Post #3: Advertising

Advertisements everywhere constantly objectify and dehumanize females. Women are turned into sexual objects that are meant to provoke lustful images so that heterosexual males will buy whatever she is holding or standing in front of. As John Berger said in Ways of Seeing, “Women are depicted in a quite different way from men – not because the feminine is different from the masculine – but because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him.” It’s quite obvious that advertisements portray anything but real life. But the question is: what purpose do these images hold? Simply put, while trying to rouse consumers into buying their products by using “beautiful” women as selling points, the media completely disregards that those women are human. They try to be risqué knowing that men react to those kinds of portrayals, but in the end, everyone becomes less of a person. As Anthony Cortese mentioned in Provocateur: Images of Women and Minorities in Advertising, “Gender images hit at the heart of individual identity.” The women in ads become less human through obvious objectification and the men through being portrayed as one-dimensional creatures who only think about sex and who are dumb enough to buy anything just because an intangible woman is the face of the product. This is the purpose of pervasive advertising: to get to the perceived root of human desire and exploit it for economic means, no matter who gets harmed in the process.

As Professor Caçoilo mentioned on the first day of class, “Media is the common pedagogy. We learn just as much [if not more] from the media than from our peers or family members.” Taking this into account, we can now see how popular culture influences society in the way the way it does. Jean Kilbourne wrote about the influential power of advertisements and focused on the effects it could have on young, adolescent girls. In “Beauty and the Beast of Advertising,” Kilbourne mentions how “advertising is one of the most potent messengers in a culture that can be toxic for girls’ self-esteem” (Kilbourne, 131). At this point in their lives, girls are still extremely impressionable and are enveloped in a world of media and their friends, who undoubtedly know no more about the real world than they do. Young girls see advertisements and music videos depicting women as hyper sexualized objects and desire to emulate them. This just continues to reproduce the notion that a woman is nothing more than a hopefully gorgeous face, pair of breasts, a large behind, and a vagina. This is all that girls see them portrayed as in popular culture and more tragically, “many women internalize these stereotypes and learn their ‘limitations,’ thus establishing a self-fulfilling prophecy,” (Kilbourne, 125). Take the various "Twerk Teams" that are all over the internet right now. Young girls didn't just come up with the idea of shaking their behinds to rap music and videotaping it. They see it in music videos and they want to be the girls who the guys fawn over.

One can see how these advertisements come about in the conference room. The designers or creators envision the consumer of their product and try to dwindle them down to their “essence”. What do men want? Men want fast cars, cologne, liquor, sports, and muscle supplements. Why do men want these things? Because essentially, all men desire is the company and intimacy of a woman. What do women want? According to the media and popular culture, the basis of a woman’s desire stems from their longing to be the woman of a man’s dream. So because of this, women buy makeup, curve hugging clothing, hair products, nail grooming kits, body hair removal kits, teeth whitening products, and lingerie. Naomi Wolf emphasizes this idea in The Beauty Myth. In her article, Wolf says that "women are mere 'beauties' in men's culture so that culture can be kept male." In the real world, women and men desire a plethora of things that don’t always root back to sex. A lot of men desire an education for themselves. A lot of men don’t even like women, but that’s almost never portrayed in advertising. Many women desire a career and emerge themselves in getting bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees. Once again, many women have no desire for men whatsoever and this is almost never displayed in the media, unless to depict a hot lesbian scene that is meant to cater to the male ego. We as the makers of media should make advertisements that depict products and people, as they are, not in a way that they further solidify gender limitations.

I want to see more advertisements that celebrate all families and individuals. I think that if more companies would portray more non-traditional family units they would be much more progressive and they would begin to break down pervasive advertising walls. Take for example a campaign that JC Penney recently did with same-sex families:

This is what advertising should be doing: promoting unity as a family and creating an understanding of the world beyond one's field of vision. The lack of positive images in the media is doing nothing but deteriorating any moral foundation that parents are trying to teach their children or that individuals are trying to teach themselves. In order to subvert the paradigm that has been placed upon the current media, we must first understand that there is a world beyond sex and lust. We must encourage the circulation of the depictions of how we really are. We must accept ourselves for we are the face of society. We must make the media reflect who were are as people, and not the other way around.


Work Cited

• John Berger, Ways of Seeing
• Anthony Cortese, Provocateur: Images of Women and Minorities in Advertising
• Jean Kilbourne, "Beauty and the Beast of Advertising"
• Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women