got a tattoo saying ‘Made in England’ above my foot to represent that, that I felt like a doll for so long.” Said Cara Delevingne, supermodel.
Why is the model industry creating this idea that all females have to look like this ‘doll’ to be beautiful? Society has moulded the ‘ideal’ body image to an unattainable goal fashioned by the criteria established through advertising. Advertisements are enforcing the standards of beauty to encourage our youths to believe and aspire to become this contemporary based view of what beautiful is.
This is supported by 45% of women and 23% of men in the healthy weight range think they are overweight and 20% of women who are underweight think they are overweight. (Butterfly, FED) So why do we have such false perceptions of what should be? Advertisements are shaping our society into believing that to become beautiful you must mimic the models depicted in adverts.
Advertisers have been using masculinity and femininity to sell since the early 1900’s and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. This is a controversial topic and has been heavily discussed within recent years.
Commercials such as ‘LG Kompressor Plus Supermodel Commercial’, paints an image into female’s minds saying you have to be the symbol of perfection to be beautiful. By using the seductive, blonde, tall, fit model in a sense of her achieving her dreams to be on a photo shoot proves that to be in this business you need to obtain these specific traits.
Although at the
Under society’s customs for decades, young women have found themselves immersed in the pressure and anticipation to have exemplary bodies. Nearly every young woman prefers to be slim, have a perfectly shaped body, that is beautified by applying pounds of makeup to their face but does not appear ridiculously overdone. Who’s responsible for these measures imposed on young women? When a young girl picks up the model on the cover of Vogue being called flawless, naturally it’s easy for her to then aspire to be a real-life imitation of the that model. These companies produce magazine covers shown with girls’ images daily. As if keeping the perfect body wasn’t hard enough, our culture also forces girls into the forever expanding world of composition, however, body image is a surging subject for young girls. Advertisements and pictures of lean female models are all over. Young women are measured and perplexed by their physical appearances with attire intended to raise their physical structures; social media, magazines, the society, marketing campaigns, advertisements, and the fashion gurus add to a strand of excellence.
Since the emergence of advertising in American culture one thing that has remained constant is the visible truth that men and women are portrayed differently. In consideration to the evolution of man kind gender roles have evolved immensely throughout time, although advertisements have not kept up with this process of evolution. Companies to this day use their tactics and skills to reach out to specific genders such as pretty fonts with a stylish message, while advertisements towards men portray the character as strong and intimidating. The typical viewer can easily spot the difference in the portrayal of genders. Men are portrayed this way because the viewers look up to these characters, they want to be
Every day, companies present the people with advertisements everywhere they go. Advertisements have become very prevalent in today’s society nowadays focusing in on a negative connotation. Advertisement has become an effective way for producers to display their new products. In present day, they come in forms of billboards, flyers, e-mails, and even text messages. It is widely known that companies create advertisements to persuade people to buy specific products or goods; however, it is not widely known that advertisements can make a negative impact on today’s society. The companies manipulate people’s mind and emotions, swaying people by new promotions and therefore generating a strong desire to fit into the society, that causes them to make inessential expenditures. Advertisements pose a critical impact on the American culture.
For women, advertising exemplifies the ideal female body. According to Kilbourne, young girls are taught from a very early age that they need to spend lots of time and money to achieve this “physical perfection.” But realistically this cannot be achieved. The ideal woman’s body is Caucasian, very skinny, big breasts, no flaws, and pretty much no pores. This cannot be achieved because it is physically impossible to look like this; the illusion comes from the secret world of Photoshop. No woman is beautiful enough so they leave it to technology to create perfection. The supermodel Cindy Crawford said, “I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford!” She knew the realities of Photoshop and body image, and more women and girls need to become aware of this as well.
The fashion industry plays a huge role in portraying bad images of ideal beauty, which in turn affects today’s society perception of their own body image. Not only are women affected by what is seen and heard about how the perfect body should appear, children of young ages are now feeling insecure and obsessed with their bodies before they reach teenage years. This ‘ideal image’ the fashion industry continues to enforce only focuses on very thin models who seem to be in shape and are very healthy. Furthermore, many people think of the influence from the fashion industry as being human representations (models). Because of the rising problem with the image of beauty within the fashion industry, it is shown that even mannequins and non-human representations (mannequins, dolls, photoshopping) of bodies play a significant role in women’s body image; which causes problems to the individual. (Anshutz & Engels, 2010). Body image and self-satisfaction, eating disorders and non-human representations all can cause harm to the individual, if prolonged.
Moreover, as Richins (1991) reports, women always make social comparisons between the advertising models and themselves. As a result, advertising images create negative affect and increases women’s dissatisfaction with their own appearance. Since those images are edited through the consistent usage of digital technology, these idealized images do not portray women in a healthy manner. Indeed, these enhanced images would give these young girls the impression that they need to be ‘perfect’, just like these ‘fake’ images. According to Reist in ABC’s Gruen Session (2010), ‘young women get the message that they need to be thin, hot and sexy just to be acceptable’ in this society. Therefore, by generating the wrong perception of real beauty, the responsibility is pushed to the marketers, as they portray women with this stereotypical body type as acceptable. In addition, as the brand, Dove’s tagline in its advertisement - What happened to the ‘real beauty’? (Reist, 2010), marketers need not market their products in manners portraying women as airheads. Consequently, marketers gave most consumers viewing the advertisement, the wrong impression that
In the article “Obsessed:...”, the author interviews a sixteen year old girl named Molly, she says, “‘As girls, we think we can't be pretty unless we are a size zero or look like a Victoria's Secret model”’ (Abbondanza).
Commercials such as ‘LG Kompressor Plus Supermodel Commercial’, paints an image into female’s minds saying you have to be the symbol of perfection to be beautiful. By using the seductive, blonde, tall, fit model in a sense of her achieving her dreams to be on a photo shoot proves that to be in this business you need to obtain these specific traits.
In the “Just Say Yes” article, I was appalled to see the statistics of how many children are being shaped by these unobtainable ideas of what beauty is. I always knew that people were being negatively affected by these false images, but I never really considered the generations that are being raised with this idea of beauty constantly swirling in the heads. It’s hard to even think that nine and ten year old girls know to be self-conscious about their bodies and want to diet. The comparison between the average U.S. woman’s dimensions and the models sets the authors point in stone and really drew me back for a moment. You never see models in real life and compare yourself based on height. The pictures only highlight their “beauty”, so that is what girls compare themselves to. This article makes me hope that young girls and women would realize that models are really the abnormal ones that should be criticized for sticking out from the normally beautiful crowd.
According to Steve Craig’s research, women can be presented in commercials in several variants. Company’s mainly showed very thin actresses in this type of commercials, which can lead to the assumption, that only thin woman, can be beautiful and healthy. As a result, many female receivers fall into the obsession with their weight, which sometimes can have negative effects. (Craig,
This is a popular argument when it comes to supporting using unrealistic images of bodies in advertisements. Well, there are people who know that these certain images are incredibly impractical but that doesn’t mean they won’t be affected by them. In a 2010 study sponsored by the Girl Scouts of the USA and the Dove Self-Esteem Fund it was shown that “63 percent of girls think the body image represented by the fashion industry is unrealistic and 47 percent think it is unhealthy, yet 60 percent say that they compare their bodies to fashion models,” ("NYC Girl's Project”). So, even if someone understands that the body types portrayed in the majority of advertisement are not easily or safely achieved, they may have it engraved in their minds that the only way to be beautiful is to become exactly how beautiful is being
Advertising uses a lot of different techniques to show the public the perfect female image. Body doubles and computer retouching are two examples of how advertisers are able to “doctor” images. The majority of women we see in magazines, music videos. and movies do not appear in reality, as we perceive them in the media. We may actually believe we are looking at one woman’s body when we are actually looking at sections of three or four women’s bodies, which, when spliced together, shows us the best parts of each women’s body as the final product. Women cannot attain these impossible standards of attractiveness. Young girls learn very quickly that they must spend much time, energy, and money on achieving these standards.
Everyone has a different view of what is beautiful. Why are we never happy with how we look? Why are we so quick to compare ourselves to others? The simple answer to these questions is: Media. The media is constantly showing images of what is considered beautiful. These images greatly affect society and often impact the way people view themselves. Most of these images are unrealistic, and send unhealthy expectations to women; however most women are willing to do anything they can to achieve this look. In recent times, the notion of thin at all costs defines our culture. The media builds the idea of distorted body images, creating a belief that beauty is achieved through body weight.
Advertising has had a major impact on society. Some may be considered positive and some negative. Take a look around, advertisements are placed everywhere, television commercials, billboards, newspapers, and even on the sides of buses. Advertising is the basic form of marketing and trading throughout the world. Today’s society knows it as marketers trying to influence or persuade consumers into buying something. It also serves as a medium for services and businesses. There are many advertising strategies, but television commercials will always remain the number one strategy. Think about it, how much television is watched a day, probably a lot. What better way to advertise a product or service? Advertising has a positive effect on our economy. It does not only influence and persuade consumers, but it also benefits them in many ways. It also benefits manufacturers and their company, and the world as a whole.
A variety of advertisements such as TV adverts, billboards and print ads, outline the way men and women should be according to society. Advertisers give us gender specific advertisements to explain how it is to be a man or a woman. Society has grasped the concepts of what traditional roles in gender should be and applies them to advance their products and reach consumers.