Advertisements Sell Products, But Is That All They Do?

Throughout their lives, women of all ages are constantly being bombarded with advertisements convincing them they must meet an ideal of the perfect body image. This is all thanks to companies that share a common goal to influence the mainstream population into believing they need to purchase certain products in order to compare to the impossible standards set by the beauty industry. In Dave Barry’s “Beauty and the Beast” he displays that it is planted in young girls minds that they need to look, dress, feel, and even act a certain way. However, men aren’t as affected by these capitalistic marketing schemes. In short, the media has affected the way women think of themselves.

Mass media is effective in teaching us what we “should” look like. Women should be thin. Men should be muscular. The skinny and muscular ideals portrayed in advertising encourage men and women to look a certain way. The depiction of the female ideal has helped shaped society’s perspectives about beauty. The media pushes you to “improve your body” by buying their products but soon the road to a skinny and toned body leads to a self destructive path of self hatred. The powerful ideas that the media transmits through words, images, and movement can have lasting impacts on the human brain, affecting how we think and

Media holds such high standards in today 's society, and media as a whole has gotten so much power throughout the years. There are so many different forms of media in today 's world: newspapers, magazines, televisions, the hundreds of websites on the Internet, social media applications, computers, and novels. Media advertises thousands of different things, but something that has stayed consistent over the years is advertisement on body image. Media advertises a specific body type, pushes different dietary needs to achieve this body type and thus creating the standard of in order to be beautiful, this particular body type must be achieved. However, what advertisers seem to be neglecting is the effect their advertisements are having on its viewers. The constant push to achieve a certain body type has affected the health of thousands of people around the world, and directly affecting the eating disorder epidemic.

In todays society media has many different represtionations of womens body ideals and they are portrayed in many different ways. The majority of body images are female and represented with negative connotations. Women are plasteted on billboards magazine covers and play an very important role in the way young women are viewed and how they feel they should look. Through out this essay I will look how media has such a massive impact on our lives and the power it has to control the ideals of young women and how the industries with in the use of media are exploting women of today and how they are benifitting from it to make multibillion companys with out the a second thought to the explotation and harm it is causing to our socity and health with in the new generorations. I will also explore how some organistions are fighting against this ideal and how this is creating a more healthy view of women and challenging what we have had drummed into since an early age.

I agree with Jean Kilbourne’s perspective which argues that women are misrepresented by the media because they have to live up to standards of body image that the media creates, which is a significant aspect of a consumer’s self-concept. Women are perceived to be skinny and light complexion. Even though that is not the case, the media continues to impact people. This leads to social comparison, which has an impact one’s self esteem because one then tries to evaluate her appearance by comparing it to the women depicted in these ads. There are however, some limitations to her arguments. For example, if women are as free as she implies then they are free to reject the messages of advertisements. Her argument can only go so far because it is not

Body image remains to be a very controversial topic in today’s society, because of how easy it is to become a hate crime over a small comment on how small or big someone’s body is. Today, it is unavoidable to see the look that it seems society wants us to look. Professor Susan Bordo writes the article, “Never Just Pictures”, describing her investigation between the media and its effects on how people view their bodies. She uses ethos, logos, and pathos to bring in the attention of the people, in order to get her message across to be aware of media and how they portray the ideal body image. Bordo notes the patterns of the different types of models that magazines and commercial ads use, to say that even though they have changed the face of beauty, they never really changed the body of it. And she analyzes the affects that these ads have on how people view their bodies, and alter what the ‘ideal’ body image is. Bordo uses other sources to prove her argument mainly allowing readers to have more reasons to side with her argument. Having reviewed this article, I think that we should publish this article in the Shorthorns, because it will attract the attention of most people, since right now young people still struggle with differentiating between what is a real body and what is a body that has been altered for the likes of what the media likes.

The film “Killing Us Softly 4,” by Jean Kilbourne elaborates on the fact that women and the female physique are over-analyzed, objectified, scrutinized, and treated as a means for financial profit by advertisements in our current society. Ironically enough, there are about 3000 ads shown to an individual on a daily basis (Kilbourne 2010). As stated in the film, editors use multiple photos of women to devise an impossible body type, implementing an image of who and what women are in our current society, and this is all done with the aid of Photoshop; the images are constructed, they are not real (Kilbourne 2010). It has been noted that 75% of women have an eating disorder; this seems to be an unfortunate pattern within groups of young

The media is our source of constant information, and is presented in many forms such as, daily newscasts, social media like Facebook, and the magazines strategically placed in our doctor’s office. There is no surprise that it is also the dominant influence when it comes to society’s beauty standard either. Unfortunately media isn’t a positive influence all the time, and is the main force behind negative body image epidemic that plagues women, especially the 18-25 age group. In order to fully understand the severity of what some call a “Vanity” issue we must look into the facts of how exactly the media damages women’s perception of their own bodies, and then observe the extent of the damage done to the physical and mental states of these women

Jean Kilbourne’s 2010 documentary Killing Us Softly 4 discusses the idea that the businesses of advertising and commercialism have promoted specific body ideals for women in our modern day society by the methods in which they market towards their target audiences, specifically how women are portrayed in their ads. Throughout the documentary, Kilbourne is extremely critical of the advertising industry, accusing it of misconduct. She argues that objectification and superficial, unreal portrayal of women in these advertisements lower women’s self-esteem. Women have many industries that try to gear their products towards them with apparel, beauty, and toiletries being amongst the most prominent. The majority of advertisements put out by companies

Do you remember the last ad you saw in the past 24 hours? Do you remember what they were selling? It was definitely not the item that was mentioned at the bottom of the ad. For years, marketing has been using people 's temptations to make them interested in the ad, or commercial; not necessarily in the product. In Judith Lorber’s piece, “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt”: Advertising and Violence, it becomes evident how many different ways a woman can be negatively affected by the media’s idea of how a sexy woman is supposed to look and be treated. Lorber’s research explains how women are negatively affected in the workforce and within their daily lives due to the constant objectification of women in ads and commercials. Women are forced to

Since the 1960s and the rebirth of the women’s movement, there have been rages against the way women are treated in advertising. Every day viewers will find themselves showered by explicit advertisements, images, slogans, songs, ads, etc., all that which have a major underlying issue within mass media: the objectification of women. Women were suggestively portrayed for the sale of all different types of products and services, from print in magazines to commercials on television. There is an extremely strong focus on women being a sexual object rather than what she is, a female human being.

The female body image is highly influenced by the mass media and the media’s portrayal of women, ‘70% of college women say they feel worse about their own looks after reading women’s magazines’ (University of Massachusetts & Stanford University, 2006), the portrayal of women in the media has an unrealistic approach and brings out body dissatisfactions and this results in eating problems and disorders.

Mass media is overwhelmingly present in today’s society. Although mass media is a convenient and important form of communication, does this constant flow of interaction have unintended consequences for the public? In an increasingly connected culture, the influence of mass media on one’s perceived body image is important to consider. The media influences how individuals act and interact in their daily lives. The complex effects of exposure to unrealistic images of beauty are especially concerning to sociologists. For example, a feminist analyzing mass media and body image would argue that social pressure to be thin leads women to compete with each other, wasting resources that one could otherwise use for self-development (Park, 2005, p. 609-610).

The roles that women portray in public advertising, television, magazines, the internet, and any other form of media, have a huge impact on the way society views them. We all have our own interpretation of how a woman is supposed to act and look like. Our vision of the “ideal woman” and “ideal image” has greatly changed over time, especially nowadays with our new ways of thinking. At a very young age, we are unknowingly taught what society expects from us and what we must accomplish to be successful, regardless of being a male or female. One of the ways we learn those expectations is from the different networks of media.

Domestic and foreign research found that many media reflects the mainstream value of society and the use of the symbols did not show women real and diverse appearance, but more is a number of stereotypes. The stereotypes that these media reproduce are rather limited and endangering women to develop a complete personality and become a valuable member of society. The idealized women body images introduced by the media represent standards of femininity that are unrealistic for most female to achieve (Body Image and Advertising, 2000 cited in Karen, 2006).