hands raised as if he was going to hit her. The ad reads in big bold letters, "If your husband ever finds out..." The ad is meant to promote a certain coffee that is said to be fresher, but it is actually promoting other things. It is promoting abuse towards women and power for men. With the image of the man and the woman the viewer may be lead to think that a man hitting a woman is okay. With the words of "if your husband ever finds out" they are basically telling women that they should be afraid of their husbands. Is this really what we want to teach our children? Susan Douglas writes,  "Along with our parents, the mass media raised us, socialized us, entertained us, comforted us, deceived us, discipline us, told us what we could do and what we couldn't do."

In many ads women are depicted very sexually in order to sell a product. In the image above the viewer can see a light skin female model who appears to be topless being embraced by a male model. On the bottom right hand corner the product being promoted is shown. The woman in the picture is light skin with fine feature and blue eyes as well as skin from the thickness of her upper arm. This can lead a woman to think that in order to get a man she has to be like the model shown above. This can be considered to be racist because where do you leave all the African, Hispanics, Asian, and other females women that do not look like this. This can also lead to body image concerns and insecurities of a lot of women. A great amount of women perform serious amounts of cosmetic surgeries as well as starve themselves to change their appearance and look more like the women shown on ads and runways.

Through advertising, society is showing us how they want us to be or look and how they want us to act. Bell Hooks wrote in her Black Looks: Race and Representation book, "Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality." By looking at these ads and expressing our feelings towards them and not accepting this as okay one can possibly change the way of advertising as well as become the oppositional gazers. Another way that we can change the ways of advertising is by boycotting these products and again expressing our feeling towards the ads letting the companies know that we wont take this. By raising our voice and expressing our feelings we can possibly gain the attention of advertisers and change all this.